From the hairy red ball for a cricket bat above to different bats galore below and a sort of mansion on the edge of an encroaching sort of bog hole…
LET’S HANG OUT by Charlotte Turnbull
“Webbed fingers stitched the air.”
…and later the hair itself. This is the absorbingly mired story of two women, versed professionally in nature conservation on the moors, reminding me at one fleeting moment of my own recent roofless mansions, and of a recent synchronous reported political expletive here made polite as ‘bat faeces’. Bat faces, too, and the premonition, amidst such battery, of the women’s perceived madness as symbiolised by the expression ‘bats’ and by a series of artful premonitions of this work’s transformationally poignant ending that I felt coming with my own fingers in every sticky fibre of its text. Bells in the belfry, too. The hindsight thought of the eponymous T-shirt somehow made me want to weep. And then
HOLE by Robert Stone
“There was a sweet smell too. […] It was pudding-soft here.”
…the arguable sinkhole that has suddenly appeared in a man called Rice’s lawn, that is, and into which he has thrown household things like the kettle, perhaps keeping back his saucepan later to cook a rice pudding, and what happens is that I land in the hole with him and cannot get out of it again with my identity or reviewing métier intact even to say anything critical regarding this black hole of a story at all. I shall likely have nightmares tonight about my shortcomings in even saying nothing about it, having already uploaded these words of mine over a fence into the playing fields called cyberspace, before a hairy red ball like the head on the back cover bounces back. A cup of you and me. “…boiling out of him.”
“He thought that nothing cannot be real.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/robert-stone/