SILVER PRESS 2017
My previous reviews of three of these stories linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/03/the-three-big-books-and-the-weird-edited-by-ann-and-jeff-vandermeer-as-linked-and-listed-to-my-real-time-reviews-of-them/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below:
My previous review in 2019 of the first story is reproduced below…
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THE DEBUTANTE by Leonora Carrington
“I cannot eat anymore; the two feet are left, but if you have a little bag I will eat them later in the day.”
Swift’s Modest Proposal seems to be in my mind today, and Swift himself is mentioned towards the end of this two page story. As a sledgehammer to crack a nut, a hyena from the zoo dresses up, complete with garnered human face, to replace a girl who hates dinner parties in her own honour. Reminds me of Clarice Lispector, too, in keeping with gestalt leaps of imagination from Mexico to Brazil.
THE HOUSE OF FEAR
Entirely incapable of being summarised, this brief story makes me swing my tail to the rhythm of one song and bang my hooves to a different one, as I read in it about the nature of Fear and of much else that could follow but…
THE OVAL LADY
“…’We are all horses!’”
It is as if these Carrington miniatures have been waiting to pounce on me, straight out of Barthelme or a deadpan version of a surreal Elizabeth Bowen and even out of my own recent miniatures, now here with an edge of absurd extrapolation taking us into realms of an equally absurd truth, as we enter this narrow tall house where there is a tall lady called Lucretia with a pheasant feather who talks of her father, a house that is a sort of high and oval ‘stately home’ inside and Lucretia is an equally tall and oval adolescent in this mansion, a place I may deem to be a Whovian Talldis. Not even its roof could keep the screams trapped when she is punished upstairs for pretending to be horse, as I infer from what the feather later told me. I heard the screams downstairs, too, as if inside myself — my last animal instinct of an inference. Does ‘oval’ mean egg-shaped?
THE ROYAL SUMMONS
“I nearly saved my poor husband from his last attack of bronchitis by knitting him a waistcoat.”
These stories are off- and on-putting in a great way, with open-ended obliquities at each turn, even after the story has ended. This is the summons for the female narrator to the Queen to act as her representative at cabinet with the Prime Minister, but her car is buried to help grow mushrooms by the chauffeur so she has to travel by horse and cart, and ends up, via a domino rally, being drafted into assassinating the Queen by throwing her to the lions, because she had gone mad. But who had gone mad? Me, apparently. Lewis, writing reviews in the library’s only carrel.
“…she fed all her horses on jam.”
A MAN IN LOVE
“No doubt she is dead, but the warmth remains.”
A story of a girl, after stealing a melon from a fruit seller, has to listen to his absurd life story — involving a crone with a head on a string, foxes and wolves as landlords — as the thief’s forfeit. And then to see his dear lover Agnes dead for many years but still warm enough to incubate eggs cetera. Agnes now triggered by Melon, mangonels from mélanges, we shall still never obtain the trebuchet of truth.
UNCLE SAM CARRINGTON
A talking horse and fighting vulgar vegetables, and a young lady is counselled by two lady dowagers when she is lost in an uncountable forest of trees about her aunt and uncle always having an embarrassing laughter attack at sunset and at full moon respectively. Merely that. Makes sense if you try. But it matters little whether it did or didn’t mean anything as you fall in an open-ended hole as an ending. Perhaps the secret is that ‘morningstar’ can be formed from the letters of Sam Carrington.
AS THEY RODE ALONG THE EDGE
“; cushions made of millions of black mice biting one another — when the blessed buttocks were elsewhere.”
Here the author is riding along the edge between automatic writing and deliberate ratiocination, as we follow Virginia Fur riding her Wheel while her hundred black and yellow cats stayed at home, then with her being importuned by Saint Alexander in his concrete underwear and a big wild boar called Igname, while two chatty ladies decide to stay off at a convent, and all strands of the ‘plot’ eventually come together as if we have also been riding Virginia’s Wheel. Just noticed Igname is an anagram of enigma. Nobody has noticed this before, it seems.
THE SKELETON’S HOLIDAY
“The ceiling was the sky, the floor the earth.”
Oops, wrong photo! Sorry.
As well as being hand in fist with Rhys Hughes fiction it’s miraculously in tune with Donald Barthelme’s PORCUPINES story reviewed by chance half an hour ago here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/donald-barthelme/#comment-1582
“Satisfied he contemplated the Milky Way, the army of bones that encircles our planet. It sparkles, glitters, shines with all its myriad little skeletons that dance, jump, turn somersaults, do their duty.”
PIGEON, FLY!
Apparently the title is a game played by sheep, later appearing to be men dressed as whores. As Eleanor is taken from home by the mediaeval equivalent as prophecy of an appealing scam email of ‘things to her advantage to be gained’ if she goes with it. Indeed it is a form of trans-gender email on a horse followed by a painterly job for Eleanor to paint the dead Agatha amidst the corpse’s written talk of husbands as naked angels. No wonder we are as we are today; we can never shake off the syndrome of Airlines-Drues as then unrealised launderers, sideliners, slanderers and idealisers. Still, things are better realised now than they otherwise might have been, I guess.
THE THREE HUNTERS
Starts with a dead rabbit, not a white one, for our narrator, and meeting a ninety year old man without trousers who can only move in leaps and bounds, three hunters with names starting with Mc, and a tale of a feckless fart in church making all their trophies turn into a landscape of sausages as God’s punishment. Mine is reading this story while having to leap from each boundary of thought to another. See my review of THE BIG BOOK OF CLASSIC FANTASY (starting HERE) where the conclusion is that all great fantasy is such leaps and bounds.
MONSIEUR CYRIL DE GUINDRE
“Papa wants Spring.”
Possibly the most lush and implicitly-illicitly sexual work of absurdism you will ever read. I dare not even breathe on it let alone review it. In fact, I have gone too far already.
THE SISTERS
A “forest of food” prepared by servants, including variously choice stuffings, and two sisters, one a sort of Mrs Rochester in the attic, await the return of the ex-king who writes love letters to the other sister. The one in the attic wants ‘to drink red’. One of the most remarkable vampire stories ever written, please take it as read.
CAST DOWN BY SADNESS
“…the house, a large mansion covered in sculptures and terraces descending from it one beyond the other in a stupefying state of confusion.”
…the latter words like the story itself.
Try retell its plot at your peril.
“I saw the reflection of the moon in the water, but was horrified to see there was no moon in the sky: the moon had been drowned in the water.”
The next story I reviewed on the THIRTEENTH of November 2011 here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-weird-4/, as follows in its THEN context… (add the first four digits of 27.2.24, today’s date, thus ignoring the other four shown)
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White Rabbits – Leonora Carrington
“…watched a bluebottle suck the dry corpse of a spider between my feet.”
With the symbiotically potential influencing across Pest Street from balcony to balcony (as in the earlier story entitled ‘The Spider’), this startling vignellarette is a shard or scintilla of random truth and fiction that paradoxically resonates unscintillatingly with the inner and, eventually, outer sickness of feeding processes from ancient times and, for me, with the new custom of saying “white rabbits” out loud at the start of the 13th of any month. (13 Nov 11)
WAITING
“Forty-three, that makes seven . . . a beautiful number.”
A heart-breaker (full of much Carrington magic and a music box) for a young woman called Margaret, my having just read about the Margaret in Shirley Jackson’s A VISIT, as Margaret waits for her sweetheart Fernando, and a blonde lady, her dog-like hair similar to that of her two blonde dogs, takes her to a house with the dogs where she reveals herself to be Fernando’s lover instead. Important work because of its synchronicity for me today… including the counterpart house here with the long bleak marble staircase and its moths and…
“I Will Always Come Back”.
THE SEVENTH HORSE
A truly remarkable and disturbing tale of what I deem to be were-horses that I first took to be human. Required reading for those imbued in the various fantasy genres of literature. This one gives a new slant on the expression ‘seventy-seven sunset strip’!
JEMIMA AND THE WOLF
What it says in the title. The wolf is a handsome man hovering on the edge of animalhood and he sort of obsesses Jemima to the point of crush, Jemima being an adolescent who despises her ugly mother, and Jemima sits in trees to ponder, and it is a longer story with many of the author’s archetypal false steps whereby you fall into plotholes, and you think different plots begin, like meeting Mimoo, a boy, of the same age? Leading her to a castle where there is re-connection to the wolf-man and the chicken heads she once chopped off thus earning her a rooster head from him. But what of her equally despised Governess Bleuserbes? A bespoke plothole invented just for this review.
THE NEUTRAL MAN
Astonishingly bizarre. Not least being the moustache stuck to a pork chop at a so-called masked ball, and sirens dressed as choir boys. And I have no ideas other than wallow in the absurdity of the events in the mansion and the green lady’s reactions. Perhaps it’s because I am a neutral man who is British. You see, I can sit and not worry and just accept what is thrown at me,
“The congenital stupidity of the inhabitants of the British Isles is so embedded in their blood that they themselves aren’t conscious of it anymore.”
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MY FLANNEL KNICKERS
My aged face has eaten itself with wonky teeth by means of a lunar plexus, and thus I shall I leave it there. Other than to say it is a true Word Installation that should be exhibited as if it were visual art. All knitted with cosmic wool as woolly as my own thinking.
MY MOTHER IS A COW
A somewhat shocking story, with many plot-traps I fell into without really worrying that part of me was left in each one of them. A mother as a cow-faced fan or horned oracle, the impotence of dolphins, a stomach eating shark, and much else. But the most haunting thing was the use of ‘gavort’ instead of ‘cavort’. Not a typo as it is used twice at least. And the state of us today: “Those who no longer pretend to know who they are.” Which perhaps harks back to the ‘congenital stupidity’ quote I used above.
ET IN BELLICUS MEDICALIS LUNARUM
Rats, Soviet or not, are bartered as hospital doctors or psychoanalysts of gynaecologists, making me even believe in Serpent’s or Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’! Or Dr Monopus’ psychological Mansion toilets!
“In spite of everything, psychology lives in the flesh. And without flesh we would have no patients. Thus, even a bone that talks is worth more than a rat that thinks.”
HOW TO START A PHARMACEUTICAL BUSINESS
Inter alia, first invite two Mexican dignitaries for a picnic, then have yourself measured for someone else’s grave, and later accept a death casket within a casket for a human the size of a toothbrush as a toothsome moustache. Tasty as a sardine.
THE SAND CAMEL
A chastened damascene slamdance (sand camel) for metalheads.
A and B, two boys, construct it, and it eats Old Grandmother up to her own head of umbrella pinions.
A crow wins out.
An aide memoire not a review.
MR GREGORY’S FLY
If I issued one of my aide memoires for this two-pager, you would hardly believe it. The title is enough.
You can only really understand some of this author’s pieces while asleep.
I READ AND REVIEWED THE NEXT STORY BELOW HERE: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-modern-fantasy-3/#comment-1137 , AS FOLLOWS…
This is one of Leonora Carrington’s paintings, that seems perfectly to match her own story below about the combined state of being blessed with fantasy wings and being earthen bounded, and, not only that, but also with the Fra Angelico story above…and with this book’s gestalt so far.
A MEXICAN FAIRY TALE
by Leonora Carrington
“Pigs have an angel.”
“Quietly Maria set down the pail of water and walked north towards the Pyramid of the Moon.”
This tale feels like a Jungian Archetype, one that I have lived through all my life, although I don’t think I have read it before.
The story of a boy called Juan and a free-wheeling audit trail of surreal events in battling a mysogyny with promise of impossible mangoes. An Earth alive wherein one can travel, as through Nemonymous Night. Even being able to feed the Earth. And wherein lives a Black Mole and, in view of this book’s earlier mole king, I was somehow not surprised when it said to Juan: “Do not be afraid, Juan, this is only a first death, and you will be alive again soon.” The scenes with Maria are rhapsodic as well as dark with a hollow man that might have derived from T.S. Eliot. And a dog that brings separated pieces of your body together as gestalt…to ever return to Earth as a God, or Goddess. Perhaps the Mole was right, all along! And just like in the above Pat Murphy…. ”They jumped into the fire and ascended […] to join the Evening Star.”
I SHARED THE SAME BIG BOOK AT THAT STORY ABOVE WITH MY OWN STORY!,
THE HAPPY CORPSE STORY
“; it was practically impossible to tell one from the other. They just looked different.”
This last story is the most horrifying of all the stories, as the Happy Corpse’s story that he tells within it from the back of his head like bad breath describes his Father who seems to be ME working in insurance all those years ago and what I had to contend with. This book is persurreally bespoke for everyone’s nightmares, at least once, but probably far more than once.
“… Telephone Hell, where everyone has these apparatuses constantly glued to their lips or ears. This causes great anguish.”
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