Crow's Tin

Today's quoted passage (about hawling?) from 'The Glastonbury Romance' (1933) by John Cowper Powys: 

 "For the last month the tin had been pouring forth with such a steady flow that Philip's spirits had mounted up to a pitch of excitement that was like a kind of diurnal drunkenness. He dreamed of tin every night. The metal in all its stages began to obsess him. He collected specimens of it, of every degree of weight, integrity, purity. He carried bits of it about with him in his pocket. All manner of quaint fancies -- not so much imaginative ones as purely childish ones -- connected with tin, kept entering and leaving his mind, and he began to feel as if a portion of his innermost being were the actual magnet that drew this long-neglected element out of abysses of prehistoric darkness into the light of day.

Philip got into the habit of walking every day up the steep overgrown hillside above Wookey and posting himself in the heart of a small grove of Scotch firs from which he could observe, without anyone detecting his presence, the lively transactions at the mouth of the big orifice in the earth, where the trees had been cut away and where the cranes and pulleys stood out in such startling relief against the ancient sepia-coloured clumps of hazel and sycamore, still growing around them upon the leafy slopes. Here he would devour the spectacle of all this activity he had set in motion, until he longed to share the physical exertions of every one of his labourers, diggers, machinists, truckmen, carters, stokers, miners, and haulers."

The World-Snake

From 'The Glastonbury Romance' (1933) by John Cowper Powys:

"The man rubbed his shins meditatively and leaning forward in his low arm-chair, pulled with both hands the shiny black material of one of his trousers close round his leg. This action seemed to give him some kind of spiritual comfort and he continued to enjoy the warmth, gazing into the fire with a curious film over his black eyes, the sort of film that might have covered the ophidian stare of the world-snake, at the bottom of the Northern Sea."

Nancy Stickles and the Blue Mist

 A favourite passage from 'The Glastonbury Romance' (1933) by John Cowper Powys:

"This particular day was indeed as characteristic of autumn in Somerset as any day could be. A blue haze was over everything, so thick and intense, that it was as if the blueness in the sky had fallen upon the earth, leaving only a vague grey hollowness in the upper air. The blue haze invaded everything. It crept through gaps in hedges; it floated over old crumbling walls; it slipped into open stickhouses and haysheds. And though it was blue in colour, it smelled strongly of brown mud and of yellow apples. The blue mist, reeking of cider-juice and ditches, seems to possess a peculiar somnolent power. Travellers from the north, or from the east, coming into Glastonbury by train through Wareham, may be sitting erect and alert as they pass Stalbridge and Templecombe but they will find it difficult to keep their eyes on the landscape when the train has carried them beyond Evercreech and they come into the purlieus of Avalon.

Sleep seems to emanate from this district like a thin, penetrating anaesthetic, possessed of a definite healing power, and it is a sleep full of dreams; not of the gross, violent, repulsive dreams of the night, but of lovely, floating, evasive day-dreams, lighter, more voluptuous, nearer the heart's desire, than the raw, crude, violent visions of the bed.

Nancy Stickles felt a wave of delicious languor steal over her as she contemplated the Glover family enjoying themselves on the little lawn and as she watched the blue mists floating over the old walls and lying in hollows between the narrow alleys, and hovering in pigsty doors, and privy doors and fowl-run doors, and flowing like the vaporous essence of some great blue apple  of the orchards of space over everything she could see." 

More of my favourite passages from this book: HERE

Horror Without Victims

After joking around at the end of October with Hallowe'en, tomorrow marks: NoV - No Victims.

Premonday-ition

The Antiques Roadshow - since it was shown regularly on Sunday evenings - has been direly known as the PreMonday-ition.

The Pantomimic Cock

From 'The Glastonbury Romance' (1933) by John Cowper Powys:

"Thus, in immediate juxtaposition with Pilate's prolonged soliloquy and also with the pantomimic fooling of Capporelli, as the clown moved from group to group, Christ was led before Caiaphas and Peter denied Christ. The part of the  cock was introduced. This was a too dangerous experiment even for the two Dubliners. They maintained that there was such a deep and primordial poetry about the crowing of cocks, drenched in the dews of ten thousand dawns of human suffering, full of such equivocal, treacherous, and yet Homeric braggadocio, carrying memories of women in travail, of dying soldiers, of millions of tortured, imprisoned and executed victims of Society, -- that it would be vulgar, sacrilegious, a blasphemy against the dignity of the human spirit, impious, gross, offensive, ridiculous to introduce a pantomimic cock upon the stage. Besides -- the two Dubliners had argued -- no human eye ever actually sees the cock that makes its eyelids open. The crowing of the cock brings with it the passionate revolt of all the desperate lovers who like Romeo and Juliet would fain, if they could, hold back the coming of the dawn! It has become -- so the Dubliners protested -- one of the eternal symbols of the human race, recognised from Ultima Thule to Thibet, from Greenland to the Cape of Good Hope; and to introduce a *visual mockery* of such a thing in any performance would not be merely Aristophanic. It would be diabolic."

More favourite quotes of mine from this book: HERE.

A Man Too Mean To Be Me

MEGAZANTHUS PRESS

Terror Tales of East Anglia

Real-Time Review continued from HERE
———————-

Wicken Fen - Paul Finch
"They oozed sexiness..."
Another worthy story, this time written by the anthology's editor. Here, now, aptly,  we have a riparian reality, or in other words, a waterway, one with locks, called a 'lode' in the Wicken Fen area near Ely and the other Fens, where I myself enjoyed a holiday a number of months ago. The photo to the left is one I took in Wicken Fen. This is a come-uppance story (to match the Johnson story, because any robbery or disloyalty or conceded-to temptation by Man is a common  (Shucks!) mis-symbiosis).  This Finch story is a skilful suspenseful page-turner, with very evocative, often darkly poetic conveyance of the 'genius loci' (to which I can testify from my own experience of the place), possessing that delightfully disturbing, acute, yet textured, horror prose of the horror genre, as our two male narrow-boaters, 'suffering' this book's many earlier marital strains, meet shape-shifters that, here, are "perfectly shaped". So sexily described, I fell for them, myself. At one moment 'Warm and Comfortable Terror' with its satisfying echoes of 'Three Miles Up' (cf: the pair's fatal 'three point turn' of the narrow boat) and of 'The Willows', both classic ghost stories, yet all such great stories, including the Finch, contain real uncomfortably chilling Terror, too, amid the sodden greens and 'crimson cavities'. A fuckerlode of a story. (16 Oct 12 - 4.20 pm bst)

Dementia

An extract from my real-time review of THE SCREAMING BOOK OF HORROR here.

Dementia – Charlie Higson.
“She said there wasn’t any problem in the world that couldn’t be fixed by having a nice hot bath. A nice long soak.”
Not a bonus track at all, not even just a perfect coda (which it is), this in many ways, for me, is this screaming book’s raison d’être, both in itself as a free-standing story and in the context of the book’s found gestalt. Something you NEED to read, combining the pervasive HORROR and the earlier recognised HOPE of the Littlewood ‘Swarm’ and the phrase ‘Horror without Victims’ — the onset of the ‘Deads’: that plague of dementia as we all grow older. Reminds me too of Reggie Oliver’s great story: ‘Flowers of the Sea’: there a wife (and people of my age have ‘wives’ (or as the Higson story tellingly has it: ‘partners’)), and here in this story: a mother. Her dementia makes Higson’s narrator seem to her to be forever her baby, left behind. And she becomes his ‘giant baby’. And, thus, the book’s main ‘infanticide’ leitmotif takes on a new light here, from Probert’s fatal christening onward. Hot bath or washing-machine to washing-line. The narrator, too, is imbued with the Taborska and Hughes film director and celebrity slant, and the hint in the Fowler of today’s concerns regarding this slant, as explicitly recorded by the narrator in ‘Dementia’: “Starlets, make up girls, continuity girls. I was never short. Had plenty of affairs, relationships, long and short, one-night stands. I was never lacking on the sex front.” This seems to add a pathos to an already deep pathos of the Deads, such HORROR stigmata, paradoxically, not without HOPE. His mother ever moulding clay like pottery – or poetry. A major story in a major book. “Screaming and screaming.”

Horror Without Victims

I am *intending* to issue submission guidelines shortly for next year's Megazanthus Press short story anthology: HORROR WITHOUT VICTIMS. A paying market, as before. In the meantime, please feel free to start thinking about your submission to suit an anthology with that title. The guidelines are likely to be simply that - with a maximum of, say, 10000 words. Please don't send me anything yet. For the style of fiction I favour please read some of the reviews of the nine issues of NEMONYMOUS, ‘The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies’ and ‘The First Book of Classical Horror Stories'. UPDATE 5 Oct 12: GUIDELINES: http://howivi.wordpress.com/

Hiraeth

HIRAETH

**Disturbing Fiction Collaborations with DF Lewis**

(a selection of collaborative stories written and published at the Turn of the Century). The contents are complete below and the manuscript prepared, although there may be one or two more should I be able to contact the writers involved.

If anyone knows a publisher who would be interested in putting these into a book....

.

The Sound of Children – Anthea Holland (fantasque 2000)
Variations on the Vile – Richard Gavin (Book of Dark Wisdom 2003)
Knuckledraggers, Inc. – John Travis (The Zone 1999)
Popper’s in the Wine – P.F. Jeffery (Lateral Moves 1998)
In the Belly of the Snake – Paul Pinn (The Edge 1996)
I Consume That of the Edge of Exquisite Taste – Craig Sernotti (Not Dead, But Dreaming 1997)
The London Fairground – Allen Ashley (The Heliograph 1999)
Harvest Time – Gordon Lewis (Enigmatic Tales 2000)
Three Suns For Yesterday – Jeff Holland (shown on-line)
Don’t Drown the Man Who Taught You to Swim – David Mathew (Redsine 2002, Paranoid Landscapes 2006)
The Fat Bat – Scott Urban (Octobyr 1998)
Tale With Unknown Collaborator – Carlton Mellick (shown on-line)
The Slippery Pearls – Mike Philbin/Hertzan Chimera (Masque 1995)
NITS – Paul Bradshaw (Voyage 1999)
Tungus – Jeff Holland (Rictus 1995)
The Shoal – Lawrence Dyer (shown on-line)
The Moon Pool – M.F. Korn (Eraserhead Press 2001)
The Quest of the Mouther – Rhys Hughes (Visions 1997)
The Swimming Pool – Tony Mileman
Disaffected Blood – David Price (Unhinged 2000)
Tiny Hooks and Dainty Door-Keys – Mark McLaughlin (Flesh & Blood 2003)
Mary’s Broken House – Dominy Clements (shown on-line)
The Winged Menace – John B Ford (The Evil Entwines 2002)
Finnegan Awake – Simon Woodward (shown on-line)
This Flight Tonight – Gary Couzens (Substance 1994, Second Contact 2003)
Remission – Anthea Holland (Roadworks 1996)

The multiple collabs with Stuart Hughes (already published as BUSY BLOOD) , with Tim Lebbon (to be published as LET’S EAT MONSTERS) and with Marge Simon (to be announced when finalised)…

Aeontonomous

I instigated these words and expressions: ‘zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), ‘whofage’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), ‘agra aska’ (1983), ‘weirdmonger’ (1988), use of ‘brainwright’ in modern times (1990), Salustrade (1992) use of ‘yesterfang’ in modern times (1997), ‘wordhunger’ (1999), ‘nemonymous, ‘nemonymity’, late-labelling, veils-&-piques’ (2001), ‘denemonise’ (2002),‘megazanthus’, ‘weirdonymous’, ‘chasing the noumenon’ (2003), ‘wordonymous’, ‘wordominous’, ‘the-ominous-imagination’, revelling in vulnerability (2004), ‘a woven fire-wall of words’, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, ‘nemoguity’, ‘vexed texture of text’, ‘fictipathy’, ‘nemotion’, ‘the hawler’, ‘the angel megazanthus’,‘klaxon city’, ‘horrorism’ when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005),‘publication-on-reading’, ‘antipodal angst’, ‘the tenacity of feathers’, ‘a writer’s mandala’,‘wordy weird’, ‘nemophilia / nemophobia’, ‘magic fiction’ as the obverse of the more common expression ‘magic realism’, ‘weirdtongue’ as the ‘name’ of a language,‘Glistenberry’ as an alternative name for ‘Glastonbury’, ‘tonguage’ as a ‘conscious’ language, ‘yester-eggs’ as a term for Proustian ‘selves’, ‘the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice’, ‘all is for the pest in the pest of all worlds’, ‘Baffles’ as fables with muffled morals (2006), ‘fanblade fable’, ‘abutting the if’, ‘word clones / word clowns’, ‘bumps for books’,‘rite of review’, ‘cone zero’, ‘a basket of coinages’ (2007), ‘small press cover ark(ive), the baser pulps’ ‘orrorfaces’, ‘the wheel culture’, ‘netogenic’, the first fiction about a ‘drogulus’,‘Innerskull’, ‘meganthus‘ (2008), ‘CERN Zoo’ in literature, ‘Real-Time Reviewing‘, ‘ligottum‘, ‘the pit and the pessimum‘, ‘ligottus‘, ‘fubbcuckle’, ‘extraneity creep’,‘pillowghost’, ‘intowards’, ‘powderghost’, ‘nightmare’s moat’ (2009), ‘THE TENSES’,‘scream munch’ as another word for ‘captcha’, ‘skight’ – threepenny bit, ‘invitations from within’, ‘novellatory’, ’Ress’, ‘Venn Dreams’, ‘Tearsheet Doll’, scanbuncle, A Götterdämmerung of Guts , Holistic Horror (2010), SFtopia, Salustraders / Overspacers,Novellarette, Inquel, Gaddafery, Jungian autonymity, sudracide, an impesto novel,trendbaffler, our planet as reliquary, fictionatronics, Lovecraftianisation, “To know the worst is also to know the best“, vignellarette, “Nothing is controlled by logic other than logic itself.”, nightgators, Horror Genreators, dicksplay, roman littoral, ghostalt,poltergeistalt, horrasy, Horrasy: The Horrastic and the Heuristic, srednibution,srednidipity, Lovecraftian indescriptivities, bememorise, alephantiasis, reva-menders,metapomorphic, rarifiction, neoloquism, Was the God Particle born instable? (2011),angelivalent, literal-meaning dreaming, the ‘Higgs boson’ of Horror, The Weirdonomicon,Aickmania, shortcomings harnessed are stronger than strengths unused, privacy-trawler,disarming strangeness in connection with Robert Aickman, Fiction is like currency: belief is everything, oblique concomitant / oblique contaminant, age at the edge, A writer should make clouds shine even if the world’s sun has gone, The Call of the Silly, pastilential,eschairtology, e-born, read-tangler, ghorror, the authorial cloud, grosmance, quixotiose,most placating is playacting, ‘friendly fire’ fiction, dilemmachination, absurface, aeontonomous, aeontonomy.(2012)

THE BROTHEL CREEPER – Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension
by Rhys Hughes

Gray Friar Press 2011

Real-time Review continued from HERE.

--------------

The Sickness of Satan

"'We've been sent to Hell!' I replied. / 'No, Donald, I think Hell has come to us.'"

About a married couple. Following the different sorts of 'docking' in the previous two stories, arguably both with Hell (!), we now have (in this previously published story) a timely reference to gladiators fighting and to Crowley and to 666, and to all manner of historical fiends and friends - but which are which, God's or Satan's? ... I suppose it depends on what the couple had done and why they had done it. There is also a student as the couple's lodger (a refugee from the Indigo Casbah, it seems) one who is subjected by the couple to a form of cynically inverted martyrdom. A ruthless couple - a truthless one, too. Truthful, at times. Loving and loveless, a couple of whom this story gives a thoughtful portrait via mayhem's thoughtlessness! I don't know how, but Rhys obviously knows how, as it works! A relationship of marital docking amid a wild vision of anti-vegetarianism (Donald is a vegetarian), of submarine-deep levels of sickness in neutral Swansea, of richly various and rarified meat curries, a Mumbles Lighthouse like a headmaster's erection, and more. Just don't go there! But do go there, and learn about married life and its give & take. Rhys is himself the 'Fabergé Devil'! (20 Sep 12 - 1.30 pm bst)

The Gibbon in the Garret

"What a concept!"

An outrageous fable about onanism with a moral: if you spank your monkey the monkey may spank you! That is in danger of being a plot spoiler, but I don't care! It probably deserves spoiling! However, to prove this is a real *real-time* review I won't rub it out, as the more I dwell on this story the more meaning it gathers about human nature as seen through the cracked prism of seemingly mad conceits. So utterly mad they complete the circle of becoming sane. It is a bad story that is bad at being bad, in other words. ('Fanny' was good at it.) (20 Sep 12 - 2.35 pm)

The Small Miracle

"Then he saw the tower. / It appeared just above the line of reeds..."

If anyone, I at least should know that this miraculous story stands on its own. In hindsight -- with the now perceived telling connections with the earlier brothels (having grown ornate balconies) and a protagonist whom I can see as the same character from "One Man's Meat" and "Mah Jong Breath", including the same motorbike accident -- this is even more a story that deserves the widest readership possible. It relates also to the "guilty dream" gestalt, the marital give and take, and much more that continues resonating even as I write this review in real-time. The self-hatred etc. that now actually relates to buildings themselves - in tune with that Gaia theme I think I mentioned earlier in connection with 'One's a Crowd'...  (20 Sep 12 - 3.30 pm  bst)

"The Quims of Itapetinga"

"...the arboreal tangle, that permanent dripping hothouse that surrounded the city like a balustrade..."

I was determined to find this to be a bad story that was good at being a bad story, because I thought 'The Small Miracle' was the perfect culmination of this book's accretive gestalt. At a whim, I was jealous of this last story involving Quims that I predicted being silly, like'Fanny'. It is indeed silly in so many ways. But equally its 'synchronised shards of random truth and fiction' (a long term googleable phrase of mine) are transposed into the-lights-of-empty-rooms-above-shops grid-kaleidoscope in tune with the Gaia I just mentioned, with that earlier male gibbon-graft now imputedly destroyed by a female raft of insectoid Quims, i.e. the book's earlier 'lovecraft', via a hilarious but thought-provoking 'mad scientist' scenario. Zelophilia rampant. And much more.

One needs to be tutored by the rest of the book into understanding and appreciating that last story. The whole book itself is like no other and deserves an attention that I feel it yet hasn't had. Outrageous in part, touching in others, thought provoking, disturbing, inspiring, mundane, spiritual, philosophical, ironic, dirty, absurd, Absurfing the Surface. The gestalt? Lovecraft, not the name, but a new dictionary word with a small hell. A small miracle. (20 Sep 12 - 5.05pm bst)  

END

The Flesh Stocking

From HERE.

Mah Jong Breath

“…pressing objects into other items, some wider than their receptacles, the nested results then compressed into geometrical shapes, pyramids, dodecahedra and cones…”

And the Great Wall of China.  I have a real-time admission to make.  In my earlier review of ‘Pyramid & Thisbe’,  I wrote “I need a firewall between me and such a conception of an author with just a chink to peer through to savour his prose images surreptitiously as well as safely.” Before publishing that sentence finally on the blog page, I had originally drafted ‘Chinese Wall’ but I then changed it to ‘firewall’ because I noticed that the later reference to ‘chink’ might be considered dubious in some way, however unintentional that might have been. What this fact signifies, I’m not sure, but, meanwhile, the ‘Mah Jong Breath’, as an utter masterpiece of literature (no exaggeration), may not even have been written  if I had not made that last minute change. The universe is a strange place, but the universe of magic fiction (as opposed to magic realism) is even stranger. A similar retrocausal conundrum is conjured here from the brilliantly described ambiance of Cardiff’s Chinatown and its whorehouses, and this conundrum is on a sort of sliding scale of the whore’s age in real-time during sex — leading to the most incredibly stunning prose of reprehensible salaciousness. Seriously, it is something one will never forget reading, so I can indeed be sure that I’ve never read it before. The conundrum, you ask? It is embodied in this quote from the story: “How could a sexual act be risky and harmless simultaneously?” This intensely atmospheric story is not only a wonderful exploratory answer to that conundrum, but also adds to an assuagement of other real-time elements of one’s own sporadic infiltration by archetypal “guilty dream“, a dream that tends to squat inside while also forging self-hate or self-deception or paranoia in the same pervasive way that a sense of “death squats on one’s shadow…”  (19 Sep 12 – 2.40 pm bst)

The Flesh Stocking

“The accelerated gurgling through the hose tucked in my armpit always made me giggle; I imagine this is how an elephant’s trunk must feel like if you hold it while the beast is sucking up water from a pond.”

If I had read this story in an old issue of ‘Nemonymous’ that I hadn’t edited I would never have guessed it was written by Rhys Hughes, unless I had spotted the single fiction conceit as embodied in the above quote. It is an intriguing mood piece involving dialogue between firefighters in UK during the 2nd World War … With vivid description of a pencil factory fire contiguous with a freak barrage balloon, plus ‘friendly fire’ from bombers killing their own locals, but, above all, an endemic homophobia contiguous with hydrophobia emblemised by flailing hoses carrying water’s conduit-force… The more I think about this piece, the more thought-provocation emerges. Including something I remember my mother doing in the 1950s: i.e. drawing pencil lines up the back of her own bare legs. To create the illusion of stockings she could not otherwise afford? Or, subconsciously, to create, as she danced, an impression of firemen’s sinuously whipping hoses … or the stray tethers left hanging from rogue barrage balloons? (19  Sep 12 – 4.05 pm bst)

Kadath Press - At'mōs faer

1997: At'mōs faer

Kadath Press:

'Stabat Mater' - DIGITAL WORKSHOP 1996:

The Absurface

 From HERE

Southbound Satin

“…his dignity deflated like a dinghy ruptured on a swordfish nose.”

In contrast to the previous story, this is more in line with the author’s accretively extrapolatory logic-building towards a crystallisable land I shall call Absurdia – except here the ‘land’ is sea and those people in the sea use sex and lust to become ‘land’ or rather to become a living life-raft, or a lovecraft (my word not the story’s), even to become a ship to replace the ship that has just sunk. There are many things to enjoy in this story, concepts of ghost ships, a shark floating up as a wardrobe, voodoo dolls that weave satin dresses etc etc … But I had been led to expect this book to contain Rhys’s horror stories rather than his (admirable but often of an acquired taste) ironic extrapolatory fantasies. But no worries, this story is one of the best of the latter kind, probably creating more and more lovers of his fiction gradually bobbing up to the surface where we Absurdians live and play… Meanwhile, it does continue to give further voice to the book’s “paranoia regime” and to the sad maverick whose self-worth is merely in twisting paperclips into animal shapes when in the office. “…this negation of everything he had lived for gave him a perverse strength.” (15 Sep 12 – 1.35 pm bst)

Pyramid and Thisbe

“But vampires do not give birth to live young. They lay eggs, spherical and black as cracked leather.”

…one of which hatches out into a vampire called Desmond! Meanwhile, the horror here is not so much in the highly intriguing and extrapolatory  horrific concepts of Vampire gestation-lore and a wild flight cosmoswards to compete with the conceptual intricacies  in ‘The Ditching’ while trying to obviate some *real* ditching into a “silent and mindless void”, a void threatening such vampire creatures as it also threatens default-paranoiac human beings like us, I guess — yes, not so much horror in all that, but, for me, in the actual act of trying to imagine the type of person who could possibly write such a story as well as end it disarmingly with such utterly outrageous wordplay. I need a firewall between me and such a conception of an author with just a chink to peer through to savour his prose images surreptitiously as well as safely.  (16 Sep 12 – 10.30 am bst)

[I note that, in relation to 'Southbound Satin' above, the words Absurdia and Absurdians already exist in a different context. I hereby change them to Absurface and Absurfacers by retrocausal decree.] (16 Sep 12 – 2.20 pm]

Is My Wife on Mars?

“It seemed an absurd talent to possess, the art of steering and reading.”

…like this act of real-time reviewing itself! Those who have read at least some of my RTRs will likely know what I mean by that.  Meanwhile, all pretence has now been abandoned (at least at this early stage) as to this being a book of Rhys-Hughesian  literature that may appeal to exclusive Horror Story readers. This tale  is a cross between BS Johnson and Eugene Ionesco, I guess, designed for mad Absurfacers  like me. A dadaistic ‘Uncle Conker makes my wife from martian mineral’ story, laced with semiquavering concupiscence. It sheds no light-motif at all, I’m afraid,  on my previous conscientious gestating of a gestalt for this whole book and, indeed, I suspect I’ve been steering it into self-critical mayhem… “…she was both an alien surface and the implausible statue of herself on that surface.”(16 Sep 12 – 3.40 pm bst)

The Toymaker of Bremen

PEEL BACK THE SKY – a collection of Stephen Bacon stories

Real-Time Review continued from HERE


Gray Friar Press 2012

—————————–

The Toymaker of Bremen

"...a silent legion of dolls had been arranged in various positions, handmade humanoid figures..."

[I commentated on this story before: quoted from here: <<“He watched himself in the mirror as he dressed.” - I don’t say this lightly – nor do I intimate imitation, because this story is intrinsically its own story through and through – but ‘The Toymaker of Bremen’ would be a worthy addition to the Aickman canon of stories if it had been written by Aickman. I once said (HERE) that Ligotti fiction = Humanity becoming various Metaphors – while Aickman fiction = Various Metaphors becoming Humanity. And this tale of an English family in Germany (in 1938, with all the story’s growing ’troot’ in the context of that era), the boy Scot Tullis (the ‘t’ in his name erased?) being lost during a rainstorm and his parents’ car breaking down and them vanishing – and him finding himself in the Toymaker’s house with the Toymaker’s children (seven or eight children, I’m still not entirely sure – one of them already erased?)… Well, read it. It is a substantial classic ghost story, I believe, that both stands alone and benefits from the fiction context of the rest of the book. No, that’s wrong. This story benefits the rest of the book more that the book benefits this story. (5 Aug 10 – three hours later)>>] ---- As ever with this book, a Bacon story strengthens by the company it keeps in this book: i.e. other Bacon stories: and there is another almost Hitchcockian appearance in this story of the 'sizzling bacon': leading to some dubious 'pork' later! Something I had not noticed before. Also this story now cleverly represents some inversion of the childhood / parents temporal/dislocatory cross-section of this book. Not a hand puppet this time. But a handmade one.  Memory fading in the real-time of the present by a glimpse of the past in the future, underpinned by the 1938 situation of Germany and Britain. Things I had not noticed before. It remains highly disturbing as to the nature of cool acceptance of 'uncool' dislocatory and dishuman factors as well as of anachrony.  I believe it's the same story, but a new reader. "A coil of steam was rising from the bonnet of the car where it was dissipated by the rain..." (12 Sep 12 - 3.00 pm bst)

This is a photograph I took in Bremen, Germany in 2008 on the way back from my Norway holiday that year:

Classical Music in Fiction Classical Music Fiction Stories Classical Music as Fiction Stories: HERE
beethoven, chopin, classical music, english light music, fiction, horror, literature, mozart, satie, schoenberg, schubert, scriabin, shostakovich, wagner, webern, Mahler,Britten, Sibelius, alfven, Bach, vivaldi