Friday, July 03, 2020

We All Hear Stories in the Dark - Robert Shearman (1)







We All Hear Stories In The Dark – Robert Shearman

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When I read these three massive volumes, Covfefe permitting, my thoughts will start to be shown in the comment stream below…

27 thoughts on “We All Hear Stories In The Dark – Robert Shearman”



  1. ”Can you recall the lasting effect of the most deeply disturbing collection of horror stories you’ve ever encountered? The narratives join hands…” — From THE USELESS by Dominy Clements, a story in THE HA OF HA
    PROLOGUE
    This prologue in the first volume is genuinely inspiring to me, and I actually feel unable to share even its basic thrust with you in case I set off the wrong chain of reading events… suffice to say I feel that my whole career of Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing over 12 years has been geared to this perhaps grand climax. When you read this book’s prologue, and if you have some knowledge of my reviewing processes, you will hopefully gather at least an inkling of what I mean about that. But this review should not be about me. It will firmly deal with the following 101 stories. Meanwhile, please bear in mind that, in the realms of experiencing literature, music and art, my default position is to eschew set choices, to bend rules and to bristle at any order…. except perhaps the sacrosanct order crystallised in print. No choosing of my own path to adventure. My first collection with 67 stories in 2003 was printed in alphabetical order by title of story. But, as I say, this review is not about me! I do sincerely promise.


  2. At the beginning of this year, just as Coronavirus started playing with us, I embarked upon the long-term project of real-time reviewing, one by one, the enormous short story canon of William Trevor, a project I recently completed before July started. And I have similar high expectations for this equally daunting project, reading and reviewing this huge Shearman canon, starting today in July with….
    ALICE THROUGH THE PLASTIC SHEET
    …an absurdist horror story that contains what it calls a “mild coincidence” and, later, a “happy coincidence”, and neighbours in the middle-class, career-driven suburbs suffer loud Christmas music IN JULY from THEIR neighbours, thought to be new neighbours, different neighbours, freshly packed neighbours… both sets of neighbours with dogs, video golf games role playing famous golfers, shit delivered to shit. Married sex penetrating married sex with mannequin suppositories, I guess. They may as well have died unnoticed. They probably did. 
    “Was it just lots of little songs mashed into one unending paste, or were his neighbours simply playing the longest song in the world?”




      • And I see there is at least one unnumbered story, thus making 103 stories in total, so far,
        An untitled but numbered story is included in that provisional total.
        It says somewhere in this book: “A STORY THAT IS READ TWICE IS NEVER EXACTLY THE SAME”
        I have often found books changing overnight, when left unread, something I have reported in my reviews over the years!


  3. THE ALL NEW ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD
    “Sleeping with the next door neighbour had been rubbing her nose in it rather.”
    With a plastic swimming pool and a little plastic chair outside the deputy headmaster’s office in symbiosis with Alice’s plastic sheet, there is a definite morally ambiguous connection between this story and the previous one above. Marital as well as neighbourly ambiguity. Like father, like son, or the Child is Father of the Man, a shifting of ownership from neighbour to neighbour, generation to generation, statue to statue (Winston Churchill), where it was mannequin to mannequin previously, and with the golfing heroes of the son in that very previous story, this particular hero uses the slings and arrows of gratuitous crimes against our pesky pets. Well nothing is all bad!




  6. AND THIS IS HOW WE FALL
    “THERE ARE SUCH THINGS as second chances after all!”
    …like those stories we are allowed to read twice?
    Seriously, this is a powerfully moving story of old style coffin horror and time-loops of naked fingers — in those ampersand days, a nakedness that’s more bone than mannequin plastic, I guess — from generation to generation (that ‘Child is Father of the Man’ again from the previous story), this one being a story literally written as a story on a coffin lid, alongside the need to read it to its end. With the help of the latest Michael Kelly in a long line of Michael Kellys. All enhanced with a frisson of sheer horror of hell that I feel outdoes Poe’s Premature Burial and even that in the Ka of Gifford Hillary…following your onset of a sort of knowledge that there is nobody to rescue you because of some plague of sore throat and fever (described in this story), a plague that you infer has now beset the world outside.
    I have felt this before, but Robert Shearman is identifiable as a story-writer as much as Robert Aickman has ever been thus identifiable, kindred spirits, but paradoxically quite different ones, too.


  7. AND THIS IS WHERE WE FALTER
    “What dying man gasping for air bothers with semicolons, of all things!”
    A period piece for our times, where, at least figuratively, the earth’s once firm ground under our feet has become as uncertain as the waves of a sea; gasping for air I may soon become to be, but I shall still manage to finish this real-time review, I vow! This work appears to be a disarming prequel of the previous story above, one where its themes of demiurge become semicolon, more enclosed coffin horror, if not coughing. The Chinee yellow getting beneath the skin of a future American president, or should that be orange? The story of genius-loci that is told around the sea story-within-a-story reminds me of Dunwich in Suffolk (while eschewing any explicit reference to Azathoth lurking at the centre of the earth, although I found it implicit) together with the gestalt kamikaze ‘urge’ of Thomas Hardy stories (that I happen to be concurrently real-time reviewing) and the walking coffins of Charles Dickens in Tale of Two Cities. These two AND (&) tales by Shearman mix the God and Devil in arguably optimal ways, alongside this book’s (so far) ‘Child is Father of the Man’ theme. That expression is the Wordsworthian use by me of an outdated generic Man for Mankind. The ‘kind’ bit being Woman; I learnt this since my own childhood – generally speaking. Clemence eventually returns, after all. But that has already happened in the sequel. Turning the lid of each & every box. Sometimes inadvertently reading things twice – or not at all! (Our own life’s box today lifted in the real-time around this story within a story’s story?!)


  8. ANGELS IN AUSTRALIA 
    “He had in Elspeth a wife he loved, and who loved him in return, and who seemed to him the most beautiful angel in creation, and who was patient and kind…”
    …alongside some antipodal angst’s comparison of JULY with Christmas! And that father-son dynastic syndrome extrapolated again…
    This, meanwhile, is a truly remarkable story, one I shall never forget (and I suspect I may need to say similar things again during my review’s future rite of passage through this book) and its father’s own rite of passage is a 19th century one from Scotland to Australia, it being a hilariously satirical, disarmingly absurdist, breathtakingly fantastical, emotionally, sometimes cruelly, patterned panoply of the upstanding status of the British and Britain in the world then and to some extent now, together with macho bloodsport hunting lore, and genders stereotyped, and deploying the eponymous angels as a race apart. All this and more, culminating in what I shall call a loop in sorrow and affection and, even, miscegenate sex, a loop transcending the at first seeming slavish submission of angel feathers (see FEATHER again?) and perhaps transcending, too, man’s oppression of those he finds different. A loop that will haunt you. Ecosystems and Darwinianisms, too. Ick, ick, ick.


  9. And from those Swiftian Gulliverities and Modest Proposals above we now reach the most immodest Modest Proposal possible…
    BABY SICK
    The sickety-sick to the nth power of onanism – one of two stories numbered 66 – and we outdo even Ralph Robert Moore stories, one Robert more, as the foolhardy reader tries to interpret this ultra-politically incorrect fable telling of a Baby-in-utero as a sexual fantasy. The meatless chicken bone just one more of those earlier naked fingers?
    In the further yet-to-be-read context of this book, this work will eventually change no doubt from (god)forsaken lumpen foetal monstrousness towards a gestalt that fills our holes of emptiness with holistic glory. And in the meantime, this is certainly a reading experience and a half!
    We all fear stories in the dark.


  10. THE BATHTUB
    “She knew what was hiding inside the taps. Fingers.”
    Young SARAH, in a story by SHEAR, is obsessed with the acronym of people’s names, particularly her own names, also with the numerology pareidolia of bus and train routes. But, above all, she has some obsessive phobia about her grandmother’s spooky bathtub, in a house where she and her mother need to stay. I felt the accretively subsuming spookiness of the bathtub, too, but I was also taken with Sarah’s attitude against the hugs of her grandmother, the subsuming nature that such inter-generational hugs have now taken on in our own real-time today, and the need to avoid smells in, say, cinnamon and cigarettes. Smells as tastes? Somehow, I noted that her own speech marks are missing at the end, even when she is speaking. I know ‘a story after its end’ where that phenomenon depicts a ghost’s speech…A very effective story to depict marital break up and how it affects the children. A bathtub as the symbol of the womb, a womb to be returned to, too, a story now, perhaps for the first time, in shudderingly ironic synergy with the previous story?


  11. THE BEAST AT WORLD’S EDGE
    “The oceans were all about him, lapping away at every bit of his body, oh, they wanted in.”
    The perfect segue to Sarah’s subsuming bathtub hugs. Here treacly subsumings. A mighty sublime and imaginative theme and variations transcending even what might have been Verne-Poe visions of a ship adventurously seeking the edge of the world and, hopefully, reaching beyond it. And we are placed inside the mind of one of the sailors as they meet destructively head on to this amazingly depicted edge of the world and his visualising something like the ‘Baby Sick’ octopus foetus and, then, his own daughter – left back home in his backstory – now as a beautiful mermaid at the edge, and his becoming tantamount to the Beast, but not Azathoth at the centre of the earth, as I previously prophesised above, but something EVEN worse than Azathoth — thankfully, though, better at its edge than at its centre!






  14. BEDTIME STORIES FOR YASMIN
    “An enormous book, when he sat it down upon his lap and opened it up it was wider than he was, and she could only imagine how many stories there must be in there—“
    Another story with sweet smells – and of cigarettes. Another bathtub-type subsuming of mother and daughter. And, yes man, men that never were, the wilder storytelling of fathers or other avuncular family friends who did read bedtime stories to young girls like Yasmin, about darknesses under beds, as well as, sometimes, above them. Another darkly archetypal haunting vision, archetypal yet paradoxically unique to this book. Grim, Grimm, and inspiring.


  15. BLOOD
    I recall reading this story before, but somehow, predictably in this different world, it does not feel like the same story at all. I have not yet looked at my previous review of it, as I suspect there is indeed another review by me about it. I felt, like the male protagonist, that I was being taken on a different journey, to a different Paris and back again — as a revenge retribution by the mermaid in the Beast story above? Or Yasmin’s for being taught all the wrong stories? Whatever the case, I was consumed by this work, its aching to represent the man who felt he hadn’t had his penis fondled without sufficient intention from the one fondling it. A disarming way eventually to shear it from its root? Or a penis that had only been pretending to sleep? Waiting for blood to fill its steak consistency or foetal shape? And was the man with the pencil moustache — eating alone in that most haunting Parisian cafe in the middle of nowhere’s walls — the same man with a pencil moustache that met this teacher and his underage girl pupil at the airport on their return to England? And I shall now irretrievably post this review before seeing what it meant to me when I read it before. I cannot remember what I wrote about it at all. And would she have taken it seriously if I had actually completed it and given it to her, as a way to avoid the repercussions of our trip? A silently-hinged door that “could just swing open so stealthily, like a beast that had only been pretending to sleep—“ 


  16.  BLUE CRAYON, YELLOW CRAYON
    “She looked down at her colouring book. Grim, not a hint of a smile.”
    Men and women as couples in this book are always saying they love each other TO each other, but do they ever mean it, or am I exaggerating when I say ‘always’? Here, a man conscientiously plugging away at a job in America is, for once, allowed to spend all Christmas with his wife and daughter in Edinburgh. Idyllic imaginings — as to what a wonderful Christmas he is about to spend with them — slowly fall by the wayside one by one during what turns out to be an increasingly difficult journey by aeroplane and then a late replacement train on the last lap to Edinburgh… in a special carriage that seems shiny black outside it and the people inside it deadened somewhat. The young girl on the train and his own daughter at home somehow the same person, and his thoughts are slipping away … like senile dementia will eventually seem to be? Or already is in my case? Rushing somewhere never really gets you there, I guess, and I often felt my own hopes as attritional ones amid the brighter periods between. Stabbing at the colouring-in book of life. No rhyme or reason to any of it. Rushing towards the disappointment of a once subconsciously envisaged shiny death. Or towards, at optimum, the Elysian Fields of those disjointed blues and yellows merged as green. Interrupted by jumping train. Missing out on childhood. Even leapfrogging the whole of one’s life itself. Thoughts keep bubbling to my Midsommar mind, probably till hindsight kicks in too late. As in the previous story, the ground rules of moral and bodily restraint were just another example of naivety. Midsommar at Christmas.


    1. BOBBO
      “I choose a story to read at random.”
      “, yes, crayons, didn’t children like to draw with crayons over everything?”
      Although the exact nature of this story read by me already had slipped my mind, I now know perhaps why I wrote this above earlier in my review: ‘…Robert Shearman is identifiable as a story-writer as much as Robert Aickman has ever been thus identifiable, kindred spirits, but paradoxically quite different ones, too.’
      This hilarious story where the writer narrator has a love-hate relationship with Aickman’s literary canon, and enters all sorts of shenanigans, including a Hospice-like sexual fling with a so-called relative of Aickman, so as to obtain an Aickman book found on cosmetic show in the hotel bar amid Reader’s Digests, a hotel less digestive though than the Hospice! It takes place in Bath, if not a bathtub! “Ick ick ick.”
      The whole wonderful story reminds me that I heard recently that me Gestalt real-time reviewing this enormous Shearman canon of stories is only slightly less mad than Shearman writing them in the first place!
    2. BRAND NEW SHINY SHINY
      “Whereas Marklew knew that each item he owned had been specifically hand-picked, that the entire collection was a single piece of art, that it was a summation of something, that it was a summation of him.”
      … as any gestalt eventually derived from THIS book collection might well be, too. And this truly remarkable and unforgettable story (yes, I somehow knew previously above that I would have to say that again, before long) is certainly a huge contribution to the collection, page-turningly dealing with some male macho privileged abusive collectivity, at conventions across seemingly random global capitals, of some stonemasonry of skulls and other dead-human pieces that Marklew bid for at the conventions’ poker strategy of auctions. Here the shiny shiny is similar to that blackness seen through the earlier train window above, but now a boy rather than a girl. To abuse his own leapfrog of lust for youth again? The boy jumping higher than possible off a stage like a frog or grasshopper, at one, point, we explicitly learn. Not forgetting the two complete skeletons in the bath one on top of the other.
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Sunday, June 28, 2020

Fake Ass Lawyers - Justin Isis

 

8 thoughts on “Fake Ass Lawyers – Justin Isis”

  2. Pages 5 – 19
    “Rintaro had been coughing for what felt like months even though it could not have been more than a week and a half; she visualized the immune system as a small, pale, beleaguered cartoon animal…”
    Or what might have once passed as the manipulated focus of a twelve year old’s onanism alongside a YouTube film filming a thirteen year old…. till reading this. Despite some constructive confusions as to backstories and stage names or real names or trade names, the mother of Rintaro is working as a hostess in a club where one of the customers is that erstwhile twelve year old now grown up… unless I am destructively confused instead! The textured style is pitch-perfectly wordtacular and, in one place at least, obsessed! Doesn’t do any 72 year old reader like me any good in this his due time of Midsommar.
    .
    Reply
  3. Pages 19 – 32
    “Human beings seemed to be living lives of thoughtless routine punctuated briefly by meaningless events such as birth and divorce that in turn led to further routines.”
    I have recovered! … as the erstwhile side-character – with the obsessive trip alongside the YouTube video when he was 12 – let’s call him Taro – with his consuming backstory and equally consuming forward story – has taken over this text’s ‘routine’ of what he considers to be a wasted life from the future hostess in the club, and, indeed, Taro seems to have become our central real-time concern as he reaches an epiphany in the street, one featuring a purple ball, and his then accretive urge to assume a career as a fake lawyer, a ‘patchwork monster’ threatening to fill my Gestalt…. I am consumed, too. Albeit recovered from yesterday’s obsession of my own.
    “…strange maggots of thought.”
    Reply
  4. Pages 32 – 40
    “‘Yes, Wódka Žołᾳdkowa Gorzka,’ the bartender said. ‘It’s infused with herbs.’”
    But what herbs, does one drink it without knowing one drinks it, is it the tripswitch nostrum from the Rix FEATHER as a ‘Coincidence?’ earlier this morning HERE? As we follow Taro into his own trip or leap with the underlying triangulations of this Isis work? As he is led to a back room where all lawyers are fake, or those ‘lawyers’ who have seen assonance with fake truth? Sussed out by the boy he once was, the boy tugging or testing his grown-up penis-symbol of a neck-tie? And he is explicitly said to be so short of breath at one point (“on the verge of suffocating”), I do wonder if Taro is now really the Rintaro I assumed (wrongly?) to be the son of the hostess whom he later meets along this book’s future triangulations? Assonance, assume…
    “He assumed the child was wearing a mask, until it became clear that the smooth skin stretched tightly across its cheekbones formed its real face.” (an ‘its’ that later became ‘his’)
    Reply
  5. Pages 40 – 51
    “, he pieced together a taxonomy of fake lawyers.”
    I am now amazed that I have not considered this taxonomy before, this building-up of a gestalt of truth from real-time fictions or fakeries … such as fake yews (or yous) within the word ‘lawyers’ as Ley-lines of prehensility, explaining, at least for me, the synchronicity (‘as above, so below’ rather that cause-and-effect) of one of my earlier passions: Astrology. Also the Saitama syndrome described here — where “Beauty is often found in darkness” as that ‘darkness’ in ‘obscurity’ of endless flat roads — reminds me of my favourite ever novel: ‘The Unconsoled’ by Kazuo Ishiguro. And of some works by Haruki Murakami. Even my own ‘They Crawl Over the Outside of Buildings More Than They Walk in the Streets Between’. Here, Taro’s “inner ear” needed for such fake lawyerhood is to be induced by a token gratuitous crime as in Camus’ ‘L’Étranger’…except it’s due to be a ‘flat road’ crime, not a murderous mountain one.
    Reply
  6. A12792C1-01D7-4720-A13E-4CE51288EBECPages 51 – 60
    “, you’ll be confirmed as a legitimate fake.”
    This section genuinely supplies me with a sort of personal epiphany to match the Kit Kat / Penal Code bird epiphany of Taro described in it. I now know I am a genuine fake reviewer, and if I had not been reading this book, I may have missed the point of this long-term mission of mine, its dependence on preternatural synchronicity and the hawling of meaningful typos or SICnificant autocorrects. A46A7656-1E07-4154-B1D4-5F3F6178874F And, as with Taro, I may now be able to see the concomitant birds that fly alongside me at each turn of the multiple onanisms as an eventual gestalt epiphany … and to have such a métier successfully rubberstamped by a literary notary or, as appropriate, mucked upon by bird flew now seems a worthy goal. As you can see, I have been significantly affected by this section’s art installations of procedure towards legitimate fakery, and by its explicit “geomancy” that is not a million miles away from my erstwhile asstrology (sic).
    Reply
  7. Pages 60 – 76
    “Osmosis.”
    We all have this if we train ourselves to use it. I use mine for literature…
    Here, also used for law itself, and law livers, even raw livers? Drink, like knowledge, seeping into us. Like that doctored nostrum in ‘Feather’, here a series of more trade names for various disguised drinks , even Strong Zeros. How much of this induces Dream Sickness, I wonder. A drinking contest and a Rock, Paper, Scissors one both of which you need to read about, and now a fake paralegal turns up, as if in parallel world where we all walk up the parasites or parasides of buildings and not in the streets between, some of us not even needing ropes to hawl us up! Pity our lockdown urinals in our own real-time today are not even open!
    Salarymen and Girls Bar staff…
    “The young are mapped onto ruins, the dreams of the dead.”
    Reply
  8. Pages 76 – 92
    “Now you’re in the Golden Liver Gang! You’re a pants-to-ankles man and you’re no longer subject to the law of causation. The mighty become your slaves. Cancer and flatulence cripple your enemies. All omens fall in your favor.”
    All omens are to be hawled preternaturally; synchronicity, not causation, as I said above about asstrology; I am thus confirmed in my own instincts of osmosis. More c letter words in addition to cancer and cripple and causation are covid and coronavirus and, here, even crude coital cottaging, but my own law giver or boyish Penal Code Bird was irretrievably shrivelled by radiotherapy for prostate cancer in 2015. Yet I now feel I belong to the optimal gang, thanks to what I have hawled from this all-giving book. An “ink painting” inside me, and a “spectral forest” in the sky, a skein of laws, logic to logic and back again, hopefully embracing as well as outlawing illogic, with bright advertising signs and climbing apps up the sides of buildings near the hostess club, but the hostess’s “coughing boy” is still at home. Each of us has a Jack Vance aura, but taste and smell now foregone, at least for a while, and we “…need to get locked down into consensus reality…” by ironically embracing our coranasensual or co-vivid dreams, dreams that, as such, have no doubt developed since this book was first written.
    end
    Reply

 

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Friday, June 19, 2020

Fosforos Library brochures

 

Mount Abraxas Brochures of Rich Folded Text


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Mount Abraxas Press 2020
[EDIT: Fosforos Library brochures]
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/complete-list-of-zagava-ex-occidente-press-books/
Work by Sebastian Montesi, Patrick Mallet, John Llewellyn Probert, Christian Riley, Milenko Županović, Dominy Clements and Liam Garriock
When I read these, Covfefe permitting, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

22 thoughts on “Mount Abraxas Brochures of Rich Folded Text”

  2. The first one has text by Sebastian Montesi. Artwork by Adolf Hiremy-Hirschi.
    As an aesthetic entity, when concentrating on it alone, there is something special about its configuration of rich folded text. A concept that needed a conceit to achieve.
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    When I have read it, in due course, I will sub-comment below.
    Reply
    • “with the hiraeth of verdant fire”
      “Hiraeth” is an important word for me.
      Reading these many Montesi poems and prose pieces makes me think that reading something has its own necessary embouchure, a shaping up of the thinking mind towards blowing them like woodwind and making them sound out beyond the craquelure of semantics. Here, I have a feel of Finnegans Wake. I mean that as a compliment! (My gestalt real-time review of this Joyce book HERE.)
      Any catharsis of coughing notes blown, notwithstanding.
      “Corvus, cathar so heralded”
      “the spittle from roaring maw”
      Reply
  3. 0B5D1270-5892-46E8-AB56-007185F7B361 ARABESQUE EN ARRIERE a story by John Llewellyn Probert
    “As the car pulled up to the theatre Maria Bournonville coughed again,…”
    This is the exquisite final symbiosis of an ageing, diseased ballerina with the theatre where she had her triumphs, the theatre that had absorbed so much and was now giving it back. Taken there by her equally ageing, and loyal, chauffeur Bruno, who felt a similar symbiosis with her. This story itself feeds off itself, with elements perhaps of an honouring symbiosis, too, with the theatrical work of Reggie Oliver? The theatre itself is a living force and echoes the fact that I mentioned ‘craquelure’ in the previous review above. A cracking and crunching of bone at every ‘en pointe’. The crunch of plaster, too, “…its crimson paintwork cracking, its gilt peeling.” And I am left with the projected sense of an inevitable purging by all parties triangulating their symbiotic coordinates in death’s distancing. At the point of that one last little leap away or ‘petit saut’…
    [“…that all people die, but art does not. It is all that remains of us.”
    — Sue Harper (The Dark Nest) reviewed a few days ago here.]
    Reply
  4. 0520E8F2-6E41-4DC9-9F7D-B7E227B1FA4C
    THE UNEXAMPLED PHANTASMAGORIA OF DOCTOR WEIMAR
    a story by Liam Garriock
    “…in their narrow rooms above the butcher shop as if sheltering themselves from the apocalypse outside.”
    84096146-E216-493C-96F5-38C3C2522CE4
    I have shown above, I hope, the experience of reading close-up each folded luxury of brochury represented by these artful items. Those vertical lines — as evocations, when combined with the words they bear, of today’s co-vivid dream-reality, dreams we all now dream in our apocalyptically furloughed times so much like the Weimar Republic — are not lines at all but watermarks or intrinsic textures, and they enhance the already enhanced writing by Garriock. A startlingly clear and engaging texture of text depicting brilliantly a coastal community in the north east of Scotland. Their Calvinist principles et al, and one day the eponymous Phantasmagoria show arrives in town, all seen through the eyes of the young narrator, feeling constrained by his family, a narrator who still holds a crush for the beautiful Freya who had by then already departed the town. The shock of the show I cannot do justice to here, the perfect descriptions of the concupiscence and grotesqueness, and the repercussions for the narrator are surely unforgettable. A disturbing epiphany. Leading to a disarming bathos or dying fall.
    My previous review of this author: https://howivi.wordpress.com/something-remains/#comment-404
    Artwork by Jeanne Mammen
    Reply
  5. 4C10A398-9AA8-481C-AE28-4D492C84AB87
    THE MACKAY-BENNETT by Patrick Mallet
    “Between the frozen fingers of the child’s tiny right hand, a little ball could be seen.”
    This is a core-stunning witness eye view of the Titanic sinking, as part of a gestalt witness that we all become, firstly, from on board, a little boy and his sister, his precious ball rolling along a sloping cabin floor, she with her doll, the iceberg itself as a prehensile part of this gestalt, and then a sailor on a separate ship who ‘rescued’ some of the multitudinous corpses… and pairs of dancers who ice stuck together in their last dance; you feel the cold to the core of every reading bone. Leading eventually to a “macabre ballet”, a Mallet ballet, with its own (eye)’ball’ embedded, somewhat in tune with Probert’s ‘en pointe’. On the balls of the feet, when the toes are too frozen…
    Translated by Jeffrey Probst
    Artwork by Moyen
    Reply
  6. “Can you recall the lasting effect of the most deeply disturbing collection of horror stories you’ve ever encountered? The narratives join hands…” — From THE USELESS by Dominy Clements, a story in THE HORROR ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR ANTHOLOGIES
    THE PAINTER in Nemonymous 4, I think, was Dominy Clements’ first published story, and we also wrote together a number of fiction collaborations in the day.
    His story in ‘The First Book of Classical Horror Stories’: ANEMNESIS IN EXTREMIS.
    Berian Winslow & The Stream Of Consciousness Storyteller – his story in ZENCORE
    Angel Zero – his story in CONE ZERO
    Artis Eterne – his story in CERN ZOO
    My previous reviews of his work: https://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/book-the-inkermen/
    E637446A-107B-4287-AD58-AEC0336A108A
    There are two stories by Dominy Clements in this Abraxas Brochure and I will read and review them both separately below…
    Reply
  7. THE GREAT CIRCUMBENDIBUS by Dominy Clements
    “The high, soft sound which I had experienced before came as a prelude,…”
    Quite randomly, as I typed out the above quote from the story, Spotify filled my room with some sweetly high and soft notes of a flute playing Schwanenlied by Fanny Mendelssohn…
    This story with adeptly evoked genius-loci has the wonderment of a lost or hidden realm, a large house in Kent parkland at the embouchure of the Second World War, a place where the narrator as boy and later as callow teenager was able to stay on a number of visits – often playing hide and seek in its large maze with his friends.
    Is this a story as a metaphor of a personal and social ‘lost innocence’ via Rodin’s Gates of Hell or is it a disarmingly gratuitous journey in fiction for its own sake with a chill of terror in its closure charming those who simply relish such chills? Each of us will have their own answer to that question. Meanwhile, games of hide and seek with voices guiding you high and soft as well as hot and cold can often involve extra seekers or hiders you did not otherwise know were there. Poised for playing at the Jaws of Hell, as Hell has no need for Gates?
    Reply
  8. THE OLD MASTER by Dominy Clements
    “Most people like to know what they are going to get in advance, especially if they are about to fork out a vast sum of money for something intrinsically useless.”
    6587DC61-35A7-4887-A5D4-FFFB2A720771
    Is all art intrinsically useless, unless the fickle Tuning-Fork of genuineness deems it not? And this is a creditable copy of an original, or an original begging for a copy. A jobbing artist who doubles, in a fabricated capsule of seventeenth century lockdown, as creator of original work by Willem Claez. Heda. A Tuned Forgery as adeptly described here that makes Heda make Still Lifes hedonist! Rather than cold objects. Until he emerges into the cold light of day to find some other artist had beaten him to the game almost by travelling back in time to obtain the unobtainable object. Who is the primary source in mutual synergy with whom? The painter himself (the one by Dominy Clements in 2004) or the painter by Brian Howell? Or the reviewer who drew it altogether as a crystallisation of truth? All of us invisible, except here.
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  10. DEVOTIONAL TEXTS by Milan Županović
    “…black anchors
    still standing.”
    Astonishingly to me, I seem to have asked exactly the right question as a postscript to the two Clements works above yesterday — is Rodin’s Gates of Hell a Still Life? And great still lifes do indeed come to life! As if a fermenting still of existence and memorials and monuments, ‘a dead monument to once ancient hope’ and Ruinenlust, I suggest. And this feeds into today’s ‘statues’ issues, at least the enormous political and historical and stone-into-life issues about them in the UK….
    And, these hauntingly hypnotic (sometimes experimentally typeset) prose pieces and poems are mainly instilled with such considerations, especially from a devotional and spiritual and Christian point of view. Frescos, come to life with a hammer. A stone statue at the bottom of the ocean. Those black anchors as black statues. Dreams of Gods. And three boys who are either in the above image or playing in Clements’ maze! And when the sun itself died…
    ‘Sunce obasjalao. mesec zacarao.’
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  11. WHEN THE WOODS COME CALLING by Christian Riley
    “I heard voices. It was perhaps a vague chorus, a song of some kind, at least that’s what it sounded like.”
    …if not this story’s keynote, it is certainly a connection with the image above created before I read this story, a story, for me, uncannily and personally epiphanal. Dungiven, of course, that it starts with a boy, this narrator amid a house of a lost domain (in the woods of Ireland), a lost domain that we found similarly with the house that the boy is visiting in the Dominy story, both stories explicitly mentioning or featuring hide and seek. And now we meet him again as a man of my own age, and I, too, was in Corporate Assurance for much of my life! This surely must be a rite of ‘Midsommar’ passage for such septuagenarians as me that I have long publicly talked about. Perhaps that Rite day is today! Also a story of Anti-Natalism made into almost a self-cannibalism of sin-eating, following the discovery of a still-life box of wood that was also found in the Dominy story. Wood beyond Aickman. And this Riley story’s ‘Mends’, for me, represent all the books I happen to read and review every day, especially the Mount Abraxas ones. The narrator had perhaps ‘seeked’ his own hidden self and found Rourke as his own self, a sort of re-oak. Rourke is also the name of one my favourite reviewed authors…

  12. All these Brochures edited and designed by Dan Ghetu.
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  13. Just been reminded that there are 6 other Fosforos brochures – new works by D.P. Watt, Thomas Strømsholt, Geticus Polus and a few other surprises. The entire Fosforos Library set contains 13 brochures. I have these other ones already on order.
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