More New Miniatures

 

THE PLOT – JUST LIKE THAT

Posted on November 28, 2023

I misunderstood what he said, when Tommy Cooper said it. But then he added: “There were several traitors in England throughout its history, but have you heard of the purple one?”

I shook my head. In some history books, however, I knew there were theories about various traitors – like Lord Haw Haw, and Guy Fawkes, or Lord Lucan or John Stonehouse, or Blunt, Burgess & Maclean, even slapstick comedians like Charlie Drake.

Some of the more dangerous ones were given colours to keep their identities safe, a bit like M, Q and Nadine’s Dr No in the James Bond annals . My understanding of the Traitor known as Purple was a comedian like Charlie Drake, Jasper Carrott, Dave King, or even Sid James. To make us laugh so much did seem pretty treacherous bearing in mind what life was really like!

You see, unbeknownst to Tommy Cooper who mentioned it, I had myself made a study of all the colour traitors. In fact, I became the leading expert – and I had tipped the imagecorner of each page in a book I kept about these traitors, tipped them with different colours as a way of coding – so that one day they would be revealed to someone not as clever as me. In fact revealed to the Purple Traitor himself, clever enough to fathom my colour codes but stupid enough to betray himself by showing that he could fathom these codes. A clever ruse on my part, eh?

I left the book on the arm of my settee when I expected Tommy Cooper to come round again, whom I had worked out as being the Purple Traitor. Arthur Askey had nothing on him.

I invited him into the lounge and asked whether he would like a cocktail. He nodded.

“Green Safecrackle or Purple Hazard?” I asked.

Of course, he opted for the first one, so I now definitely knew who he was. A double bluff. Even a quadruple one. Hardly a triple.

Then I left the room to make the chosen cocktail. But I left a spy-crack between the doorframe and the door to watch him leaf through my colour-coded book. He seemed to study the strange patterns that the words made, while triangulating one of the imageacrostics with his finger. He naturally ended up on the page I expected him to be on, i.e. the one you would least expect him to be on if he was the Purple Traitor.

I plunked the purple umbrellas into the tall glass and re-entered the room with it.

“That’s the way to do it,” he said with sufficient breathiness. And he swallowed it in one gulp. Umbrellas and all.

“Just like that!” I replied with a studied grin, and I smartly placed the handcuffs on MYSELF as the perpetrator.

***

It is sometimes a precariously foolhardy task for you to copy and paste large amounts of text with a finger, in tactile contiguity with a screen, dragging itself across the surface of a page without upsetting ‘the apple cart of what’s begun needing to be finished’ alongside an unfaltering steadiness of purpose, before releasing the store of words upon another page without, in the interim, losing it all into a void where words could be lost forever or even vacuumed up in other dimensions by creators of alternate worlds. But the greatest slip between cup and lip that stems from this process of dragging the finger is dragging the very heart out of the text, and when it is thought to be successfully released as a paste from the past you see the pulsing heart slipping, from top to bottom, through the fingers of the text and then falling off the edge of the page into areas where no screen dares to go and eaten by the ghosts of starving copy cats that have gathered at your feet by the scent of your genius. Apologies to real cats

***

• 
  0 

I have long enjoyed chance and coincidence, and random luck. But these times have been ones of frustration; in fact, that particular f word has been building in strength over a longer period, just as the word itself is longer than the more usual f word everyone seems to use these days, even those you don’t expect to do so especially when their luck runs out….
I was interrupted in writing the above essay upon modern mœurs, by the arrival of my own version of starfruit on nothing as carried by nobody, making this difficult to make a meaning relevant to anybody reading this. I turned to my assistant who usually kept things away from me while I tried to concentrate on today’s subject in hand, and I watched gradually my already written words pulling back along their staves like music notes cringing at what was approaching from the right hand side as symbols of illicit tone and key. To the extent of my utter frustration at such a turn of events, until I managed to turn it around again. My assistant whispered her own pet expletive under her breath, as if readying herself for something beyond the range of hearing as well as smell and sight. Giving me a clue towards rescuing what I had already written. Taste and touch were often a last resort. What happened next was the resumption of my essay as I diverted into more arcane Games of Fate and Frustration with no dice shakes and plenty of dying snakes upon collapsing ladders. The fell lottery of postal codes. The bingo blight of life’s unnumbered mischances. The carambola of catastrophe and chaos. Luck running back in time to clinch the final rhyme.

***

Time to emote. Time to rethink things. To remember that longer arms meant bigger elbows, and even bigger heads to match. There was not a thing that could be done about it inside such a large contraption that had no outside to it. One of them grabbed the remote, remembering at the last moment that was what it was. The remote what? asked the other, who had forgotten the child left behind. Not a single thing that would change things. The need to re-shorten and to re-earth.  Slowly, by half of a half of a half of a half forever, the outer contraption felt as if it moved on tracks that would not take traction. Circling a moat with no drawbridge and no boat to cross it. To be taken across entailed more than just a strength of mind over matter. It simply took a look at each other to reshape whatever had trapped them here by carvery as well as welding. Elbow empowering while arm twisting and head banging to force the mind’s motion to be recruited in the same battle of moving onward through more than just a metal machine with a resistant track’s trickery of obdurate flesh. The thing that was the same thing. The only thing to rethink. Until they heard the child’s first baby cry.

 

The Volkhova Perplex by Ashley Stokes

Published in AT THE LIGHTHOUSE, a new anthology in 2023 edited by Sophie Essex and published by Eibonvale Press HERE.

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of Ashley Stokes are linked HERE.

***

“From behind we see Syzygy gently nudge Star with her elbow.”

Even having just re-watched yesterday a ‘realler’  colourised version of the first Daleks’ shaky cardboard and silver showing in 1963 that I originally saw live in fuzzy black and white when  it was first broadcast, I do not know how to approach reviewing this first person plural referenced, indeed multi-referenced  ‘story’ of the eponymous TV serial’s ouroboros of a time warp creating for the first time the Lighthouse in a new Area X as seen  by a narrator who was an obsessive fan to the extent of blighting his subsequent life or altering what happens in the backdrop history in the 1970s to the extent of the serial’s existence at all being in question when…. ah, I am aging and agog with both its setting on the east coast where I live and the previously invisible lighthouse that I can now see from my window. I sense this is a significant work, sparking off with a fazy Sapphire and Steel. 

 

ANTRIPUU by Simon Strantzas

Posted on November 26, 2023

Published in ONLY THE LIVING ARE LOST, a new collection by Simon Strantzas, published in 2023 by Hippocampus Press as described HERE.

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author (some of which are reviews of stories in this new collection) are linked HERE.

***

“The problem, instead, is what’s beneath the storm, mimicking the howls of the storm, trying to coax us into opening the door and letting it in.”

This is a fearsome scenario made into a psychological study of a narrator mixing life-preserving hope with death-embracing depression and other elements of his self-complex when on a trip into the Iceteau Forest with his two male colleagues from the Socket Company, where they meet, in the throes of terror, an itemised man and woman in a wayward shelter — all of them besieged by the eponymous monster as a unique version of the Wendigo, a frighteningly tall, yet narrow hand’s breadth, thing which I imagine to be full of sockets and fence joints and  ’bent knees’ and an ‘overlong arm’ in different contexts elsewhere in this story, but tellingly never an explicit elbow. But where is the bad story and the good story hinged, and by what means do you believe the Antripuu is also hinged to the fate of those it terrifies, as it terrifies the reader, too? Somehow, for me, the narrator is already embedded as the ever joyless one, embedded indeed within ‘Antripuu’ as the ever partnerless ‘Puritan’, even if one eventually escapes the other. When I do go, the you follows.

“They have to have. They have to.”

THE PLOT — JUST LIKE THAT

I misunderstood what he said, when Tommy Cooper said it. But then he added: “There were several traitors in England throughout its history, but have you heard of the purple one?”

I shook my head. In some history books, however, I knew there were theories about various traitors – like Lord Haw Haw, and Guy Fawkes, or Lord Lucan or John Stonehouse, or Blunt, Burgess & Maclean, even slapstick comedians like Charlie Drake.

Some of the more dangerous ones were given colours to keep their identities safe, a bit like M, Q and Nadine’s Dr No in the James Bond annals . My understanding of the Traitor known as Purple was a comedian like Charlie Drake, Jasper Carrott, Dave King, or even Sid James. To make us laugh so much did seem pretty treacherous bearing in mind what life was really like!

You see, unbeknownst to Tommy Cooper who mentioned it, I had myself made a study of all the colour traitors. In fact, I became the leading expert – and I had tipped the imagecorner of each page in a book I kept about these traitors, tipped them with different colours as a way of coding – so that one day they would be revealed to someone not as clever as me. In fact revealed to the Purple Traitor himself, clever enough to fathom my colour codes but stupid enough to betray himself by showing that he could fathom these codes. A clever ruse on my part, eh?

I left the book on the arm of my settee when I expected Tommy Cooper to come round again, whom I had worked out as being the Purple Traitor. Arthur Askey had nothing on him.

I invited him into the lounge and asked whether he would like a cocktail. He nodded.

“Green Safecrackle or Purple Hazard?” I asked.

Of course, he opted for the first one, so I now definitely knew who he was. A double bluff. Even a quadruple one. Hardly a triple. 

Then I left the room to make the chosen cocktail. But I left a spy-crack between the doorframe and the door to watch him leaf through my colour-coded book. He seemed to study the strange patterns that the words made, while triangulating one of the imageacrostics with his finger. He naturally ended up on the page I expected him to be on, i.e. the one you would least expect him to be on if he was the Purple Traitor.

I plunked the purple umbrellas into the tall glass and re-entered the room with it.

“That’s the way to do it,” he said with sufficient breathiness. And he swallowed it in one gulp. Umbrellas and all.

“Just like that!” I replied with a studied grin, and I smartly placed the handcuffs on MYSELF as the perpetrator. At least I never swore.

 

COCOONING by Christi Nogle

Published in PROMISE, a collection by Christi Nogle, published in 2023 by Flame Tree Press: HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author HERE

***

This is a sort of lockdown or curfew; in fact I recently learnt that the UK Government considered ‘cocooning’ in 2020 as their term for such restrictions, but changed their mind to lockdown. This is a transformational grammar or theme-and-variations on such a cocoon with, inter alia, a blanket cartoon on a window and removal of mirrors akin to old block TVs being ousted by flat screens, whereby we follow —  haunted by it all, and our own memories and mind contortions three years ago — a married couple whose cocooning involves a carnal subsuming with pet dogs that is vividly conveyed towards what now in hindsight was a sort of natural culmination and I wonder if the particular word that is crystallised at the end here by the preceding matters was the same Welsh word that my Welsh father (trapped in England in the 1940s by the war) taught me as a word that seemed to be connected with the 1918 cocooning in Wales when he lost all four of his grandparents to a similar infectious subsuming. Trapped on the hither side of the hearth as something other than himself?

 

ANTRIPUU by Simon Strantzas

Posted on November 26, 2023

Published in ONLY THE LIVING ARE LOST, a new collection by Simon Strantzas, published in 2023 by Hippocampus Press as described HERE.

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author (some of which are reviews of stories in this new collection) are linked HERE.

***

“The problem, instead, is what’s beneath the storm, mimicking the howls of the storm, trying to coax us into opening the door and letting it in.”

This is a fearsome scenario made into a psychological study of a narrator mixing life-preserving hope with death-embracing depression and other elements of his self-complex when on a trip into the Iceteau Forest with his two male colleagues from the Socket Company, where they meet, in the throes of terror, an itemised man and woman in a wayward shelter — all of them besieged by the eponymous monster as a unique version of the Wendigo, a frighteningly tall, yet narrow hand’s breadth, thing which I imagine to be full of sockets and fence joints and  ’bent knees’ and an ‘overlong arm’ in different contexts elsewhere in this story, but tellingly never an explicit elbow. But where is the bad story and the good story hinged, and by what means do you believe the Antripuu is also hinged to the fate of those it terrifies, as it terrifies the reader, too? Somehow, for me, the narrator is already embedded as the ever joyless one, embedded indeed within ‘Antripuu’ as the ever partnerless ‘Puritan’, even if one eventually escapes the other. When I do go, the you follows.

“They have to have. They have to.”

 

WHITE PAINT by Annie Neugebauer

A story published in ‘Cemetery Dance Magazine’ #78 (2023) HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author: HERE

***

“elbows locked”

This is a telling post-prison story where a man, upon his release, therapeutically tries to create a tabula rasa for his life, until  he is haunted by someone with a girlish pink ribbon at the packaging works where he worked, disrupting the purity of the eponymous paint he places on the walls of his emptied living quarters if not with my personally perceived assonance of the author’s name as a snow bower, in fact his very flesh is infected by the paint itself that only his misunderstood slapstick past could paste over? A powerful probationary portrait of this man that I timed as being read by me for thankfully longer than 4 minutes 33 seconds but also making me wish to re-read the world’s first published blank story that was never blank enough….

 

HIDE AND SEEK by Andy Humphrey

Posted on November 21, 2023

  A story recently published in ‘Something Peculiar’ (Black Shuck Books 2023) HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/andrew-humphrey/ and https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/02/18/duck-egg-farm-by-andy-humphrey/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/the-alsiso-project/

 ***

“. . . demeaning.”

Demeaning or dreaming, this is a remarkable story in stages of a man’s age having first been harassed, when he was 8, by an older lady in a town park and induced to play hide and seek, with elements I will not spoil here by divulging. It has elements of Aickman with gradual regard to the meaningfully de-meaning, even de-spelling, development of his own life and his sister’s life, with references to his mother and the Findus food he liked, and the worlds-apart places where he was subsequently employed and the seeking game followed. 

I can say, beyond question, that it is a major work in the oblique and slipstream, as well as mainstream, a claim I make with the experience of THESE reviews under my belt. 

He was eight at first, but claimed to be nine. The former being a vertical lemniscate. 

Findus endlessly to purge the Zeno’s Paradox of the game?

The Dapper Man

 When I met the Dapper Man, I thought he said something he didn’t, and I just stared at the bottom of his reflection in the shoeshop window, while listening to screams in the sky I could not explain. Why not look up and see? But I was permanently dip-headed, as you know, and could only see the Dapper Man’s shoes alongside all the other shiny pairs on sale. His, though, were neatly laced, and the glimpse of socks was like the glance of pretty ankles in days of yore. I wondered if he wore a hat, but this reflection was not in colour, and I assumed the hat to be as colourless as the forehead skin beneath it. Why not ask him? But that would make no sense.

They turned out to be reflections of my own shoes as I wiggled them with an artful caprice. The screams that ploughed the sky were constellations of the war’s dead children, the Dapper Man guessed.hu

***

The Dapper Man went to war, there being a gap in the officer ranks that needed filling, with soldiers’ boots all the rage, their leather dubbed and glistened with elbow grease before each battle. He was inspector of the ranks, marching with his baton past the men, to see if their boots passed muster. One pair indeed did not cut the mustard, and he swiped the recruit like a credit card through a machine. And the whirring never stopped until the next poor punk was reprimanded by the Dapper Man. The men already in the trenches were to be inspected next, and mud the most danger for soldiers’ boots. But very little dog muck. One soldier whined and coughed like a whelp’s barking, his nose elongated by the intense frost. Snot as hot as Coleman’s. The Dapper Man had a moment of pity, but there can be no pity in war. So on it all went. No gap for mercy. No lap to be run for the next baton passing. The Dapper Man was a kind man at heart and in truth. But this tale about him was as scarce with truth as meat in any sapper’s gravy rations.

***

Once upon a time, the Dapper Man went off on holiday, so that nothing could be written about him. But little did he know that I followed surreptitiously in his wake, ticking as complete each of his expected movements as if he were a linear clock. Except, of course, he soon ventured off piste when caught short by everyone’s wall of watching him through me. I take full responsibility, having become a desert town’s shop window mannequin in mock array within it, outside of which window our dear Dapper Man stood and stared with his own sense of high suspectibility of being stalked. A desert town under a hot sun with thistles galore covered in what looked like frost, along with the gently mobile weed clumps of eye-floaters susceptible to every passing eye. The Dapper Man seemed to look keenly at his shoes’ shininess, but I could not follow all his movements, frozen in time as I had become by an ill-judged subterfuge. My own sight-line fixed firmly on my own feet. Here, though, unexpectedly, was an oasis of imagination and dream, if cross-structured by your gawps and gazes, japes and jeopardies, in hope or dread at this Wonderwall of Words.

***

The land lay low, the sky was not at its highest, and the horizon had been thrown there by a God with a weak-elbowed arm. And, furthermore, any distinguishing marks on such a horizon to adumbrate its nature had been forgotten. It was simply a straight line with a slightly different pastel shade either side of it. More like a Rothko painting than a real landscape, and describing it thus at length has made me forget the actual purpose of describing it in the first place and what story unfolded in its vicinity.

***

There was no need to remember what happened in the Rothko-like landscape, because it is happening before my very eyes as I write these words themselves, thus making events happen in synchronicity with the simple act of writing such words. It was like playing a piano with three hands but only one brain, drawing into focus the characters, one being the Dapper Man himself and one of the Big-Headed People employed as his rival in plot terms, and a morphing of the horizon into a recognisable city’s edge. The pastel shades above and below the horizon were blending, deepening each other into primary richness, even when veiled by the blurred effects of any words used to reveal them. Words, you see, were normally imprecise even when sporting variable colours of their own in every pinion, spindle, cross and dot of the letters’ visual configuration, disregarding any semantics or phonetics as patterned and supported by a structure of syntax. It was when the notes of the piano were played that the whole story was captured, not by the phonetics of the words, but by a separate music sonata that harnessed all the other ingredients into a vision of the Dapper Man and the Big-Headed Person having an elbow fight to decide who was real enough to proceed to the next frame of the tragi-comic story beyond any horizon’s now re-emptied cliff-edge, and the eventualities themselves would tell each other the ensuing story without needing any words other than their own.

***

We had a Medium to Low Suspectibility that only one of the competing pair could possibly progress to the next frame, but in actual fact both did so, having deemed their elbow-fight to be a draw, or a truce that only truth was able to deny, and this was because they now found themselves entering the land of trust as truism. The win-all, lose-all ethos was left behind by their having crossed the broken horizon under the vertical eye of whoever wrote this about them as a word-wielder in whom they had intrinsic faith. But it seemed self-evident that there were levels of words at play and at this level you are reading, the word-wielder was unknown except by the secondary word-wielder who weighed up such a word-wielder and then wrote this about him or her. And so on, as that entailed yet another level of word-wielder who had to resort to such pronounced ‘pronouning’ as ‘him or her’, while all the time we knew the case was neither. And, thus, that ‘we’, in turn, implied collusive word-wielders as a committee considering worst case scenarios within the Art of Suspicion regarding the Balance of Probabilities. Meanwhile, the erstwhile elbow-fighters, the Dapper Man and the Big-Headed Person were playing on a child’s see-saw in a world of golden heaven’s shafts of light whereby ‘Man’ had no meaning at all and ‘Person’ very little. How long, before snapping, the precarious plank could bear their weight in alternate turns of sprung shoe wear was your guess being as good as mine, and only the next frame of the story could tell us, except, arguably, the next frame was already a palimpsest of this one.

***

The two of them had made up their quarrel, which didn’t mean the quarrel had never existed for real as described by words intended to alchemically magick it into an utterly real quarrel, and having both injured themselves, they blamed the now broken see saw rather than each other, and sought to see a hospital on this side of the horizon’s border rather than return to the thick of it before they crossed such a horizon. They soon saw the sign BLACK SWAB upon an evil-looking mansion and this they guessed must be where the doctors and nurses now operated. But before they could reach its entrance all the building’s shadows became congealed with their own, and the Big Headed One was now just the bobbing head after which it had been named and, so, without limbs, it depended on the the Dapper One to drag it in the trench that had been formed by the Dapper One’s own shoes which were all that seemed to remain of the Dapper One as a pair of large tongued tanks waddling, if not trundling, along, the laces harnessed around the huge head of their companion to gain traction of positive passage and reach rescue by subsequent healing in BLACK SWAB. They were soon ushered into the Sibelius ward that led from the triage vestibule and placed in a section controlled by someone with a name badge of Dr Tuonela. Although that previous sentence was apocryphal. Although that previous sentence was apocryphal. Although that previous sentence was apocryphal.

***

He found himself in a hospital bed, his pronoun now  known, despite the medication he’d been given to neutralise it. His big head smiled wanly as he squinted to see his wrinkled face in each of his shiny shoes that stuck out from the bottom of the eiderdown. The nurses had not yet removed his shoes, and it seemed strange they had bothered to shine them up before they did. He smiled again to test the reflection’s veracity. Death would be like this, he guessed.  Full of sound cancelling and sometimes jagged music.

 

THINGS BREAK DOWN by Ashley Stokes

Posted on November 19, 2023

  A story recently published in Phatasmagora Magazine 23 HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

***

“No one jostled at the intersection.”

This is like one of my ‘mansions’ made into mammoths not miniatures, a woman climbing floor by floor, a story by story that chrysalises with the other Stokes stories I have reviewed HERE, something indigo at the corner of my eye  as “I lay down and stared at the white expanse of the ceiling.” The Age of Disorder with AI after AI glancing out of me and into me, attacked by spores as well as whatever else is here. And who is ‘you’ in preference to Christian’s throb, and what did we do when we finished pretending to be the Famous Five? (There being a new book out recently by Nicholas Royle about David Bowie and Enid Blyton, is my first aside.) A human being helping an AI in an Astrological Tower become a sort of mansion of the moon so as for this woman specifically to feed someone’s pussy cats, from Scullery to roofless Skull. The worst of all nightmares, the best of all dreams. (Another aside, ‘mansion’ is an anagram of ‘onanism’.) My reviews now break down upon this story edifice. The end is nigh for me… No justice done, I have just touched its insides from outside.

“I wanted to make sense of them, look for patterns…”

So instead I fall back on the enemy AI, whence I have dared seek retrospective pictorials before …. and for which daring I wear sackcloth and ashes…

…the whole shifting collage for Ashley Stokes HERE

 

DON’T BE CLEVER by Georgina Bruce

Posted on November 18, 2023

A short story in this author’s THE HOUSE ON THE MOON (Black Shuck Books 2023).

My previous reviews of this author HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE.

***

“People thought it was either something to do with Elon Musk, or aliens.”

I cannot tell you whether I was startled by this story or not, as that would be a spoiler. But it at least took me by surprise, as I followed Suzanne who needed more space from her husband and children  and  travelled on her own  to an idyllic Croatian island with many quiet or secret coves where she found herself being harassed by a fellow tourist, a woman who was simply full of her own chakras! And when a chosen mystic stone became a rock much smaller than the moon …. I thought of my journey many years ago through the Art of Astrology and the ‘mansions of the moon’, and when certain planets transited certain ‘houses’ of my own natal chart.  Suzanne needed space indeed, and another of  Musk’s rockets exploded today, as I synchronously witnessed in today’s news just before reading this remarkable story. Yes, Astrology is synchronicity not cause and effect, I have always found myself arguing. Yet, maybe I should pay heed to the story’s title. And, by the way, it is not a spoiler to say it is a remarkable story, as I just did, as I feel it deserves anthologising again and again.  And I say that advisedly, having reviewed all THESE mainstream anthologies in recent years. But who is Brian Cox?

“She had no idea how long she’d been sleeping when she felt a jostling at her elbow,…”

 

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY by Gary Fry

A short story that appeared this year in NIGHTMARE ABBEY #3, available HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE.

***

“If that had been a gassy giggle, it surely couldn’t have emerged from anything that resembled a mouth.”

A horror story that might have got away from me, but I was somehow destined to return to my book-reviewing roots paradoxically to find myself reading this story (most of my previous reviews of this author are inexplicably rooted in my reading past and are linked from HERE), and this one is genuinely suspenseful, honestly and plainly horrific, with an evocative sense of place, in many ways unashamedly and gruefully what-it-is, perhaps echoing in some way my own journey from a grey financial humdrum job and bringing up a family in the 1970s and 1980s also somehow bringing me later to writing horror stories… but this adept tale is, of course, not about me nor my erstwhile situation; it is about someone quite different, but it is a sort of parallel, as the character diverts from a boring business meeting near Bradford (where I had a few business meetings myself!) and he eventually finds, in the area, the township where he was once a gauche youth in the first clumsy attempts of dating girls, and the place where one particularly coquettish girl used to live with her father, her house now derelict and haunted by old childhood games, and much more that comes through some telling slit in time  and place that we both fear and love. He sort of dared it to happen, although he was not the sort who could really dare anything.

 

PLEASE LET GO by Johnny Mains

A new story being published in December 2023 in a re-issued ‘Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types’.

A REVIEW OF IT AS PART OF MY ‘DESSEMINATION’ PROJECT HERE:-

“…that Aickman, man, he is zipped up way too tightly.”

A story billed as the best story ever written, as gifted this morning to someone older by someone younger, yet the story itself is about the very vice versa or inversion of such an act. This being an as yet secret unread story by a man much younger than the ailing man like me to whom he has given it to review, a story about Robert Aickman and his death, written by a fan herein becoming an arms length confidant of the great writer during his period of  dying, with cameo parts by people who knew Aickman, and involving sickly spurts of blood that never quite erupt in the real church of his fiction, except perhaps in the secret unknown Aickman story that is somehow bequeathed to the younger man using the same title as this alternating-current fiction from the Mains man. 

Aches and pains, the growing pangs of death’s remains.

But spurts of blood can at least be inferred from the pages of PAGES FROM A YOUNG GIRL’S JOURNAL, from which pages are also found these words: “…fiction though it be, could hardly with sense have been written at all.”

My previous reviews of Johnny Mains:  HERE

 

The Waiting Room by Stephen Volk

I did not want to miss the opportunity of sampling, for potential readers, a story recently published in THIS new acclaimed book collection by Stephen Volk, sampling it as part of what I call my ongoing ‘Dessemination’ project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=Volk&submit=Search

***.

“An author is not bound by legal contract to believe what he writes. We would all be the poorer if he were. Therein lies the task, as I see it. To make the downright impossible feel, if for but a minute, for a page—for a book—more real than the world at the reader’s elbow.”

And alongside that significant elbow moment (and two other elbow moments in it),  the author makes the ‘downright impossible feel’ as real as the story’s summoning of Charles Dickens, as he once summoned for me Peter Cushing and Alfred Hitchcock. Summoning, too, a gestalt from a tessellation  of coincidences, and stories within other frame stories and ghostly echoes of Dickens’ Signalman —  as we grapple with the narrative painter and Dickens himself in a conundrum of plagiarism between a painting of a woman and an already printed story,  and the poignant secrets thus revealed. A ghost story for ghost story lovers.

A New Index of Miniatures (3)

I used to be a frequent träumtrawler of Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, until I went off piste with the Piano Sonatas of Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué. But, last night, I decided to refresh the Scriabins in one long lie-in upon decent Bluetooths and undiverted by the guilt of other tasks undone or by tusks of anxious trauma, or later by some sweet träumerei tussling or teasing me to be tempted into deeper sleep with no listening or any subconscious hearing. No, I heard, in my still waking mind, every single note of the Scriabins and they scrubbed me clean, made me feel reborn, if surrounded by miniature ghosts amidst the floaters induced by my attempts at fending off concentrated shuteye.

“Alexander Scriabin Memorial Museum was opened on July 17, 1922 in the old mansion located in Arbat Street, Moscow, where one of the greatest composers of the turn of XIX-XX centuries spent the last three years of his life.”

***

 When I write my book reviews, I feel a ghost on my shoulder imagining synchronicities and connections and a sort of pareidolia from words. Some call it apophenia or confirmation bias. Others call it foolish pretentiousness. Last night I dreamed of seeking a certain meal in a busy staff canteen in an unknown workplace, and I felt a sense of solitude as everyone seemed to know each other and were already eating, as I tried to help myself to something that I could not quite load on my plate, before finally waking. And this dream had no connection with the book review I conducted soon after waking from it. This seemed stranger than there BEING such a connection. A weird experience inasmuch as the synchronicity-ghost must have vanished from my shoulder, and then I saw it flying across the white ceiling. I smiled with relief, when realising I was still dreaming, and not yet awake at all.

***

Was it a dream? Yes, but I don’t want to get into the habit of miniaturising my dreams into words for you each morning after waking. Such a regular rite has the high suspicion of a chore or a self-indulgence. However, from last night I can’t seem to rid myself of the things that bowled along the road, having escaped from my enclosure. One was a machine like a small torpedo on wheels that moved as if in mayhem to become an eider duck and later to become an urchin boy who mooned up at me as if to ask: “Why you coming after me?” I gave him a shilling instead of the sixpence he was owed in advance and I watched his head bob up and down and heard him whistle as he cleaned my enclosure’s windows.
The very last bit above was a lie, as I did not want this to be wholly what I dreamt, but to be something I had created outside the dream. In fact, I am the whistling boy, later to be grown up from that miniature ‘me’, and it was a threepenny bit you gave me not a bob or even a tanner. I’ll come after you as your lad, don’t you worry.

***

You know, when you’re actually living through a period of downbeat events, often interspersed with bouts of anxiety and perhaps even unexplained fits of laughter, it does not dawn on you that you have been suffering from old-fashioned sorrow, and when that period announces its end, you look back objectively at it all, and you finally see it for what it is. Or was.

And in your case, it had been a period of sorrow you had not been able to shake off, but now you were able to feel that you were back to yourself, conscious of who you were, not the other person who had experienced the period that was now over with.

Your eyes told me that you were a new person now and I took you by the scruff of the neck, well, sort of. I was subtler than that. I plumped you right in front of the mirror and showed you that nothing had really changed. There was the same wrinkled skin, the same innocent eyes, the same big head, the same birthmarks on the skin.

“That’s not me,” you seemed to say.

“Yes, it is,” I responded. “That is what such a period of sorrow has done, kept you intact, levelled out your moods, lifted the laughter, enabled tears to follow.”

The sudden knowledge indeed that the whole of your life was encompassed only by a single period of sorrow that seemed as if it had lasted forever but now set free as birds on some unlikely wing.

Big head and birthmarks, back to that very start of ageing, crying out for the period of sorrow yet to come, the same sorrow, always the same sorrow, a recurrency ever and anon.

I cradled you in my arms, as you started those fits of laughter again, between bouts of further tears. Spurning past years of gradual instinctive learning to become who you really are. Happy not to grow older and wiser. Ever aching for partition and margin. Looking like a calculated log of ancient colourless bark, with accelerating strobes of grief and joy. Your own swollen baby’s head in full shameless view, perhaps forever. A honed and old-fashioned period of honest sorrow. Turning you even more wrinkled with wonders. A great old one.

***

I love early 1960s pop music, because, well, because of Radio Luxembourg and later Radio Caroline. This originally involved spreading my wings further than the living room where my parents were engaged in an out-staring game with their small black and white screen in the corner, and the screen won. Now a different sort of screen has defeated me in its beguiling pretence of interaction with you out there reading this, who thus, by default, is interacting with me. You know who you 

***

TO BE CONTINUED AS THE DAPPER MAN