Wednesday, May 31, 2017

The House of Silence – Avalon Brantley

19 thoughts on “The House of Silence – Avalon Brantley

  1. IMG_3222
    Copy of accompanying pamphlet above.
    285 pages in a luxurious hardback shown in my first post above. Can you see the face on the front cover? In real life, it is invisible.
    Liberally peppered with whole-page black and white images.
    My copy is numbered 32/170.
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  2. I
    FINDING FOUNDERED FOUNDATIONS
    “The familiar landscape has changed, strangened, filling the boy with the suffocating certainty that he has not so much been benighted, but transported.”
    Well, I have already been transported by what so far appears to be the unbelievable apotheosis of style that would appeal to those interested in texts by Hodgson, Poe, Lovecraft, Shiel, Ashton Smith… a 13 year old boy’s pareidoliac, ‘gluttonous’, ‘bruise-hued’ vision, running away from home again, with his now missing dog Psalter, the pit, the house. The face at the window. No justice can be done to it here, nor can I cover the backstory that ensues as Mr Acheson now plans, after the Second World War, to travel toward his past, relations and sweetheart, in Ireland, having been apprised of his father’s death there. Backstory of himself as a boy and young man in palimpsest with that parastory of the boy in his vision…? The ‘elsewise’ of an ‘ontological paradox’, notwithstanding. Acheson –> ache son?
  3. II EX EXILIO
    III SCHOOL BELLE
    “– another magical element of childhood expunged with the plunge into oldness.”
    The spurge, too.
    This book seems a new style for Brantley, accessible and engaging, yet retaining the tantalising feel of the tentacular wordiness, beauty, density, poetics of what I have read in her earlier books. This is sad as such a remarkable talent seems to be evolving, not in a straight line of improvement, but in a timeless variegation…and it is arguably a tragedy, too, in the circumstances. This promises, so far, to be a very important book, I feel.
    Here the train journey to this outland in Ireland for reunion with his younger brother, and memories of the unrequited love in the earlier classroom he now rediscovers in the present day (a present day that is the past for us.) Underlain with the friction between the Anglicanism of our narrator and the Catholic environs, now and then.
  4. IV THE FALLEN TOWER
    “…Óengus the Culdee, later canonized Saint Óengus of Tallaght — his feast day was a month ago in fact — but at the time alluded to in the manuscript he was just a young eremitic man in cloak and reverse tonsure,…”
    From busybodying gravestones ‘entitling’ their occupants, while narrator Ashley Acheson’s father’s coffin is being prepared in a backroom of the wake house, a coffin too small for the occupant’s shoulders, we now have this ‘reverse tonsure’, plus this meeting with an old school friend in a secluded church near the arguable remains of a Round Tower. We sense ancient awe here, a forbidden quality, something or other about, we also sense, this author and this book? Or have we just said not only the unsaid but the unsayable?
    (With an added bonus of hearing bad organ playing; badly played familiar music often awakens its predictability into something else. God versus fallen angels?)
  5. V SHANNON AND ÆONBHARR
    VI WAKING THE DEAD
    “The silence in the house was massive. It made the structure feel small as a single room, or a wardrobe.”
    Some very striking touches, as Acheson renews his acquaintance with those he used to know here a number of years ago, enough years to make the remembrances meaningful if distant, such as young ‘sin-swollen’ sexual beginnings, and his nephew who looks like Acheson did at that age, and we hear through the nephew Acheson’s late father (as he now lies in state in the wake house) speaking some last words about the House of Silence….and we learn more about Acheson’s life between, his hopes when running off to sea against his father’s wishes and his hopeless attempts to become a poet. The words and the sound of literal paper protests tell us more about words and poetry in his life, poetry as a craft, and many other aspects of eras in palimpsest with each other. Beautifully conveyed In a strange modern-ancient accessibility of al dente as well as plainer, but never simply plain, prose.
    “…a chilling polyphony of keening,…”
  6. VII A GRAVE WELL DUG
    “The child gave a naughty smile and hid behind her mother again.”
    A stunning short chapter, of urgently replaced intention of grave site for the mourned corpse, a sunk well dug well or not well as a surprise morass of memories, as the loves, from Ashley Acheson’s past in this area, having been a wake’s co-carousers, are today co-mourners: women and girls or their own faery foundlings and changelings between. A mystery of trivial trinket or rich redolent amulet consigned to such well dug well? I am captivated, nay, too late – I am captured, I guess.
  7. VIII THE OLD FALLOWED FARM
    “…and the once whitewashed walls were now every colour of bruised and pallid corpseflesh, some of the chipped and mouldy surface broken away near the decrepit roof, revealing the crumbly masonry beneath, like the flesh of a forehead open to the skull.”
    This is both traditional horror traditionally expressed and the powerful breaking news of something else within such a tradition of aura as well as of genius loci: a self-anciented House, where you once lived when much younger. A glimpse and skirmish upon you of a wild pig as HOdGson or an erstwhile unrequited lover or an inimical fuse of time as “some unnamed tributary of the River Shannon” or a denizen of “the nothinglands beyond”…?
    Your forgotten tin whistle is still there.
  8. IX BOUND TO THE BORDERLAND
    “It wasn’t necessary to play so roughly with me, now was it Sir?”
    This work leapfrogs and piggybacks itself, somehow. The journey by car through benighted wilds and steep drops, a vision of hit-and-running a lonely waif on the road, arrival at the house – just read this to gain a view of this house or spite your face, I say! And then a young girl riding on his back and a character falling over a crevasse, while excited about another round tower et al. Not to mention references to the Gadarene swine.
    This book is, so far, gorgeously ominous, implicitly erotic, fey, feisty, pungent, exciting and word-worrying.
    Might be the new old-fashioned horror classic you have been waiting for? Rare, and wildly conservative in its rule-breaking, if that is not a contradiction in terms.
  9. X REPAST
    “‘Just a large bog rabbit,’ O’Brien declared before swallowing another piece of it. A sliver of white emerged from his beard-hedged lips: a slender spike of bone, which he took with his fingers and clinked to the rim of his dinner plate.”
    A substantive chapter of meal-taking as repast as well as info-dump through prandial conversations as re-past, I guess. Yet, it is not an info-dump, really, as you forgive this means of imparting information and atmosphere and backstory and character and history and religion … it slides down beautifully like some of the drinks they drink and the food they eat. And the turns of destiny that Ashley the narrator regrets or, rather, turns into new patterns of self, amid glances of sexy communion both during yesteryear (where be Amanda now? ) and now (Shannon at this this repast, who once stalked and fancied him as a boy) and her fey, feisty daughter Briga, like Shannon was in those old days. And Shannon’s father, O’Brien, the same age as me, but far more stolid a person than me, even if he only inhabits fiction?
    I am just past halfway in this book and I sense it is already an important book that will haunt its author, wherever she is now. It must surely be, inter alios, a superior form of haunted-house-by-a-pit book, or at least on that borderland of another great author’s book in that form, an author whom or a scenario which she will by now no doubt have met or visited. Then beyond it. EVEN beyond it or him, with a traditional horror epic in retrocausal modern hyper-imaginative mode, towards literary nirvana, I suggest, with an old man’s lack of fear or favour.
  10. XI ILL REPOSE
    We reach beyond even my own expectations, an apotheosis of literary rhapsody and rapture, helped by visionary powers as well as drunken ones, in this the narrator Acheson’s post-repast. There is so much highly hedonistic wordplay here, I can’ t even begin to choose quotes so as to demonstrate it. I do NOT exaggerate.
    A vision of monstrous nightmare, later, then a purgatory or borderland of spurned erotic sex.
    This is rare stuff, no mistake. It may be too rich for some reading tastes, but I can’t imagine any reader who manages to own this book spurning his or her own emotional affair with it, when push comes to shove, lush comes to love. It is difficult to understate or overstate this book.
  11. (Image is of my Kindertotenlieder Tree as shown elsewhere on the web)
    IMG_3316
    XII THE STRANGE AMBIT
    “, let alone alone with me,…”
    “What was it about Shannon’s children that had me so on edge?”
    Purgatory’s End or Land’s Border? The pit’s chasm beside the house?
    This strange ambit is last night’s aftermath, including Ashley’s residual dreamss hungover.
    One major character seems to have ‘legged’ it, representative no doubt of any reader who has also legged this soon-to-be-a-legend of a book, it being too rich for them, or too disturbing? I cannot imagine any such readers existing, though. If you are, I hope this review’s accompaniment in real-time helps you and prevents you from prematurely legging it.
    Ashley does meanwhile meet some seeming strangers, this morning, in the environs of the house. New readers who have already caught up with us at this point?
    Ashley also accompanies O’Brien et al on a hunt, and some of tbe mutated images pent up in my mind are upon the edge of fruition during these striking scenes.
    And there is the promise of ‘flitting and flirting ‘ festive night tonight for homesteaders round about, for which event Ashley is to be Poet Laureate?
    “, the book like a murdered bird in my lap.”
    “…whose bole resembled writhing worms and whose roots bubbled up from the eroded soil.”
    • Well past halfway in my real-time review of ‘The House of Silence’ by Avalon Brantley. I am already certain it is a classic to be cherished. Hodgson should not eat his heart out but feel enhanced by a new gestalt.
  12. XIII A NIGHT OF CONVOCATIONS
    “…like a magician sheathing a trump behind a flowing sleeve.”
    Ashley, having, as a boy, run away to sea, now submits himself to “this Sea of Sleep”, a grey area between singing along with the festivities of the Eyes Wide Shut festival, where a vision of Amanda emerges, and then entering a vision so significant of shadows and shapes, even, as an implicated reader of it, one needs to check one’s own madness meter. There are moments here on which I had to double-take. Is this Óengus, not a million prophetic miles away from the Orange of today’s Marmalade Mussolini. The Pit, is that the evidence of the one-who-legged-it receiving the proof of his Round Tower and the Church that the Pit once engulfed?
    This chapter seems frankly to be the book’s own pivot, some sort of tipping-point whereby to decide whether this novel works as a meaningful classic of horror literature or an incredible mad one. Either a gratuitous nightmare supreme or something far more prophetic, far more important, about our turbulent times today? Maybe all we readers should triangulate the various findings in our own gestalt real-time reviews to address the nature of this pivot, if pivot or tipping-pit it is.
  13. XIV AND A DAY FOR CONVIVIALITY
    “If anyone reads this ever they’ll think I’ve gone mad! I may in fact be going mad, who can tell? Not I, not if I have!”
    …which seems to bear out my checking my own madness meter, yesterday. But today, my doubts are dispersed by the cathartically rich language, the arcane thrust of its words, the fact that I have submitted myself to its sometimes hairy or edgy care. Its portrait of a bloodthirsty magical woodland masque. Acheson, here in this chapter, too, seems to be prolific with his own verse, here under the tutelary-seeming presence of Shannon, when before in England he wrote little verse. The Brantley soul, too, seems to flourish more under its own creation of these scenes, I sense. The bilberry hunting with the children. The fighting antics of Acheson with stripling young men that he shares with us here in his diary-remodelled-by-Brantley-as-novel. And the parallel of rôle-playing in the masque with entities such as the swine-thing he saw earlier. Interface of artifice and truth, of horror and hedonism, each pair making one true and the other not, but not always in that order. The crowd of blackbirds from the pit…
    The monster in the nest, like a cuckoo, with “an appetite that would have trumped all her other young combined!” And… “We tromped for ages through the long shady stretches of river-riven woods,…” and the idyllic scene in the perfect last sentence of this chapter, a sentence with “orange fire.”
  14. XV DESCENSIONS
    XVI THE STRANGER ORBITS
    “Green things perished…”
    O’Brien, like me, is about the same age as the Trump. Although Brantley probably never lived to see the full enormity of Trump evolve? That dead sun evolved in Hodgson, and Byron’s Darkness poem, now reborn here even deader, more cataclysmic. This novel is an apotheosis. It is where, possibly, we have always been reading towards? Becoming a subsumptous orgy of words. The ultimate Night Land.
    In these two chapters, we can discern, if you read with attention, a series of alliterative words in threesomes (that I won’t quote here; too easy to over-quote this book), and another threesome being the Amanda-Shannon-Briga conflux and onward relay-bâton passing of concupiscence….
    “…with less room in my trousers than before.”
    Both poetic and gauche. As if written with a brain sloshing in the skull? And with the highest possible inspiration that, unless told otherwise by those in the know, we must assume was responsible for killing the author, otherwise such inspiration would not have been possible at all? An important question.
    The seething Swine-pit. Alongside the barrel- and spirit-intoxicated madness, again, till another wakening, in the next chapter, yet to be read, I guess…
    • Just posted this to my Facebook Friends with a link to this review –
      “This is a new major horror classic tapping into Hodgson’s Borderland in a staggering blended style of horror greats, and above all of the late young Avalon Brantley who agreed its publication seemingly just before she sadly passed away…”
  15. XVII THE FALLEN WORLD
    XVIII THE SEASON OF STIRRING AND RESURGENCE
    “Had I, in some inexplicable yet tangible way, gone bodily from this place,…”
    “…the Tir na nÓg that lies over the dark ocean of Space-Time:”
    Another movement of madness and aftermath, this time, as I somehow predicted earlier, “a full-on rolling-around-on-the-ceiling bloody madness!”
    No wonder readers as well as, imputedly, the author herself, has touched or is about to touch such lethal madness? Here he sees “a trio of child-size figures”, naked children, it seems, and the season has become Autumn and the configurations of buildings reconfigure, including the Round Tower, and his terrified climb to its sky-high dungeon, escaping something from the Pit you will not be able to cease visualising once you’ve seen it through these words.
    Worth reaching the resigned aftermath simply so that you could first be Terrifid to the soul, Terrified without end. It is no accident that Terra where you walk assonates…
    “I do not remember writing that.”
  16. XIX THE FOMOR PRIOR
    XX BLACK WATERSHED
    XXI WHITE MARTYRDOM
    “And then he said something to me — something horrible — something I will never allow to disgrace the pages of this journal,…”
    These last chapters, two of them relatively short. This work is a “spiritual fingerprint”, and I still hear her voice even after closing the covers, as somehow the journal-keeper Acheson, Colums of Ache’s son, does, too.
    But before that, men and women mutate before our very reading-eyes, in this embattled climax. I also sense things here unintended, like explicitly mixing up the daughter with the mother, as I often do with Melania and Ivanka, despite tellingly their different colour hair, not that one is mother of the other in the known A-meandering tributaries or effulgent kingdoms of or off the father’s thrust, Avalon or Shannon…
    I have no reason to change anything I wrote above on this whole webpage in earlier real-time. This work transcends its own (uniquely and adeptly stunning in itself) feasting goriness and melodrama of visionary myth and retribution. A Redoubt is the strongest certainty of all.
    A New-found Horror Classic that should be read advisedly, because the Horror is somehow real and today I am one of us few readers so far still in its experiential aftermath…till thousands or mutable millions flock to join us here tomorrow?
    end
      
 

Friday, May 26, 2017

Interzone 270 / Black Static 58

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My previous review of TTA PRESS publications HERE

Stories by Jonathan L. Howard, Wayne Simmons, Nathan Hillstrom, Emily B. Cataneo, Christopher Mark Rose, Malcolm Devlin, Shauna O’Meara, Mark Morris, Helen Marshall, Joe Pitkin, Gwendolyn Kiste, Tim Casson.

When I real-time review the fiction in these two magazines, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

14 thoughts on “Interzone 270 / Black Static 58

  1. INTERZONE

    .
    RUSHFORD RECAPITULATION by Christopher Mark Rose
    “Time and space seemed to dilate around the moment of birth, as they always do.”
    Interspersed with lists of our new young, perhaps, one can see this as a satire on our world’s shoddy values. But it is far more than that. On one level it is a striking absurdist fable, where the moral is still evolving. Taking place in a town called RUSHFORD, this perhaps tells us obliquely that we need to slow down, to take stock, to somehow retrocausally track down our own evolution in piecemeal inverse gestation or gestaltion (here called ‘recapitulation’) of the things we have created. It is also about phylogeny and ontogeny, as the text itself more than just hints. In many ways, shocking and depressive, in others, igniting a new starting point of hope. Meanwhile, words themselves are like objects we’ve delivered to the bottom of a dam-sided lake, words like “a barn door of an old lesbian.”
  2. BLACK STATIC

    .
    HOLIDAY ROMANCE by Mark Morris
    “Was this run-down little seaside town really the location of his happiest memories?”
    I must be an expert on British run-down seaside towns, having lived in one for the last twenty plus years (and earlier born in one at the end of the 1940s and lived there for seven years as a child) and this story darkly radiates it seepily. Brilliant.
    A return of a man Skelton to a place where he and his parents spent holidays, seemingly reliving his own unrequited holiday romance when aged 14, thirty years before. Even the same bedsit, the same geography of seedy rooms and people in them. I found this plainspoken tale more compelling and uncanny than it should have been, given the otherwise contrivance of events, a development of a Skeleton with the attrition of losing its body parts, and, as in the above Christopher Mark story, like giving birth to retrocausal memory artefacts, ones that even police DNA tests in the Mark Morris story make them seem like objects rather than bodily appendages now dislocated, a recapitulation of self via such artefacts, artefacts through words that make up a whole lifetime.
    A time to switch off whatever made you tick.
    A sad, attritional journey, where people telegraph ahead their own plot of self.
    A hauntingly accomplished work, despite itself? A popular text with a fecilitous facility of style that makes me convinced it is written by someone who knows what he is doing, even if it isn’t him who knows it.
    I sense it is a convincing work that didn’t convince itself, at the end. But it did convince me!
  3. INTERZONE

    .
    LIKE YOU, I AM A SYSTEM by Nathan Hillstrom
    IMG_3304
    As well as a remarkable story in itself, of awakening consciousness within a wildly but ratiocinatively extrapolative electronic or mathematical existentialism, it is also synchronously the apotheosis of the separate selves and their radiating appendages in the two off the Mark stories above.
    It also seems to me to be a crazy inspirational accidental prophecy, amid various land bases like Tbilisi or Tel Aviv, of someone lately in the real world who’d radiate or exradicate themselves with nuts and bolts – but for hate or love?
    “: even the way your cityscapes creep, spire and peacock is impossible to extrapolate from rules. Almost magic. Your patterns have complexity beyond any double helix.”
  4. BLACK STATIC

    .
    THE PROCESS OF CHUDDAR by Tim Casson (and HERE)
    “There is also an installation by the artist Miya called The Curse. I imagine you think that’s just a coincidence.”
    In many ways a workmanlike narration, even pedestrian, as if you are being told it painstakingly by a sociopath who has no ease of expression. And in many ways this is the Process of the Process that gradually grows on you. Literally ‘grows’ on you and literally ‘you’! You are in this story being clumsily ‘charmed’ by the storyteller as narrator not author, a true story of his boyhood lobster fishing for his roll-up smoking aunt. If indeed you are you or he is he, or even she? The discovery of the backstoried old man Garvey in his pungent symbiosis, and the cells multiplying into an eventual successful business of that cheese-like symbiosis of fungal substance, alongside the glimpse you are given of the art installation of visionary monstrousness, in a single lantern-lit sea-girt basement. The story grabs you in the same way. Like a mulch, the millions of cells reminding me of this gestalt review’s earlier scatter-gun process of self.
    And Miya – a mycological sort of ‘my’ and ‘I’ and ‘you’…
    “I was made to practise knots all evening. The night I dreamed of tying bowlines blindfolded.”
  5. INTERZONE

    .
    DIRTY CODE by Wayne Simmons
    “It’s a face,” he says.
    “I like it better than the last one,” she says.
    Somehow, I am not surprised they message through cells, here, in the Simmons, bearing in mind the dirty fungal sort of Process cells in the Casson story.
    A Process code that now is a computer virus. A dude who is a code douche. Body’s bad codes pungently retoucherised.
    A neat blend of Chandler and Bladerunner, with some of Rose’s Recapitulation, cell and cellphone born, Morris’s strewn body parts revisualised, and Hillstrom’s computercidal stürm und drang, and a slice of what I guess is the unicity of Simmons. Singing along in the shower.
    Put me on the short blink, too, can you tell?
  6. BLACK STATIC

    .
    NONESUCH by Joe Pitkin
    “The world was too much with him, he had felt a long time.”
    Starting as a seemingly lost car driver in a strange TED Kleinian outcrop of land near Neck Road, having no ‘cell coverage’, with a dammed river of salmon harvested by naked hippies, surly grizzled long-bearded locals in the place’s pub, still keeping his city job, and this soon reaches beyond such a potential lost driver cliché to a threaded moon of the reading soul, where apple tree harvesting grows a spiritual tactility, trees with apple varieties such as Willis Nonesuch, Micmac and some other such, all to be mulched and blended as his cider business, his escape from the world. A ‘glorious folly’, sixty apple trees for $60000, eleven of them dead, but child-envisioned apples, ‘creeks of raw golden juice’, ‘liquid bird song’, ‘doughty tuns’, and whether it all turns sour, I’ll leave you to read. More to this memorable doughty story, though. Life is not binary. Nor just a mass of crushed cells? Or buried villains of configured history? Cox’s Pitkin apples?
    (This story uses the uncommon word ‘doughty’. Yesterday I reviewed a text here debating the meaning of this very word.)
  7. INTERZONE

    .
    Roman CaltorpENCYPHERED by Jonathan L. Howard
    “He knew the teapot lay in a shallow grave by what his father called ‘the humus pile’ in the shadow of the garden shed, a place where vegetable shavings and depleted tea leaves were thrown to mulch down.”
    All serving to encipher this story for you, as any solution to its plot would spoil the pleasure of decrypting it. Or them, the tea leaves. This is a satisfyingly cerebral story, of actuarial tables, Peter and Jane reading books, “Disinformation deployed”, Simmons’s dirty code made oncological, if not ontological, or Mark Rose’s phylogenic, ontogenic, and the correct names for various code-making and code-breaking methods (if code is the right word).
    “the secret to keeping secrets secret.”
    Above all it is the poignant life story (hidden in plain sight beneath the words’ semantic codes) of a boy, then man, trapped by his own secrets. Marked too late or stigmatised too early by death’s two-sided anchor points – in spite or because of a last minute body-swerve.
  8. BLACK STATIC

    .
    SURVIVAL STRATEGIES by Helen Marshall
    “And that underneath every story is a pivotal moment when things changed. I wanted to know what that looked like.”
    …and in our own world, too, even the gestalt I had been building with these stories so far, now side-stepped as a new body-swerve around the caltrop of death or a new pivot of literary history? This work stands slightly aside of our own reality while being part of it, with, explicitly, telling references to Trump and Brexit by name, and, less explicitly, Barron St. John as, arguably, Stephen King in the world of Horror publishing (or some other horror writer closer to that name in an even more distant alternate world than the one in this story?), all seen from the female narrator’s viewpoint, embedded in that publishing world as she is, and amid her associates over the years, her relationships, the ‘story’ she seeks about what really went on, who wrote what, including some scoop of writerly history, but dare she write that story (she just has!) and how the world has gone on, is actually going on as we speak, our world just one slight triangulation adrift from its own pivot, whereby we read horror stories but dare not look at the news. For Paddington here, read Manchester. The ultimate Overlook, making my previous attempts at gestalt making seem puny by comparison.
  9. INTERZONE

    .
    THE NEW MAN by Malcolm Devlin
    “You don’t think you see much of yourself unless you’re looking out of the wrong face.”
    The narrator, still seeing himself as himself if in a new body following a lethal or near lethal accident at work, rejigged, sent back home to ‘you’ (cf Hillstrom’s ‘you’), that ‘you’ being his wife (and his two children); the secrets still JLH’s earlier secrets like the poems this narrator once wrote but no longer fully understands (cf the secret ghost-writing in Marshall?), and it is mentally agony-tantalising for the reader to imagine he is still the same person but not so, as I head into dementia slowly perhaps, as I sometimes feel I am. “Whatever’s left of you up there? Treasure it. Make it count.” As I do by writing this review of something that heals and damages at the same time.
    “Again. Context. Brick by brick.” Gestalt, too, the new gestation of self?
    Casson’s CHUDDAR, maybe. “‘They percolate,” the doctor said. “Like coffee.”‘ The cut and paste of memories. And Simmons’ dirty code and Mark Rose’s phylogeny.
    Mixed with today’s concerns about AIs in the workplace.
    Just as with Marshall in the previously reviewed story, where I say: ‘but dare she write that story (she just has!)’, Devlin just has, too – to replace the narrator’s poetry?
    “We used various methods to ensure the correct connections were made…”
    Plainspoken, but incredibly complex and true, this story. One where you can’t even remember things now left by gaps. But you are still you.
    “We call it walking the load.”
  10. BLACK STATIC

    .
    SONGS TO HELP YOU COPE WHEN YOUR MOM WON’T STOP HAUNTING YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS by Gwendolyn Kiste
    You have given me another 'you' story, this a simply haunting inference of a 17 year old girl whose Mom, after a fatal illness, becomes a tutelary ghost, but your younger sister and father can't see this haunting and I suspect her friends say they are also haunted by your Mom to impress you. Different songs are listed, topped and tailed by David Bowie, as accompaniment to this ghost, even to exorcise her for her own good, to make her be where she should be after death not here in the house. There is honest love and naivety here that works. And I wonder whether destinies are changed for good or bad by things said or left unsaid by others who become ghosts and leave their songs behind. Thought-provoking, unsullied by gestalt. A musical interlude, but much more than that, too, because music seeps into what is around it. Context can work both ways.
  11. INTERZONE

    .
    EVANGELINE AND THE FORBIDDEN LIGHTHOUSE by Emily B. Cataneo
    “Then, the summer when we were eleven, the bottles started washing up on shore.”
    And indeed the previous story does fortuitously seep into this one, and vice versa, filters working both ways. Another ghost – here another tutelary figure: a distant lighthouse ever on the brink of being reached – and more evocative naivety, more paths of destiny to be chosen, altered or spurned, and two girls, from a tender age, having an intermittent friendship at the seaside, at one moment loyal to each other, the next fearing that verities do not last forever. Can one ever reach towards the end of the alphabet, as someone once tried and failed to do in ‘To The Lighthouse’. Here the letters form fortune-telling messages in bottles, sometimes to stiffen the sinews towards a fearless goal, the next to bottle out before you reach it. Until the girls grow up, the feisty, shell-loving Evangeline, and the narrator who reaches only what seems a second best. But second best to what?
  12. MEMORIES OF FISH by Shauna O’Meara
    “#GoDroneGirl”
    I predict Twitter will be teeming with that hashtag, should enough people read this work. Seriously.
    It is one that took me by the scruff of a perfect coda’s neck. As if I have been its Tourist throughout this overall reading experience. A girl co-opting a Goggle Tour drone and we follow it through exotic angles and shots, a trend out-trending all trends. Is it to show us a boy playing a cello? To give us those smells? SMELL THEM! Or to witness a snuff movie that moves you beyond measure? I think this is possibly one of those stories that will grow on you. I honestly can’t praise it enough, its dirty codes, its caltrops of naive fate, its girlish ambitions, its inevitable Trumpish tweet that out-Brexits, I infer, even the most poignant moments of literature. An overweening real-time passion of the moment? Or my merely saying this is a good enough story to end this review? Or a truly great story full stop? Read it and I know you will know which I mean.
    And I reviewed a work simultaneously yesterday with this review, about bird-hides being imported into fiction… This story has explicitly mentioned ‘bird-hides’ in a fiction about cyberspace. A double truth as a fabrication of fabrication. Be who you are when you are.
    The proof of the gestalt pudding lives or dies in the chuddar.

    END