Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Growing Things – Paul Tremblay

26 thoughts on “Growing Things – Paul Tremblay

  1. GROWING THINGS
    “Merry cannot verbalise this, but the idea of a world where people disappear like days on a calendar is what truly terrifies her,…”
    A mutual-synergy with Tem’s Book of Days (here). Merry is the youngest of two sisters, the older 14. Mother already gone, and the Father has just abandoned them, we infer, in a world where stories the older one tells, amid a house invaded, tell only of the growing things from the basement intertwining with such stories. A world in ungainly end-growth using these growing things as a trope for a squirrelly monkey bite. An insidious story outside the older then younger sister’s stories that it grows within it of truth and exaggeration. Green dresses and dirt clumps. The invaders: AMERICA FIRST, New York, its buildings…?
    “Story first. Story first.”
  2. I reviewed the next story in 2014 in its then context, as follow –
    ====================================
    …and from those stranded steps, across that trembling gap…
    Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks by Paul Tremblay“It was like being in a giant dollhouse. […] eleven steps down into a basement,…”
    Not a House of Leaves as such but a type of Molly’s Monologue where the stream of consciousness is a tenuous audit trail from the previous stepping into nothingness, and now grasping for some handle on events through an internet nickname’s job as a supermarket cashier, and her estranged daughter she rescues from some monstrous apocalypse … all the time wondering whether the apocalypse is real or in her head. A very impressive piece. Surely to be worth the price of this book alone.
  3. I reviewed the next story in 2017 in its then context, as follows..,
    ======================================

    Something About Birds

    by PAUL TREMBLAYTHE NEW DARK REVIEW PRESENTS “SOMETHING ABOUT WILLIAM WHEATLEY”: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM WHEATLEY BY BENJAMIN D. PIOTROSKWI
    “…and I have to admit, when I first read the story, I didn’t see the word “Dad” there. I was surprised to find it on the second read. Many readers report having had the same experience. Did you anticipate that happening?”
    An interview, threaded through with Facebook social media interactions, an interview with an author plus concocted interwoven afterword about the interviewer’s favourite story-of-many-interpretations entitled “Something About Birds” by the interviewed 75 year old author. The gestalt has a ritualised ‘eyes wide shut’ or Fowles-Magus syndrome, one whereby I, too, tussle, by implication, with bird mask, beak, talons and nudity.
    But who eclipses whom?
    “That’s the true power of story. That it can find the secrets both the writer and reader didn’t know they had within themselves.”
    (And what about Mr H____ and Kittypants? Perhaps the rest of this book will inadvertently help me?)
  4. THE GETAWAY
    “…Greg was always getting odd looks with his too-small-for-his-face eyes and a mouth like a cut on his face…”
    The narration of a getaway car and those men in it, after a heist. We get hints of their young backstory in the town they still call Wormtown. No way I can say much without spoiling it. A sort of gory tontine with echoing guns. The narrator driver’s dumber brother at home being the winner of that tontine, I guess! Reviewing a story as if in a real-time rearview mirror…
  5. NINETEEN SNAPSHOTS OF DENNISPORT
    “And it’s ironic that the original or true colour of the photo album page was preserved by the photo, preserved by that piece of the past.”
    A one-by-one real-time submission by the narrator to you, whoever you are, of photos of a family on holiday years ago in the 1980s, when he was a small boy, well-characterised numbered thumbnail summaries he submits to you, including the suspicions they had of their Dad in and out of a motel nearby. The gestalt you draw is a telling, if tantalisingly inconclusive, one. Sometimes photos when they get older turn yellow. Depends whether they are black and white originals or already colour. Yellow stays yellow, whatever the colour of the album’s pages.
  6. I reviewed the next story in 2014 in its then context, as follows –
    ==========================================
    Where We Will All Be by Paul G. Tremblay
    “The news ticker at the bottom of the screen is unreadable. Yellow letters and symbols overlap and blur.”
    On the macro level, a page-turning SF ‘disaster’ apotheosis of the flashmob diaspora. On a micro level, the disconnect between parent and child, adopter and adoptee. On this double review’s level, a story of the loner who survives simply because he is a loner, a loner because he is different…escaping that Gailestis river, a river within the sea… The blue star now a high-beam symbol.
    “The crowd bears his weight like he’s not there, like a river carrying a log.”
  7. 9BA0FC20-1512-4E36-9282-BBEFC2AC9E08THE TEACHER
    “Right there, in the middle of my stir-fry, I make a solemn promise to never color my hair auburn or wear a yellow sweatsuit.”
    …like the narrator Kate’s mother does. Meanwhile, this is a remarkable work of insidious horror depicting the mœurs of teenage kids on electronica like Snapchat, and sexual gossip, and looking up to a particular teacher. But his ways of conniving with his pupils is to be seen as cool and transgressive like them, and they gradually realise how OVERcool he is! With the videos he shows them. And the Zeno’s Paradox half upon half accretion of a flung child approaching a wall, or Kate her future. A process similar to the earlier accretive series of Dennisport snapshots. A sort of growing things but never fully.
  8. NOTES FOR “THE BARN IN THE WILD”
    From the start, I was not in the mood to cope with this pseudo-experimental in-joke. Perhaps BARN, as a shortened form of its dedicatee’s name, meant it was all retroactively cursed.
    It hurts me to say so.
  9. __________________
    “Whatever strange act we’re spontaneously creating together, it’s wrong, very wrong, but my head is pleasantly drunk with it”.
    …reader and writer together, that is, and not sure to whom the last bit applies, as I think of the beach-fanciable, yearningly half-memorable, woman at the end vining (sic) the male narrator’s own car home for him and his two children, children in the back, yes, children, but children very soon to be growing up when seen changing out of their swimsuits on the beach, I guess, and what SHE retroactively turns this story into. What she also retroactively turns the children’s mother and the narrator’s wife into, when they all get home to her amid the circles of other such families around. There is nothing I can underline further than that it all haunts me with its socially empty implications. Fine oblique horror stories like this one represent the best way to emphasise the otherwise unemphasisable, to empathise with the otherwise unempathisable.
  10. OUR TOWN’S MONSTER
    “The monster is the id. And the ego. It’s philosophy, and religion, and collective will. It’s you, me, them. It’s us.”
    …said with a schoolchild’s wisdom, as his fingers and thumbs jab at a playmate screen. It’s also the airbrushed ‘nemo’, I say, the monster between the id and ego (see Fowles below), the suddenly desert-surrounded town, those teachers airbrushed as the previous story’s “_____________”, always the last teacher’s last, or lust, that young couple perked by porn at the edge of the swamp where all joke the monster lurks. A genuinely classic portmanteau fable, making a town, the monster, the final trump, I guess. The realtor with the mostest. Arguably a work of a last genius. I have only mentioned parts of the portmanteau above. The gestalt prevails, though.
    “He explained earlier that the desks were small because people back then were smaller.”
    =======================
    “The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.”
    — John Fowles 1964 (from ‘The Necessity of Nemo’ in ‘The Aristos’)
  11. Pingback: The Tremblay Nemo | THE DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS Edit
  12. 0A4FFEA2-90BF-4605-BADB-FFDC9A2AF979A HAUNTED HOUSE IS A WHEEL UPON WHICH SOME ARE BROKEN
    “Fiona rearranges the book’s in the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: first alphabetical by author, then by title, then by color.”
    I genuinely believe this to be a classic, Proustian ghost story, as Fiona revisits the family house in a fighting-fantasy or choose-your-own path-to-adventure algorithm of exploration, summoning the ghosts of her family and THEIR ghosts they once saw or felt in various cupboards or rooms. This is wholly frisson-inducing, paradoxically both cosy and chilling, with memories now seen in a different context where the implications of this book’s erstwhile retroactivity curses again. Or does it? Do we all curse ourselves retrocausally, at the end of the day? Haunt ourselves? This is where fiction experimentation truly works. A “beyond-adult”, not elderly casting back, dreamcatching, träumtrawling, hawling…. where go to now, who be, whither be?
    (Photo by P.F. Jeffery, who also recently painted each individual hat green.)
  13. IT WON’T GO AWAY
    “The postmark date was six days before he killed himself, four days before I left to go to the event in Providence.”
    More growing things. And I can see why a writer friend struck me as being the retroactive curse at the end of the BARN work above. It all now makes sense retroactively from here! This work is a cross between the accretive snapshots of Dennisport and the Zeno’s Paradox video-shots in ‘The Teacher’ and the retrocausality in this book’s previous story, while factoring in, from outside this book, the splodge-stain in the ‘Again, Dangerous Visions’ Gahan Wilson story. A work about a writers’ convention and of a gestalt’s jigsawing…. a work that works well despite the writerly in-jokes. (Gahan Wilson’s story also has a title as a shape rather than a word, cf “___________”)
  14. NOTES FROM THE DOG WALKERS
    “It occurs to me that part of the appeal of being a member of your madly merry band of enthusiasts is the noble promise of the obscure, overlooked, under-appreciated-in-her-day horror writer: your colleagues and compatriots will champion her work and they will sing her song loud enough and often enough that it will forever echo in the halls of horror.”
    …hence the earlier curse of retroactivity now here in the body of the work. Meanwhile, this novella is truly magnificent, yet also rife with all those writerly in-jokes or in-sadnesses I descried earlier in this review. Those in-references are now transcended here by some of the strongest writing I have ever read in such a mode of literary (mis)behaviour. It starts as another insidious GRADUAL growing-thing in itself, the author employing an agency of dog-walkers for his dog Holly (his “fur child” as the agency references it), and the dog-walkers write a report of each walk that they each take, and we get to know the handful of walkers by name, as they sign off each report about Holly’s behaviour, its pee, and poop, and slowly, GRADUALLY, almost by Zeno’s Paradox, they speak of themselves deeper and deeper vis à vis their visits to the author’s home with Holly when he is out, and we also get to know them as they address world politics, global warming, and eventually prying into the author’s own book collection in the house as well as the author’s own genre publications in the horror field. Interconnections, plotlines, genre politics, in fact a triangulation of the coordinates by real-time reviewing towards a gestalt. I was staggered by the latter synchronicity and by the description of “bookshelf-dowsing” and “bibliodivination”, and the shelving nature of the shelves of his books (a shelving subject that I seem to have predicted by quoting somewhere above in this review how someone else shelved books!) There is so much I could quote so as to demonstrate my understanding and appreciation of this work, amid some to be borne-out repercussions for my reviewing processes and the projection of a gestalt iconicity by different means. Striving to explain the inexplicable, by hawling, träumtrawling, dreamcatching the ambiguous horror of it all. Building a universe, beyond even the usual connections between a single author’s books with characters and plots, all factored into by the real-life interconnections and rivalries of all the authors themselves. But does this include building a universe for ALL books by ALL authors, as an ultimate ambition, I ask? But none of this literary rarefication – nor any potential controversy (personal or otherwise) – seems to diminish the strength of Tremblay’s dog-walker and reality-checker concepts themselves (with all his descriptions, and his brilliant wit about the walkers’ prying impertinence, pretentiousness and paranoia) and the supremely strong writing that develops, whether it be the strong writing and wisdom of the dog-walkers themselves as the reader builds up their characters OR some preternatural power dog-walking THEM!
    And, as a line-break, who stalks the stalker? And was it all a dream? “Pee: ✓ Poop: ✓✓✓”
  15. The next story I reviewed in 2016 in its then context, as shown below.
    Then I assumed it was something to do with Dr. Caligari. Now perhaps it’s Alexa!
    =================================
    FURTHER QUESTIONS FOR THE SOMNAMBULIST by Paul Tremblay
    “We will ask our questions and we will have our answers no matter the answers.”
    Something defiantly experi-mental about this presentation of three vertical parallel lines of questions – suitably stepped for overlapping questioners and us readers – the columns being headed ‘a woman’, ‘a man’ and ‘a child’. Perhaps the ultimate existential incantation. As well as a child’s fearful side of things in the sexual plague of yearning madness it has caused in our society? Potentially terrifying. Sleepwalking into a spreadsheet.
  16. THE ICE TOWER
    Spooked with spikes, this is a treat from Mr Horror Ambiguous, with a woman, I take it, who once nursed a rabbit as a child, now nursing the vision of the ice tower, integral as a tower despite the warming, and of the climbers and Sherpas she seems to be with, and of the fact that even snow and ice can be stuffed with hot weather flies. And skin needs crampons to bite and notch against the grain of the pores so as to climb that skin and kiss the mouth. To love. To memorialise the unaccountable dead among her past and present. More anti Arctic that Antarctic, I’d say. Inverted icicle or not. And when I read this again tomorrow as if for the first time, I might have a completely different interpretation. Or it might have a completely different message to BE interpreted. Words melt and morph overnight, I reckon, even printed ones. Even its penis jokes. Or the arrival of Sam’s green army.
  17. THE SOCIETY OF THE MONSTERHOOD
    “We don’t know if there’s some sort of coincidence or connection there, like there’s a special power to the Society’s story, like the act of telling it makes things fit,…”
    A monster as metaphor is one common thing in horror works, in how horror works. But we now need a different word to ‘metaphor’, because the monster here transcends its own metaphor, and eats it, in my book. I don’t know how that works. But it does. The group of four children who are picked out for special schooling attract bullies to dent their van, but does this Society the foursome forms inadvertently summon the monster to the alley to punish those kids that bully them or is the Society a transactional monster or monster apologist, or is it really the monster’s victims, too, as we all are from the monster formed from the space created by the dents in our childhood, a space that we take around with us all our lives in wider Society itself, from alley to alley, even in the so-called bright places, and the four elements of fire, air, earth and water. The Brazilian dent, too, explicitly mentioned here, and the “arms as long as firehoses” of the monster…
  18. HER RED RIGHT HAND
    “Ever eat a Q, Gemma?”
    “His mouth became an O.”
    A skillet pan, or a hammer? To make the hand red. This is a tale of a girl whose father has become a bad seed, steeped in a bottle of whiskey within the fortress of self, and her mother gone, her going Gemma’s guilty conscience. Brought to this cabin by her parents, near a legendary well, and a well goblin, and Gemma’s sketching GRADUALLY again, becoming rectangles of a comic strip of Hellboy versus that goblin, the red hand originally her mum’s hand, now a weapon on Hellboy’s. All writ out like batter script. Loved it, but don’t know why. Often the best way to know something. Then, down by the grass, Gemma writes a capital G.
    “Stacks of green paper in his
    Red right hand”
    — Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
  19. IT’S AGAINST THE LAW TO FEED THE DUCKS
    “Tom has a green piece of paper and is writing something down on it.”
    And Danny, Tom’s small son, has what he sees as a magic piece of yellow paper. Daddy pulls him off the shelf like a melon, not a book. Actually, this starts as an ordinary holiday trip of a foursome family into the wilds with only small communities in the area. Beth, Danny’s sister, is still so small she can hardly yet walk; she may in fact be someone Danny calls Hardly Anybody? He needs to keep feeling her face to make sure she is still there, under the guise of keeping her awake in the car? Emma, the mother, has the belt and braces syndrome of a constant swimsuit with T shirt and shorts on top. Something is GRADUALLY threatening them? News reports that they keep away from the children? Something invasive we can only infer, but, if so, is it Danny’s magic thoughts causing it instead? Something slowly devastating about one’s breaking of even trivial laws in such circumstances. And I come away from this story feeling that I have been transgressive as a reader even attempting to understand its GRADUALISMS. Something about this whole book being self-sufficient by concomitant use of readerscreen as well as sunscreen. Paradoxically increasing the number of its readers because such readers perversely want to break its disarmingly oblique laws.
    • THE THIRTEENTH TEMPLE
      I’ve tried. I really can’t get on with this story. It just isn’t going in right; I really don’t like obvious spin offs such as this, specially a spin off of a book that is already in my blurred sump of an aged mind. This story is perhaps this book’s final retroactivity of curse? One that, if you don’t reach, makes the book better? Please forgive me. My thoughts on the penultimate story above must serve as my clinching gestalt of this whole book BEFORE real-time brought me to this final aberration. In that way, it remains mainly what it is: a great book with a haunted staying-power, a study in horror.
      “Oops, Merry is female. Sorry.” — from my review in 2015 of A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS here.
      I will now read, for the first time, the author’s story notes.
      end



    Pharricide – Vincent de Swarte







    7 thoughts on “Pharricide – Vincent de Swarte”


    1. Pages 19 – 37
      “I lost the plot.”
      …pages that seem fortuitously to cover the whole of October in this lighthouse keeper’s journal, except it is not a journal really, but a confession-to-self, a would-be replacing of a crucifix with a treated conger eel, amid the enforced but yearned-for loneliness, the hoist, the net, the gaff. A man who perhaps ironically calls himself “a big soft doggie.” Meanwhile, I have already learnt a lot about this man. Not sure I have properly met him yet, outside of the dark places where I would NOT like to meet anybody I didn’t already know. This specific dark place of the soul strobed by a blinding pulse, I infer. Geoffroy Lefayen would, doubtless, not welcome me, as a reader of his words, even if fleetingly visiting him aboard the lighthouse’s sporadic supply ship… And if I really did tell you what I already know about him, as I cross-section him in the flenses of my mind’s eye, as I picture these particular lighthouse environs, as I prepare to go through a presumably sea-cloying book, you would still WANT to read it for yourself, especially assuming you are of a certain literary frame of mind, but you perhaps would not NEED to read it. Yet plot is not everything, and it certainly isn’t so here. There’s something else to learn, I sense. To be alone with this man’s book of days. To become his lighthouse before he does.

    2. —> Page 50
      “It’s romantic here in the evening.”
      I don’t know how to even DARE broach what Geoffroy tells us in these pages about the visit of the English couple who have an ambition to get married in a lighthouse. I feel like I am one of those two gratuitous-seeming (at first) mooring-posts that they help him stake in the sand while the tide recedes. Or the mullet he later treats. Or the lion on TV he watches and imagines being party to his hobby, and no doubt you already know exactly the nature of that hobby, by means of a reader’s second sight. Better still, read it for yourself. Otherwise, I am just a medium for those who will never choose to read it. Or an invisible Christ between two criminals representing studied inference and preternatural guesswork. I know which one I prefer.

    3. 2C79BAE5-45A4-462F-8617-AF8A3EB2EF7F—> Page 72
      “I’m no longer setting myself boundaries.”
      Do cooked things clench up when you bring a pepper mill towards them? Do readers when you dangle such a book as this before them? There is so much here as a narrative and backstory about someone who wrote it, before which you clench up. Even asleep, you sense what it is dangled before your eyelids? Understandably clenched up. My double telescope is now fully upon him. But my name is not Damien, nor am I a cockroach.

    4. —> Page 101
      “— Shine a light.”
      I have forbidden myself from divulging most of what is in Geoffroy’s book of days. How can a real-time reviewer deploy someone else’s thoughts’ thoughts? How can even an author of them do that? How can a translator of an author, of an author who has also translated the narrative protagonist’s thoughts? All madness, perhaps, part of what is trapped at this lighthouse. Some of the sexuality eye-opening. Crucial question, though — does a madman’s diary seem mad to HIM? Crucial, but perhaps not relevant. Because who among us can truly scry madness? Or murder? Or hoarding flesh beyond any telescope’s scope?
      (Anyone else seen the Swedish film BORDER?)
      “Why was I not born looking on the bright side?”

    5. —> Page 125
      “Am I in some kind of a trance when I’m concentrating on the lighthouse, and myself the rest of the time, or the other way around?”
      When younger, I often got muddled up between being fazed and phased by something, but now I truly know what it’s like to be PHARED. Unlike Mr Ramsay, though, I can still complete my alphabet, without too much effort, even though this lighthouse is one where I am now myself being watched, as all lighthouses are by those in fear of rocks or in adventurous trepidation, being watched writing this real-time review as I in turn also watch Geoffroy’s ploys to assuage his own possible madness, even at one point — the windfall monkey brandy and a new companion dog notwithstanding — to the extent that he somehow sees himself as someone else. The characters who visit him, too, the Spanish smugglers, the supply ship, the telescope wielder and Joël, and, of course, Lise herself who, as implied here, can probably see things from beyond her closed eyelids! That [expletive deleted] lighthouse, “there’s no telling what it’ll make you do next.” The buffer of any translation of the author’s textual take — upon Geoffroy the lighthouse-keeper as journal-keeper — is perhaps paradoxically both a buffer AND a disguised means for ease of brokering or pimping the two-way filtering of the text’s effect. It’s a long hot summer here, today. A collective ‘seaside.’

    6. —> Page 150
      “Afterwards, hopefully, there’ll be dancing.”
      This is the sort of book – no doubt a future classic from the past – that you will keep in your pocket, as you gad about, in case evidence is one day needed against you in any sweet moment of due justice. Well, at least regarding what you allowed yourself to read, if not otherwise do. These last pages are intensely moving, Geoffroy – a crucified Roy, Rex or Rey – sucked into all manner of natural fish-stuffed wells or oubliettes along with the hopes of marriage with orange-haired “bizarre orange”, a “damselfish”, the irresistible irrigable sucking-well of woman to hopefully marry, as well as dance with amid the live seagulls and dead ones. As things close in. Bambi is the film at which most kids when I was a kid found themselves crying for the first time in their life at a form of art. As I did in a cinema in 1953 with my then 5 year old girl friend, left there alone by our parents. A prie-dieu, pried, die you. Chocolate liqueur, monkey or not. Fishing nets on the wall. Reading clouds. FLUNTZ, a form of flensing, and only one of those telescopes shown above now needed. Or a one-eyed teddy bear. Stuffed at last, as the sea taxi comes for your last thwarted shipwreck. Yes, a most significant experience, this book. Relatively easy to understand and to appreciate its aesthetic of language, but not easy to endure as a seismic series of days. Thanks to those who have made the medium for this equivalent Bambi of my latter years. And I shall now read, for the first time, the foreword and afterword, by Patrick McGrath and Alison Moore respectively.
      “— How many lives have been saved thanks to you, Geoffroy?”
      end

    Monday, August 26, 2019

    Vastarien: A Literary Journal: Vol. 2, No. 2

    Vastarien: A Literary Journal: Vol. 2, No. 2

    F096F161-A1AD-4E15-956B-F81B97D016F9
    Grimscribe Press, Summer 2019
    Jon Padgett, Editor-in-Chief
    My previous reviews of Vastarien: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/vastarien/
    Work by Giuseppe Balestra, Paul L. Bates, Deborah Bridle, Alana I. Capria, Donyae Coles, C.M. Crockford, Tatiana Garmendia, Robin Gow, Danielle Hark, S.C. Hickman, Trent Kollodge, Andrew Koury, Christi Nogle, Valin Paige, Eden Royce, Lucy A. Snyder, D.P. Watt.
    When I read this journal, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

    11 thoughts on “Vastarien: A Literary Journal: Vol. 2, No. 2

    1. An inchoate colour illustration by Tatiana Garmendia seeming to depict…
      CLEMATIS, WHITE AND PURPLE by D.P. Watt
      “; one of those lovely moments of synchronicity.”
      ‘The Green by Dock Street’ on one poster among many posters advertising events like a circus and wrestling, leading to the narrator watching from a window the benighted comings and goings into a derelict junk yard, a yard that gradually becomes a Green of grafted flowers with docked corpses, and the narrator’s personal connection with one of those comings and goings, and other signs. drawing the narrator there. One page of this darkening work containing a poster as an avant garde / silent garden poem of sparsely spaced words. Evening all, and night night.
      “, please contact the Police immediately on 999.”
      My previous reviews of D.P. Watt: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/d-p-watt/
    2. B0291B2F-D29E-4DE6-A01E-1231077B2589An illustration (part of it left) by Danielle Hark
      Three lower case enjambments as free verse by Robin Gow
      like crickets
      not other’s tongues
      types of knife blades:

      32279A04-A37B-4F27-A2C6-B84EE540ACEB
      “that’s someone else
      who sleeps for us
      & conjures our strange dreams”
      I was rather struck by these accessible word-wounds…
    3. THE STRINGER OF WILTSBURG FARM by Eden Royce
      “This kiss was a feast, a feeding.”
      A highly earthy, wormy baccy-haunting around blacks’ baccy farm, a sister Annie Maggie abandoned by her older sister, now to alone look after their ageing father, his wife, their mother, already taken by the baccy poisons, a mojo pouch buried, but after naively removed by Annie Maggie, taking protection away, with dealing with the crops, their stringing and worming of the leaves, makes her beset by all manner of wishes, like her father’s for baccy workers, for boys that stay, girls that leave amid leaves, and the invasive baccy man, a scenario with striking preternatural coincidence-resonance with two Tremblay sisters, only yesterday, here, the youngest sister also left alone, with stories about GROWING THINGS growing things, threatening Annie Maggie’s kisses imposed upon her and mouths and stinging wounds — and America First coming…?
    4. Another striking colour image by Danielle Hark
      followed by –
      THE PELT by Christi Nogle
      9CB20084-0C99-4ABD-BFE5-4AD0AE106C3F
      I am very struck by this narrator woman’s moving to a new house, as masterminded by a husband figure that seems to stay nebulous. Her need for her sofa that she sometimes stains with body stuff. Not exactly a yellow wallpaper syndrome, but something far more insidious. Who is choosing the deliveries to ‘furniture’ the house? Like the mock autumnal pelt of lawn, to make up for or actually match the window view of the burnt hill, even if the hill is promised to green up again. Reds and greys and angles. And the neighbours opposite, as if my own neighbour with his giant flashing screen covering one whole wall in the small front room of his even smaller bungalow. Porches beyond porches. 8DA372AB-98D0-45B7-9DE3-B9288CEED3E0Also preternatural mutual-synergies with the previous Royce story just reviewed above, the Rix novel just finished before reading this wonderful Nogle and, also, the Tremblay things growing, and Dillon’s Ice & Autumn Glass…. “and up from the carpet come pale cordyceps mushrooms, little segmented vines with spiked flowerbuds, soft little worms […] ice and dirt and leaves — yes, the first autumn leaves.”
      My previous reviews of Christi Nogle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/christi-nogle/
    5. SILENCES a fine poem by Lucy A.Snyder (“Fifteen frantic texts unseen,”),
      a remarkable pencil sketch portrait by Giuseppe Balestra of Thomas Ligotti,
      and then a substantive academic essay, with footnotes and bibliography, VISIONS OF THE GOTHIC BODY IN THOMAS LIGOTTI’S SHORT STORIES by Deborah Bridle.
    6. EYESTALK by C.M. Crockford
      “, ‘Your left eye is, erm, dying.’ I shifted in my gown, unsure why she’d made me change into one in the first place.”
      A deadpan narrative account, almost as if written with the inhuman logic of an AI (see here very recently) — an account, by vignette, if not by a lorgnette turned monocle, of a worker in Ligotti’s take on the Corporate world, where a career means everything in order to reach that top storey view in the office, to the detriment of a loosening eyeball damaged by digital screen work in bright light. The eyes here remind me of the earlier tongues in the poems of Robin Gow.
      We all pace that driven, swerveless I-stalk, I guess, even when – or especially when – we are self-employed and drive ourselves.
    7. THE MANNEQUIN IDEAL by Andrew Koury
      “I wanted to be blank.”
      A narrator who constructively suffers or enjoys the nexus that I — as an old man similar to the one in Koury’s Ligottian mannequin shop — compare to the fleshy eroticism / phobia and ‘blankness’ nexus revealed by my very recent review (here) of A Blast of Hunters. Such a comparison is preternatural or inadvertent as a mutual synergy between them. I find this work, meanwhile, a striking description of, inter alia, a sexual encounter illuminatingly portrayed by the Koury-story transcending and/or enhancing such a nexus.
    8. Another inchoation in colour, entitled Death & The Maiden IV, On Jan 27, 2012, by Tatiana Garmendia, followed by –
      A discrete but also intercontextual poem DADDY’S DEPARTURE by Danielle Hark
      with, inter alia, the imputed shaving of Daddy’s face in the mirror, ON the mirror. Aptly last night, I happened to watch this shaving procedure also happening in the 1964 film A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, more than just that being serendipitous for the following story…
      THE SPRITE HOUSE by Trent Kollodge
      “What are you making, Daddy? […] The haggard man in the mirror caught his eyes.”
      A slip of the chisel to draw blood, if not the shaving blade, or the wood plane, as the Daddy here carves not only a song but also the intricate wooden Sprite House for his daughter, by means of the Sprite House Manual (a manual given to him by whom? the neighbour who subsequently burned it before the Daddy had finished the house? that neighbour whose own house was the mirror image of Daddy’s own, bar the more bachelor furniture in the neighbour’s?) — Meanwhile, this story is a genuine oblique inspiration to face out the depressing world as we know it, the circumstances of the Daddy’s wife’s departure, the fatherly love for his small daughter and her love for him, and the sprites watching this constructively self-sacrificial hard-day’s-night of the soul, as I see it. A possible classic, once it has been reflected upon long enough?
      My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/trent-kollodge/
    9. SIRENS IN THE NIGHT by Paul L. Bates
      “Horns, guitars, electronics, symphony orchestras,…”
      Thanks, story, for bringing in the sirens, as I heard last week from the London Proms the first performance for many years (masterminded by Rattle) of the complete version of AMÉRIQUES by Varèse, and, appropriately, a week or so before that in the same festival, Mozart’s Requiem….That was surely serendipity enough! Yet, this was also a great story of a man with something clawing to get out from the inside of his head via a sporadic pimple, and serendipitous destruction of his pesky noisy neighbours one by one. All helped by the synchronicity of — or even caused by — a Ligottian Doctor’s medicine. His work all now done, this time with the sprite house become a whole apartment block!
      My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/vastarien-a-literary-journal/#comment-12148
    10. A substantive academic article; THOMAS LIGOTTI: THE ABYSS OF RADIANCE by S.C. Hickman with footnotes and bibliography,
      Followed by HAUNTED: a painting or collage in colour by Danielle Hark
      Followed by
      THE MILK MAN by Alana I. Capria
      “In that netting, I might catch the milk man and if not him, then another like him.”
      Anything I say about this work will not be sufficient warning about it – except perhaps saying that. And the woman narrator, though, tries to tell us everything, even the most shocking, but has she kept anything back? Has she saved the worst for last, the blank page, where milk settles into perfect whiteness bar the vague see-through outline of the presumably next – still unviewed by me – artwork. Meanwhile we dare watch this woman’s collage-in-words with milk and blood, her own body meat to feed him or herself, her inner self become the beast baby she might need to feed with herself as other mothers do? But nothing I say will convey the sexual and bodily co-engulfment you will face here. A mutual synergy. A melting dance of Stringer and Sprite. Perhaps ligotti are not the knots as I once thought, but, rather, the still conscious lumps in the milk of vastarian death?
    11. Colour silhouettes with naked flesh emerging: THE UNRAVELING by Tatiana Garmendia,
      followed by an effectively tactile poem: TRANS WOMAN GUTTED, all in lower case and ampersand, lower case except for ‘Oklahoma’,
      both of which are perfect accompaniments for Daniellle Hark’s more overt SILHOUETTE by dint of its title, artwork in colour,
      And all three then perfect accompaniment for:
      WHAT FOUND NEVAEH by Donyae Coles
      “Off didn’t matter. Out mattered.”
      More off than on, as if born never to have been born, other than to be in this story, in a literary journey, itself within a literary journal for alienists and anti-natalists. A young woman called NEVAEH, not Oklahoma, though the latter sounds structural, and echoes from the foregoing poem, NEVAEH who’s escaping something, having inherited her deceased uncle’s squalid flat which – as a remarkable coincidence – bears structural stains like that in the Gahan Wilson story that I happened to mention here only an hour or so ago before reading this. But nowhere else are there cages in the laundry, cages the ultimate frame with silhouettes inside rather than dirty washing, a wash of oil, and nowhere else a boy called Zion killed by a bully, but with Zion now haunting the hallways, and an older woman who talks to NEVAEH, inchoately showing NEVAEH the ropes. The only “off” story in the world. Like switching this whole journal off. Its darkest light now out, not even a silhouette of itself. I return my thoughts to the cover image by Anna Trueman, at least to know, simply to know, but know what? It won’t go away.
      end
      .