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INCUNABULA MEDIA 2023
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/christian-riley/
The ‘Christian Riley’ shifting collage: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/27470-2/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
I read the first work in June 2020 at the height of lockdown, and reviewed it as follows in its then context…
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WHEN THE WOODS COME CALLING by Christian Riley
“I heard voices. It was perhaps a vague chorus, a song of some kind, at least that’s what it sounded like.”
…if not this story’s keynote, it is certainly a connection with the image above created before I read this story, a story, for me, uncannily and personally epiphanal. Dungiven, of course, that it starts with a boy, this narrator amid a house of a lost domain (in the woods of Ireland), a lost domain that we found similarly with the house that the boy is visiting in the Dominy story, both stories explicitly mentioning or featuring hide and seek. And now we meet him again as a man of my own age, and I, too, was in Corporate Assurance for much of my life! This surely must be a rite of ‘Midsommar’ passage for such septuagenarians as me that I have long publicly talked about. Perhaps that Rite day is today! Also a story of Anti-Natalism made into almost a self-cannibalism of sin-eating, following the discovery of a still-life box of wood that was also found in the Dominy story. Wood beyond Aickman. And this Riley story’s ‘Mends’, for me, represent all the books I happen to read and review every day, especially the Mount Abraxas ones. The narrator had perhaps ‘seeked’ his own hidden self and found Rourke as his own self, a sort of re-oak. Rourke is also the name of one of my favourite reviewed authors…
The Tome of Ravass Bhavatan
“And, it is also rumored to be a guide – a manual, of sorts – for the nameless ones of our world.”
But far further beyond that! — as we follow a diminuendo Harold towards namelessness, by means of reading the eponymous tome with its codes and rituals, and via Riley’s own immaculately worded text telling us compellingly of discovering its rareness in a fourth edition and what happened to the owners of the other three. And even further beyond that! — as we continue to follow the literally fading protagonist’s bodily purges and catharses of ingestion and regurgitation… Leaving my own self, even as seasoned founder of Nemonymous, subjected to this work’s stated “tangible sense of ‘hollowness’” now become wholly hollow with the holy holes of holozoic holism.
TANNING THE FORGOTTEN HIDE
“…the repetitive rhythm of a drum, an ostinato of a low-pitched timbre, which was followed shortly by a melody from what sounded like a flute.”
Tuning this ever remembered revelation. This work is exquisitely couched and positive in tone along with a William Morris ethos and Mabinogion vibes and a mischievous blacksmith and a buxom elf queen with romance in her soul and The Black Castle and, above all, the tannery processes and smells that align obliquely with the previous story’s bodily gestations. Here animal and beast.
A highly charged tour de force eventually expunging any thought of a plume of blood in the piss let alone in the River Barrow. A story where we have followed young Arthur ‘elbowing his way’ through such a heroically spiritual but down-to-earth world, Arthur being, I feel, a future ethnarch for all disciple readers with a susceptible faith in such a fictionally created place, as if it be a wondrous Heaven as religion’s end.
WOOD, BONE, FEATHER, AND MISCHIEF
A delightfully inscrutable story of a lovelorn sheriff come to the wilds from Manhattan where he had been a lawyer, and also there is a country man who makes birdhouses and sets connections flying like birds — and a roof that leaks and falls…also with so much tactile carpentry that you feel part of the very texture of the variously chosen woods. As well as lost in some other woods that would have even defeated Aickman and his WOOD and INTO THE WOOD syndromes. Compelling and full of things I have discovered today elsewhere that stick to words like burrs, if not birds: FICTONS.
Loved it!
The Case of Sir Walter Cornwell Finnegan: A Love Story
What I enjoy about this book so far is the thematic individuality of each story, as if defying me to generalise toward gestalt. This one is an engaging old-fashioned style story but with an inner obliquity which is disturbing, a story that has as its backdrop a historical British Empire with today Indian Restaurants in London. the story of an aristocratic man in a “manse” with a valuable brooch inherited from earlier days and a wife in a coma. To tell you more would prick my conscience with regard to spoilers.
FROM HER BEAUTIFUL, LOVING DESIRE
“…gently into the crux of her elbow.”
Delighted to discover in this page-turning novelette the most crucial elbow-trigger moment in the whole of literature, no mistake! And I have explored many such intentional and inadvertent elbow moments heretofore as if in dress rehearsal for this very work!
You will also be easily drawn into this atmospheric and well-written story of an American chef employed at the Shadow Castle in Spain, aka The Castle of Lost Love, its Gothic story in the age of laptops. Involving wondrous culinary descriptions, rooms to die for, a fiesta of sex, blood exchanges and a trio of mastiffs, and much more.
It again makes this book remarkable in the refreshing diversity of the stories included, indefinably making a whole that will ever tantalise you. Not forgetting that elbow moment, phew!