GRIMSCRIBE PRESS 2024
Jon Padgett, Editor-in-Chief — Paula D. Ashe, Associate Editor — Daniel Braum, Associate Editor — Alex Jennings, Associate Editor
My previous reviews of this literary journal: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/vastarien/
CONTRIBUTORS: Romana Lockwood, Richard Gavin, M.E. Bronstein, Marisca Pichette, Laura Cranehill, Adam Lawrence, Emma E. Murray, SJ Townend, Alyza Taguilaso, Chris Kuriata, Rebecca J. Allred, Michael Bailey, Carson Winter, César Dávila Andrade, Ben Larned, Paul L. Bates, Dyani Sabin, Perry Ruhland, Shawn Phelps, Jonathan Louis Duckworth, Andrew Wilbur, A Mystery Author
Although I have retired from most reviewing after 15 years of doing it, I am keeping up with my regular independent relationships, such as with whole Vastariens, and with new single stories in anthologies and collections by writers whom I have reviewed before. Please keep me informed of the latter.
Who knows, I may one day come out of such retirement and start obsessively gestalt reviewing whole books again!
When I read this issue of Vastarien, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Issue Zero with above blank black cover…
Before starting to read above journal, it has reminded me of Nemonymous issue 4 that had completely white cover and issue 6 that existed only through its non-existence and issue 2 in 2002 that contained the world’s first blank story.
And ‘A Mystery Author’, too!
Just noticed the cover is not wholly black! Something seeps through.
Tenebrous Ramblings
by Romana Lockwood
“Trial and error”
As I always do, especially when imagining myself to be the character in a story, here halfway into a police drama on tv someone else is watching. The bathwater is getting cold around me..
Molly on the Stairhead
by Richard Gavin
“She yelped when some of the severed fence wires bit into her calf. ”
I have been spooked by dreams of such wires before thanks to the Gavinostic. Here, a classic from this author, I judge, with many staggering passages of beauty and darkness and deep key frissons releasing the prisons of the body as well as opening those in the mind, a tale with a haunting refrain of an ancient seeming playground game based on the story’s title whereby we actually witness the inception of the retroactive game now played, amidst the ‘imaginary queendoms’ of girlhood and throwaway boys as spear carriers. A vision of a marble staircase (“a relic of a mansion that had been on the Greens before the land was bought, but there was no foundation, no nothing. Just the staircase,…”) and two girls in particular growing up into menstruation, a vanishing ‘dying fall’ of one of them from the stairhead in the Greens later haunting the other girl as she babysits mere boys. A tutelary meditation “that Death’s house has many mansions.” A staircase leading only to a landingless land. Or just a distorted spook house?
My previous reviews of this author’s work:
Omens by Richard Gavin
Primeval Wood – by Richard Gavin
Sylvan Dread – Richard Gavin
Plus a number of stories in anthologies linked from https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/richard-gavin
Ekphrasis
By M.E. Bronstein
“‘Ah.’
A pause.”
Too rarefied otherwise to quote from this essential ‘ghost story’ that is actually a beautiful exposition of the art form it describes — a Proustian memory of an internally mutual ekphrasis of words and image perfected and tainted, in turn, I guess, by Bluetooth earplug, and an extracted interview and an art critical article, an ekphrasis created by a gold glass pen, as a man remembers the woman who owned the pen and his becoming (as more taint than paint) almost collaborator after her surmised death by drowning.
(Extrapolated with the previous story above, the latter’s marble staircase was a more un-deliberate version of just such an ekphrasis leading to its creator as revenant?)
Five Poems by Marisca Pichette
I rarely review poetry. These ekphrastic examples (with elements of ekphrasis as merged by the previous story above) of seemingly free verse seem sinewy enough to enjoy their own enjambment. “and and and”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/marisca-pichette/
Winter Blues
by Laura Cranehill
“But the real reason you need to mend a fence right away isn’t because of what can get out, it’s about what can get in.”
I, too, can’t wait for summer as I look outside at today’s weather. I remember I once had an escaped peafowl that sat on the fence and loitered outside this house as if stalking me. Although I did not have wind chimes, I did once have a dreamcatcher that rattled in the wind. And I tantamount killed my own mom, and others I loved or who might have loved me, but I now put it down to a guilt and anxiety complexes. Or to a therapeutic imaginarium or ‘saúde’, such as this shocking story also provides, its first shock literally coming out of nowhere, much more abrupt even than that earlier marble staircase above. I wonder if I turn on myself, I would become a rabbit or a songbird, too. Which is worst, God or the Devil? Red mittens, notwithstanding.
The Dance of Life (After Edvard Munch)
by Adam Lawrence
A poem that also seems to resonate with the earlier marble stairway above.
An Angel of God
by Emma E. Murray
“the yellow sunflower that decorated Mamaw’s old wind chime,”
A ‘pain painting’ and a potential miracle for a mother whose baby St John has died, and the site of a nearby plane crash in the surrounding woods (a mutation of the marble staircase in the earler wood above) leads her to an imputed angel crucified like Christ, but the body missing from the waist down, except for trailing intestines,… I could continue detailing this richly inspirational prose work that eventually transcended for me any possible review of it other than the sheer reading of it. Excited to report its existence here, complete with the type of art installation she makes of a different angel.
“incorporeal bells rang in incessant, painful reverberations, ”
“Tonight, the Moon is not Quite Complete
SJ Townend”
“So much is hidden in literature and so much is hidden in music, between the shapes the words and notes make.”
As if inspired by this book’s earlier wind chimes, and its mutual ekphrasis, here reality is created by music and words, not fine art painting and words, a new mirror, a new moon as a hole in the sky by the sea shore, or a reflection of something else, as the Theremin resonates with the chimes (“His attention returns to his hands, his heart thrumming, as if it may burst”) as performed by this musician who offers to conjure up dead people for an audience from the heavenly chimes of his waving hands over glassy music, or so I imagine, indeed trying to summon his own dead mother, as we learn of his tragic backstory, and his mother’s return, or is it his mother at all? Or someone even more attractive to his yearnings? Leading to essences relegated to a vision of death itself in a seal pup; only the writer knows where their writing leads us with its ‘muddling’ spells pulled from ether to printed paper and back again to our eyes by the same printless ether, or I am muddling, I wonder. Prints doubling, like footprints on the dark side of the moon?
“…or believes it may be the whisky doing the muddling, as does the writer, portraying the events which are about to occur.”
‘Extinction’
To my inexpert eyes, this is a fine poem by Alyza Taguilaso
“No ringing alarm / or cymbals clanging from spires.”
***
Auntie Shanta and the Slaughtering Process
By Chris Kuriata
“It isn’t enough that we must die, we must also become edible.”
There is much astonishing food chain writing here, a nose being crunched and a retractable telescope being quickly shut. The story of a girl and her animal-cannibalistically ruthless Auntie. And the girl’s memories of her Grandpa in the wilds of nature and its X rated slaughter of what is to be eaten, however easy or hard is the death. I feel, in the context of this journal, that birth and death are two Uncanny Balls, but here their oscillations are not chimes, not even bells, but pierogies and meat maggots. “…meat for his own dinner. I thought that was bullshit…”
My previous Kuriata review in 2016 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/playground-of-lost-toys/#comment-6274
The Dark Wood Teaman
By Rebecca J. Allred
“Like the Teaman, the carousel children sport features more closely resembling fear than frolic.”
This starts as an enchanting tale of teapots and ice cubes instead of sugar ones, a tale about the protagonist’s journey to visit their father, most certainly a tale to become an iconic one such as, say, Lewis Carroll once wrote, but with darker elements of God and the Father along with fresh nursery rhyme incantations . I will not spoil it with more details, other than with details that resonate with the foregoing context of this book… The darker elements starting with ….
“A trio of bells announces your arrival.”
And the ‘marble staircase’ syndrome and its rite of passage becoming…”a narrow staircase, chasing away ribbons of light that emanate from some room beyond. You descend, counting the stairs on your fingers and the rapid thump of your heart in your head. Thirty-seven and one-hundred and forty-two, respectively, by the time you reach the corridor at the bottom…”
Also the ‘bilateral thrum’ of the earlier theremin, and there is also a ‘hole in the sky’ like the erstwhile moon’s.
Up up up and away toward “…empty, cavernous space up all the way up to the elbow.”
My previous reviews of this author’s work: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/rebecca-j-allred/
Labyrinthine
Michael Bailey
“He needs to transcribe the lyrics before he forgets because sometimes words overwrite word”
A mind-twisting theme-and-variations on words of Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ (if not this book’s earlier ‘chimes’), as we follow the creative and emotional struggles against plagiarism of a composer improvising in words the jamming session that follows a clinching of special lyrics for a song and, by the way, his piano is called Amelia, not Joyce!
“All music is inspired by music heard; the way all written stories are inspired by stories read.”
Everything Wrong with Me
Carson Winter
“I’m a lot of things. I like things and don’t like things and sometimes I’m shy and sometimes I’m not. I can look people in the eyes when I talk to them.”
This is a disarmingly plainspoken story, compelling, too. Of a woman or girl absconding from her family home where she feels lack of self worth and uncomfortable, leaves it for a random new town via a random train journey, and a church community of young ones who take her under their communal wing after her easily getting a job at the town bakery, too easily, in fact, as she also too easily leaves the new town for another new town, for a different iteration of initiation. I, as reader, was somehow becalmed in a mix of sweetness and joy and inferred hindsight darkness. Still am by even more pervasive iterations of hindsight.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/carson-winter/
Two poems
The Great Everything of Dust & Acts of Desperation
by César Dávila Andrade (original versions and as translated by Jonathan Simkins)
From ‘Everything wrong with me’ to…
The People Upstairs
By Ben Larned
“She’d never thought of herself as malicious – it was the callousness of othersthat inspired her fantasies – but maybe that was the justification they all gave, that it’s not them, it’s me who was wronged.”
This is an apotheosis of Ligotti and more. Needs to be read and assessed. The story’s words by preternatural inadvertence stealing the DISARMING character from the immediate story above, here calling herself Jean, and these words ARMING her through her inner self’s EYE or I, and giving her her own WHO as HUE — therefore now armed and enabled by the loathsome seeming man whom she chauffeured as professional car driver into some Ligotti Corporate Horror landscapes, this man thus seeming to empower her to deal with the fuckers upstairs. I was subsumed by all the words. And I have been left with a hollow brain.
The City Archives
Paul L. Bates
“Mindful of the thin ice frosting, Mitchel climbed the worn steel tipped steps that narrowed as they rose to the colossal brick archway. ”
From this book’s stairway syndrome, this is a mighty story, methodically stylish, Ligottianly brilliant at evoking a man working at the City Archives and his rolls of pungent paper, his Kafkaesque bosses, the vermin that pester him, his dreams (one in particular), above all his prospects out of this downtrodden existence, his view of umbrellas, and of a commuting train journey to die for, and where dream meets reality in a disarming fulfilment of his prospects which is either absurdly pointless or incredibly hopeful. I am glad this story managed to reach my eyes through its own ground zero and under the auspices of this book’s zero edition.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/paul-l-bates/
These Graceless, Grasping Hands
Dyani Sabin
This fine poem acts as arch to the next story…
***
The Flytrap Garden
Perry Ruhland
“In the center of the garden rose an elevated platform, a tarnished moon with a waist-high rail.”
This strong Ligottian-plus Corporate Horror writing affected me deeply, from the foreman’s atrium in a derelict factory and all its art installations of insect life in jars plus a stench and more — and then, with each word a flytrap, as the garden itself is composed entirely of flytraps, I meet through these ever-evocative words, the old man that is me…
As Vastarien and my exterior reviewing relationship to it from the beginning nearly reaches its end….
“It was an elderly man, stout and vaguely toadstool shaped, with a tumorous head wholly free of hair. He was kneeling before the lectern…”
My previous review of this author: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/882-2/#comment-852
THE PLACE, THE PEOPLE, THE PREDATORS: THE LIGOTTIAN WORLD OF VANCOUVER’S DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE
Shawn Phelps
A non fiction article complete with bibliography and footnotes.
My previous review of Shawn Phelps: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/25/vastarien-vol-5-no-2/#comment-26165
***
A Wild Green Tide is Soon Coming — Notes on a Planned Story
Jonathan Louis Duckworth
“elbows”
This is a self-referential writerly work where, as part of speculations arising from, say, a writer’s group, the planning of a story and/ or a later film of the story has become the story itself. A story of two men and a woman who have known each other since childhood meeting up in the wilds near an old house, with sex and violence, and invasive monster vines. As if meeting up in the wilds of non-story to reenact what has already been written about them, with a surprise ending that make this experiment actually work as a great story. Words as vines, and vines as words, it also makes one think of the pointlessness of writing stories at all, because most stories have already existed in their planning and subsequently died unread. A bit like most people’s lives. So why give birth to a story at all? But I may have already answered that question in what I have written above.
Learning Process
Andrew Wilbur
Yes, it has been a dream to cherish, but also a tutelary nightmare — symbolised here by more than just a brief fiction story — its venue of an idyllic island full of tourists, but faceless at Christmas choir-time — life also being a false promise to escape insularity, while nothing makes sense, nothing ever did. And people will want to harm you as readily as to love you, to teach you something they think worthwhile as well as to cruelly correct you, and there is always one You of whom the big question must be asked. And I am now too old to climb the Tower, so mark that well. It’s not a question, but a certainty.
“I’ve learned its lesson, so I think I’ve now reached the final scene.”
***
Vastarien has now been banked in the vast nothingness of my old brain, but I hope I have at least left a virtual clue, via my reviews, as to its crystallisation as a lasting reality.
From ‘The Flytrap Garden’:
“He lifted the specimen up to the light to inspect it, and I saw, for the first time, the details of his face — his sunken black-pit eyes, his cinderblock nose, and the lipless line of his mouth which folded up slowly into a smile.”