Morbid Tales - by Quentin S. Crisp

Tartarus Press 2012

Previously published as a hardback by the same publisher: 2004

There is no guarantee how long it will take to complete this review, whether days or years.

CAVEAT (1): Spoilers are not intended but there may be inadvertent ones. You may wish (i) to take that risk and read my review before or during your own reading of the book, or (ii) to wait until you have finished reading it. In either case, I hope it gives a useful or interesting perspective.

All my other real-time reviews are linked from here: http://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/

My previous real-time reviews of fiction by Quentin S. Crisp: All God’s Angels, Beware! – Quentin S Crisp ; “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” – by Quentin S. Crisp ; Cinnabar’s Gnosis

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The Mermaid

Prelude: Philosophy in the Underwear Drawer

“I believe that everybody has a story. It falls to their life’s epicentre like a meteorite.”

There is a difference between morbid and misanthropic, I guess.  Here, we balance on the edge of each in turn and discover these edges do not overlap – necessarily. Imagine, the narrator of HP Lovecraft’s ‘The Hound’ preambling  not a Hound but a Mermaid, discovered not from a fruit-mulched grave-plot but perhaps another slot closed up as if there’s nothing to penetrate… I am entranced by the prose and its erotic touches as well as by the ”mer-monkey” from the Horniman Museum, Penge, to which the writer of the book’s Foreword once introduced me decades ago.  The narrator is in a coastguard’s cottage where his obsessions may drift ashore? (24 Jan 12)

{later} Chapter One: Beachcomber’s Delight

“…fashioned by someone for whom this was the world, for whom jellyfish were floating flowers…”

Now here a moving solidification – via unsolid visions of sea and sea’s accoutrements and ‘object’ magic and a spoken “Sunken Tongue” and Medusa-musing and a “Kraken powder” – of the Mermaid taken to the Narrator’s home, where the purpose-built tank etc. amid narcotic prose gives birth to all manner of thoughts in my mind. The use of gills?  The felt literalness (as here) of wonder being more wonderful than more wonderful wonder.  And the beauty of reading such flotsam-blessed fiction - partly at least as a result of narrating one’s own journey in it as I am here – is that serendipities are often convoked - [e.g. (for me) from today's immediacy as well as the recent past; Capek HERE, Reggie Oliver HERE and a Medusa-like HERE.]

“…as if I were a tomb-robber fleeing the winged shadow of a pharaoh’s curse.” (24 Jan 12 – two hours later)

{later} Chapter Two: To Have and Not to Have

“It was one of those times that form lightly without you realising that they are to become a poignant memory.”

And I suspect my reading of this story is one such ‘time’, tantamount-to-a-novella instilling in me both joy and despair at the same time: no mean feat.  Yet the narrator is mean to himself.  Guilt plays with innocence, like a mermaid with a lobster: and not always ‘respectively’ (or even ‘respectfully’).  And the love-physical implications – tied to that earlier ‘literalness’ which I see is in turn tied up with that in the War of the Newts book by Karel Capek – are striking to say the least: a tail like a sheath; onanism making one two (a tail eventually bifurcates) etc.; “this story-book love” telling its own story of perceived self-denigration: but, like two multiplicative negatives making a positive, two stories telling each other possibly make a positive reality along their own Escher combined audit trail or ley line of disguised fiction.  Good, too, to know that “vowel sounds travel better underwater“. (24  Jan 12 – another 3 hours later)

{Later} Chapter Three: The End of the Tail

“Yes, yes, the memories trail together as elegant as houseplants growing at different levels in an ornamental stand.”

Indeed. Just like this novella and the book it becomes. A book from the tides of sea-voice and anemone and jellyfish, shaped and hinged (like the Necronomicon?), a book that is as distant from what books are now fast becoming in 2012 as it is possible to be.  This is a perfect ending: where my earlier joy and despair are explained, reconciled, transcended – with even a passing, yet explicit, contextual reference on page 57 to the human curse of end-of-one’s-days dementia in the story mentioned above (‘Flowers of the Sea’) that had yet another 7 years to be written after ‘The Mermaid’ was first published in 2004. I shall not give away the ending of ‘The Mermaid’  - but it is something you will never forget in the context of everything that happens before it.  Not exactly “passive aggression“ but something, although similar, more cataclysmic within the human pattern of weakness and strength.  There are no words for it yet except perhaps in ‘Sunken Tongue’.  I guess, you need your own “passive aggression” to appreciate this novella fully, but that’s not all that you need : you need a willingness and an ability to empathise.  To not be you.  First and last, ”Certain sacrifices have to be made...” (24 Jan 12 – another 90 minutes later)

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Far-Off Things

“They become nothing more than an anonymous ‘you’.”

A pagan paean  – as a heart-felt, old-fashioned investigation (amid modern times) into the nature of love and into a Wordsworthian Pantheism (here sown with demons and bugbears as well as the unpagan, quite human-needed magic of Christmas Day between the “folds” of Autumn and Winter) -  to another self-denigrated obsession, another explicit story-book love, not now a Mermaid, but a Milkmaid with (for me) Rapunzel’s hair raining like teardrops to feed both hope and, with eventual inevitability, despair. Yet the hope remains by being crystallised here for me on real paper so as to hold the fleeting emotion of ‘fabulous’ fiction for as forever a forever as possible.  Another oxymoron of permanence and transience. Another of those ”gooligars” (no point in googling). (25 Jan 12)

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Cousin X

Pages 77 – 101: “There was the discreet feeling of her feet leaving the earth. She even forgot this was strange. She was simply rapt.”

Discrete or discreet? Probably both in resonance – as, here, is the optimum blend of autistic gaucheness and  single-minded wondrousness.  Well, those who know me, will guess this story is written just for me. It’s just up my street – where, I imagine, the lorries and buses float in the sky like kites.  Proustian, yes a little.  Rather more it is another optimum blend: of Elizabeth Bowen and Sarban (especially their stories about children if not for children).  The prose immaculate reveals another form of unrequited love to match those earlier: a love as yet unfelt, the deepest unrequital of all (immortal, invisible, God only wise)? – here via the free gift or bought on approval from an old comic of x-ray specs between the Cousin X (why no name?) and his cousin Sasha, she warned by her parents not to spend time with him during his vist to her house. But she is Calmahained towards other-wordliness, self from self. As I am. You see, possibly misjudged Cousin X is unnervingly obsessed with taking apart contraptions like clocks etc. [A bit like doing real-time reviews...?] – exploring rock-pools for see-through sea-creatures and “kisses like jellyfish.” A story so far for the reader to (un?)”solidify” into potential “shapes“.  (25 Jan 12 – five hours later)

{Later} Pages 101 – 122: “And in the next instance there flashed out from this calm remembrance a vicious fear, like a hound left to guard a forgotten chamber, crazed and half starved, no longer able to distinguish between those who put it there and those who it is meant to guard against.”

Remembrance of things past: having gained a past like Proust - I would not have thought to write about this story’s first half like I did above if I had already read its second half before starting to write about the whole story.  Two hours ago, I had not reached the Earth’s Core. Nor had I reached this story’s deja-vu or hindsight of adulthood (and this is truly a drama that MUST one day be filmed by Stephen Poliakoff).  It is one incredible reading experience.  You need Cousin X’s concept of ’air’ as well as the gaps between the words just to gain breath. I hate getting into superlatives and ever try to resist them. But sometimes they take you over just as subsumings take you under? As both do here. It’s just that all animals and other creatures, not only mermaids, need penetrating somehow, even if you have to enter by some strange byways. As I have done here, I hope, between the story’s claws and into its underbelly of meaning.  It’s possibly Aickman’s ‘The Same Dog’ rather than Sarban’s ‘Calmahain’.  Or, more likely, both.  And “darkle” is just the root of ‘darkling’. And k just a mutant x. (25 Jan 12 – another 2 hours later)

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A Lake

Pages 123 – 146: “There passed a few moments of expectant ambiguity, bobbing moistly like an Adam’s apple.”

At first or mostly or ostensibly, a workmanlike narration about Stephen in Japan: his visit to an uncanny Lake that he discovers is associated with suicides in the past: but set within gradually more and more stunningly conceived flashes of observation about fate and choice and identity and language and landscape and weather and morbidity and…, observations that often take the reader by pleasant or unpleasant (jarring) surprise and makes him or her stagger back on the balls of his or her feet for a nonce.  [Inter alia, a black rectangle wall emerges to bar Stephen's eventual path of aggressified passivity: that erstwhile Necronomicon-like book again? And the lake, we learn, early on, has given up many dead fishes or they have given themselves up like lemmings - brilliantly described - with their size difficult to assess as "nowhere a whole specimen to be found" (intriguing in view of the first story?).] And we reach the end of the first half of the story with a tinge of a haunting, a woman, one of the earlier suicides, returned, I feel, to requite … exactly what? I shouldn’t have stopped reading to write this. But too late. (25 Jan 12 – another three hours later)

{Later} Pages 146 – 168: “Although he could not see more than two or three feet in any direction, he became increasingly aware of a poignant depth of water beneath him, needling his innards.”

The workmanlikeness is a form of well-written ‘pulp horror’ fiction: reminding me, inter alios, of A. Merritt. As in the first half, there are shafts of perception that stun one’s path through this darkly cosmic foray into a vast universe of self and selflessness reflected within the lake and its darkling Japanese myths and demons and inter-coiling snakes.  And the word ‘poignant’ when related to a depth of water actually does take on a real, perhaps unintended, meaning – in the half-resonant light (or darkness) of the earlier Mermaid story – when Stephen discovers the layered conjoined remains upon remains of… well, that would be a Spoiler.  “Not only space, but time too will disintegrate in The Ray.” (25 Jan 12 – another 90 minutes later)

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Time too will disintegrate? Seems to be a fascinating slant on the next story that I’ve just read this early morning…

The Two-Timer

“As a result, here I am today. I have remained discreet, apart from now, of course, divulging my adventures to you, here.”

An “anonymous ‘you’” who is somehow complicit? This is a telling, gradually maturity-accreting monologue to ‘you’ by Terry Buzzacott about a boyhood of “flobbing techniques” and a special power that he wields of freezing time (resonant with Cousin X’s x-ray specs and dissecting contraptions such as clocks (and, possibly, the book’s earlier ‘experiments’ with a mermaid)) while everyone else in his life is oblivious of his ‘fiddlings’ with them during the time that time is thus temporarily frozen.  I spoke of a relative ‘foreverness’ earlier in this review and that now takes on new meaning here: “drunk on the perfume of forever” with an arguable factoring-in of Bradbury’s butterfly effect… This boyhood tale at least partially resonates with the author’s novel (Remember You’re a One-Ball) and with my own recent interpretation of ‘two-timing’ in Jeremy Reed’s novel ”Here Comes the Nice”.  A fascinating slant on early love, puberty, relationships with peers and teachers as filtered through an autistic aloneness’s yearning for ‘silence’ against the pisspot that life seems.  The plot’s final pay-off makes this  a really compelling story of beginning, middle and end, with the emphasis on the art of traditional story-telling but mixed with experimental conceits. Another landmark read for me.  ”Meanwhile“, I just found myself wondering if a flob still oozes down the wall even when time is frozen?  But that’s just me. (26 Jan 12)

I just had a rainy constitutional by the sea and, while doing so, it occurred to me that real texts in traditional books are time frozen and ebooks are transient text subject to both benign and malicious ‘fiddlings’ over time.  Or other variations upon that theme.  (26 Jan 12 – 90 minutes later)

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It now turns out that those thoughts of art’s transience and permanence, text and etext, during my constitutional, have some significant bearing on the next story (novella?)…

The Tattooist

Pages 193 – 218: “So why do you want death impregnated in your skin, might I ask? You don’t think it’s a bit morbid?”

The Laconics of a professional Tattooist as he tells so tellingly another anonymous ‘you’ (in non-laconic, stun-jarring images and stylish syntax and word-choice) about the Boy who visits his Tattoo Studio for a customised comic-book image of a girl called Death (semi-irrelevantly reminding me of a Manga image and I sense the Japanese are richly laconic (a contradiction in terms?), laid-back, too)…   This story’s first half, too, is full of well-characterised portraits of pub-goers in modern Britain (jealous of each other’s tattoos), contrasting with the almost religious, almost parthenogenetic immaculacy of two men creating a woman between them over the “needling” poignant depths (cf: The Lake) of their interaction to the sound of “dirty guitars“. The religion of stigmata, too. And Pre-Raphaelite art. And life’s accessorization. And the Intentional Fallacy (“To be astonished at one’s own work is involunatarily to disclaim it.“). And the pain that makes non-pain worthwhile. As well as all the astonishing richnesses of theme and composition, this (so far) is a genuinely compelling story that any reader would not be able to put down, susceptibility to such rarefications or not.  A “Women in Love” (Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin) type of struggle, a struggle that is also a parthenogenesis, creating the struggle as a thing-in-itself rather than the brutality of two men simply fighting: that of reader and author, too.  The dull-beating of the ever-new and ground-breaking, skin-breaking SF-fantastical from the portal of crowding creations upon screen and in book (or both). All tantalisingly touched upon: touching (at first tentatively) upon the ‘skin’ of reading this story.  Then puncturing it… ”Actually he was as punctual as the haunting of a ghost.” (26 Jan 12 – another 3 hours later)

{Later} Pages 219 – 241: “There are so many kinds of relationships we don’t really have names for them at all. In fact, each is unique, and the most insignificant and influential relationships in a person’s life are not always those with people they see regularly and often.”

I am terribly nervous about doing justice to these pages that form tantamount to the powerful coda of this ‘novella’ (forming about half of the whole work).  It’s akin to (Cousin X’s) knife reaching beyond (The Two-Timer’s) “nervous test” – and here that takes on enormous importance where Struggle struggles out in full sharp relief.  Suffice it for me just to recall the Nursery Rhyme that this coda quotes in full: meaningful as hell for me personally. And the daydream of the Primary School scene (NF “British bulldogs” pent within it).  And so many other startling images and expressions here that will last me for many a “Holy Grail” of memories. “When the past is gone, it becomes unreachable“. But this coda, this further Proustian hindsight, has a creative tension and its own ‘struggle’ with what the narrator feels, without him even realising it. I cannot hope to cover everything I wish to say about this coda (this Nemonymous Apocrypha?)… It has become, not another landmark read, but a skin one.  Despite its inferred “morbid” watermark running from page to page like the name of the resort through a stick of holiday rock (by the way, never read this book on an ebook!), the plot’s “oral fossil” — its version of the mermaid’s tail-pouch – readily disperses the “covert accusations” and “grey spirit of oppression” that seems so prevalent in today’s sadly forever world.  And for that I thank it. (26 Jan 12 – another 2 hours later)

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Ageless

“When I look at your arm just below your sleeve, I realise there is no more nostalgia.”

A short prose vision of a couple on a city roof playing chess. Frozen  by Terry Buzzacott’s time magic?  A riposte to the creative tension regarding Proustian ’petit madeleine’ nostalgia I read into ‘The Tattooist’?  Or a variation on the Wordsworthian Pantheism as background to the two essentially (for me) parallel protagonists in ‘Far-Off Things’, but now here not classic grazing-land Nature or even Tintern Abbey Nature as such but a (Japanese?) city and its buildings as an organic stasis within Nature just as much as our sun is that, too?  Or perhaps just another “gooligar”? Perhaps the book’s last story (yet to be read) will give me the answer? [Earlier in this review: "Yet the hope remains by being crystallised here for me on real paper so as to hold the fleeting emotion of ‘fabulous’ fiction for as forever a forever as possible.  Another oxymoron of permanence and transience."] (26 Jan 12 – another 3 hours later)

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Autumn Colours

“…the jellyfish glistening of street lights on the wet tarmac,…”

I always relish dealing with Prince Autumn. This is Andy, student, finishing a sort of gap year, then later, more gaps later, adulthood’s hindsight (so common in this book) – the earlier time: Socratic dialogue in modern voice about studentish things with a girl called Adrienne whom he only half knows; later time: this author’s work Suicide Watch in a ‘new’ monologue to the anonymous ‘you’ in counterpoint (the reader doesn’t or at least shouldn’t know which comes first: this present monologue or the earlier one in an ostensibly later book): mirrors aligned face-to-face like those cosmic mirrors in ‘The Lake’. Terry Buzzacott’s consequential ”Time betrayed him, trapping him in this ageing body” (his body being the only thing in which Andy can be): the dreaded “kick of death” like that kick as the gooligar springs from the box with empty face… and a real story-book time when people wrote letters on real paper and translations of foreign works were kept not like as zip file but as valued manuscript in a box, ready itself to spring out.  And over time, through only half-knowingness between Cousin X and Sasha, Terry and Nicola, Stephen and Mariko, ‘you’ and Gwendoline, ’you’ and Leah, Andy and Adrienne, they reach out to make each other better, or simply to make each other come.  Or make each other go.  The choice is yours.  This book paradoxically eases the choice by making it more difficult.  Morbidity: Actuarial tables regarding statistical proneness to illness. Mortality: Actuarial tables regarding statistical proneness to death.  But when the tables are turned into tales, we smile knowingly that the battle is to know which “someone whose part in [her] life had seemed almost incidental” is now waiting to spring out of the book-shaped box or box-shaped book to become more than just incidental to us (even to themselves). Kill or cure. To be you or not to be you. To requite or to reject.  I know what this book’s answer is but it will never be clear-cut enough for me to put into words or translate from any ‘sunken tongue’ that may have the exact words.  But somehow, against all the odds, this book has made me feel the potential power of achievable fulfilment.  And no need of Kraken Powder! “A vague daydream is always more exquisite than something clearly defined.”  (26 Jan 12 – another 90 minutes later)

END

{Received today in the post as part of my normal subscription.}

CAVEAT: Spoilers are not intended but there may be inadvertent ones. You may wish (i) to take that risk and read my review before or during your own reading of the stories, or (ii) to wait until you have finished reading them.  In either case, I hope it gives a useful or interesting perspective.

There is no guarantee how quickly it will take to complete this review.

All my real-time reviews are linked from here: http://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/

My previous real-time reviews of TTA Press publications linked from here:  http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/tta-press-my-real-time-reviews/

Interzone # 238 – www.ttapress.com

‘Interzone’ magazine contains a lot of material in addition to the fiction.

Authors: Ray Cluley, Carole Johnstone, E.J. Swift, Tyler Keevil.

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Fata Morgana by Ray Cluley

“Are you out hauling?”

I estimate that this story is of novella length – or almost.  But I do not need to estimate its nitty-gritty poignancy as well as sublimely soaring grandeur. I know.

It is a catching vision of a world - not a waterworld, not a desert’s mad-angled contraptive city, not Carole Johnstone’s ‘bottom-trawling’ in an earlier TTA Press publication ,  not a new ‘Kiteworld’, not another ‘Dream Archipelago’, but a genuine originality of conception combining all those wonderful factors in different measures and more, much more: where the hierarchy of the city’s heights and depths, downtowns and uptowns, twist and turn just like its dangerous ‘sharks’ – and the cagers, sifters, upmen, roofmen, watersiders, hawlers (my expression), fishermen, lowfolk…. It’s a perfectly blended ‘genius loci’ that takes time to be fished by the reader towards the mind’s net, but never fully a ’catch’. An uncle-nephew relationship  carving out a workmanlike living as well as an instinctive artistry from this world’s ‘flotsam’.  And a shuttling social pecking-order — with its half-sodden/ redolent/ sometimes heath-robinson complex of ladders-made-real-by-a-visionary-testing-of-truth-from-fantasy – upon which ‘scaffold’ the nephew meets feisty romance … and a yearning for a revolutionary admixture of levels that can only produce the reader’s treasurable outcome from both the story’s reaching beyond itself to manipulate or carve the flotsam of fiction-trove and the author’s own personal accomplishment, as I infer it: an accomplishment by dint of that very ‘reaching beyond’ and, then, of simply believing that he can clinch the impossible dream. An important SF work for future assessment as to its greatness by those who perhaps know SF better than I do.  So far I have only played footsies with this story.

“…accretions building one atop the other like the formation of coral.” (21 Jan 12)

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fearful symmetry by Tyler Keevil

“…and Vargas jerks hard on the wheel – fishtailing around an icy pothole. ‘My job is conservation and protection. But people must be protected also.’”

I didn’t expect this story to be to my taste; I sensed early on a didacticism about conservation and a linear, easily-’caught’ tale concerned with characters involved with scientific research and mutant animals.  I sensed wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough to finish very satisfied with my read.  The prose textured enough. The genius loci well conveyed. The characters rich. Not with money but with sable hides and inferred backstories.  The frontstories very telling, too. The morality-drama with a “message“  of human safety / conservation / scientific research etc creating angles I hadn’t thought about before. And the message simply as message (as opposed to what was in the message) turned out to be germane to the whole story’s symbiosis of various forces. The symbiosis of host and parasite, and which is which: not only conservation or protection (usually the same thing but here not the same thing) but also a child’s stuffed toy tiger or real stuffed tiger, normal tiger or mutant tiger, good mutancy or bad mutancy, porn or real sex, message or messenger, hunting computer-game or real hunting, poaching or legal hunting, (Canadian) woman or (Russian) man, cough or vodka… And I almost sense - now in hindsight rather than shaky foresight – that the metaphor of “ladder-rung bases” is part of that ‘scaffold’ between this story and the previous one…  Disregarding those richly mutant symmetries, I did thoroughly appreciate this story’s skilful linear suspense regarding the nature of the outcome towards the climax.  But… “What about the haul in the shed?” (21 Jan 12 – three hours later)

I didn’t think the Blake reference was needed, however! (21 Jan 12 – another 2 hours later)

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God of the Gaps by Carole Johnstone

“Someone besides me is still coughing,…”

“I can’t be arsed” even to read this story, let alone review it.  But, now having read it, I find it hilarious … worrying, too. It’s hard to explain but this chaotic monologue of a woman teacher in special care of a 12 year old boy in an Alien Museum of sorts – with a lift from Cluley’s updown to downup and back again – with something missing from somewhere and something else inserted somewhere else where it shouldn’t belong. Prose of crude ‘dying falls’ of backchat colloquialisms – and nothing to stop the flow other than cease reading it. But I couldn’t cease. Like being stalked through the Hythe.  What was worrying? I came out bereft somehow.  Lost my chakras or something. My maat. Or the deep thing that aliens fished from me on height. Using this story’s ”combination of dissection and controlled observation” and also Keevil’s didactic research, I need to weigh things in the symbiotic balance. God is a Gap, I guess, but only if you believe in Him. Worrying about the anal probes. But I loved this story that has ”even less interest in sci-fi than I do“. [My own ancient published short fiction about aliens and anal probes HERE and, via-a-vis the Cluley, another one about water's 'dream of real air' HERE.] “I let Brian grab my hand and haul me out.” (21 Jan 12 – another 90 minutes later)

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The Complex by E.J. Swift

“In the bathroom I hack up a compound of mucus, saliva, and red dust. I fill a bottle with water.”

An ’adagio lamentoso’ climax (like that of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony) after Johnstone’s Scherzo – and I’ll leave you to decide the ‘movements’ represented by the Cluley and the Keevil. A perfect Space Symphony whichever way you read it. Space or continuous God-Gaps - with up being down and down up, backstory is frontstory and front back. Here a story about a Convict Planet but which way Earth? – down or up? – Heaven or Hell? - from this red dust coughdrop world with a dream of real air as water – all told quietly, sedately, beautifully by a greying woman (convicted of murder) who still ‘talks’ to her sister in that other world: and who is threatened with becoming a version of Johnstone’s missing souls in one of many silver coffins (like raindrops?).  “Air conditioner pumping” as she prepares for the ultimate long-haul flight – Release.  Release as a two-edged sword (or sabre-toothed tiger?).  A mighty visionary sight – conveyed by this wonderful story - of the spaceship as it approaches to give her that ‘release’. So utterly poignant. So utterly two-edged. So utterly the moving up and down in the SF body-city of the self between the atoms that might create that self as a smooth series of selves.  Or, alternatively, each self coughs up the next?  Never perhaps a smooth process in the end. That’s the agony of hindsight’s ‘dying fall’.  But we do dance on. We continue to take life on board.  That’s what I take from this excellent story. That’s the melody-hook, too, I hope to use to ’hawl’ all four fictions’ complete symphony into further ‘message’. Fata Morgana’s carved dream-catcher from high or low tide: another well-tempered soul that I hope is mine. “…paddling in the coral reef graveyards, collecting fish scales,…” (21 Jan 12 – another 2 hours later)

END

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MIDNIGHT IN FLIGHT by Joel Lane

Paul Cooksey, a man in his twilight years, is feeling lost in the noise of the modern world, estranged by the fast moving flurry of chattering cell phones and the constant hubbub of electronic devices. One twilight evening, whilst riding the bus near the Hockney Flyover, he suddenly recalls reading a collection of stories about ‘winged nocturnal creatures’ in his youth in 1956. These stories, his ailing memory recalls, had a profound effect on the imagination of his twelve year old self, and he decides therefore to track down first the book, then its editor Thom Parr in the hope of relieving his intense feelings of loss and loneliness. You have to read this atmospheric and painful story to find out what happens to Paul and his quest. The tale is filled with a beautiful and melancholy palette of dark blues, blacks and purples, and the whispery sound of wings in the night.

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“…movingly captures the onset of senile dementia and accompanying memory loss,…” (Black Static # 25 – TTA Press)

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In “Horror Stories for Boys” Rachel Kendall presents a powerful story of a man suffering from migraines who must visit his dying father and face an abusive past. The author managed to make me feel that bitter-sweetness of nostalgia – even though the past evoked isn’t mine – and although light on plot, this is mature and emotional writing. Of a similar calibre is “Midnight Flight” by Joel Lane about an old man losing his memory, searching for a book he recalls from childhood. Both these tales satisfy with very brittle emotions and atmopshere.

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Joel Lane’s gift for the evocation of contemporary urban despair and the darkly redemptive promise of the uncanny makes the remembered anthology Midnight Flight powerfully symbolic in a story of the same name.

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Midnight Flight by Joel Lane also focuses on the moving quest for lost youth as an old man tries to track down a long lost anthology 

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In the best pieces the device of the horror anthology is integral to the story. Joel Lane’s beautiful meditation “Midnight Flight” treats its themes – the elusive fictional anthology at its center, urban alienation, aging, regret – with deceptive delicacy and control. Some of these elements, especially the urban grayness and decay seen through the eyes of an outsider narrator, have been worn thin by the heavy tread of decades of urban horrorists, but Lane folds his story inward to its conclusion with a convincing feel for the workings of fate and, in the process, strikes unsettling notes that carry after the last page is turned.

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Midnight Flight by Joel Lane. Is a brilliantly moving tale of an old man loosing his mememory who feels completely out of touch with a modern world.  He begins a quest to track down a book and its edititor , that he remembers reading from his youth.  This is at times a hard and painfull tale to read, not because of bad writing, but due to the intense emotional imagary of the story.

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Joel Lane provides “Midnight Flight”, an excellent, melancholy  story ostensibly about a man trying to retrieve an elusive horror anthology read in his childhood, actually a story  about loneliness, ageing and the endless quest for the meaning of life.

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A story about one of the things we fear most in real life. The supernatural elements serve largely as metaphors for real-world terrors, and it’s all the more effective for that.

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In Joel Lane’s “Midnight Flight” an elderly man, in the grip of dementia, seems only half aware that he is out of kilter with the modern world but forms a fierce determination to track down a half-remembered book of horror stories from his childhood.  As he searches, his childhood memories surge up to obliterate the present.  The quest for the book becomes a quest for the book’s author and ultimately for the remaining shreds of his own identity.  The story gives us an exquisitely detailed description of the process of amnesia and the stories, the memories of stories, that we cling to when we are out of touch with all else in this fast-disintegrating world.

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ALL HIS WORLDY GOODS by D.P. Watt

After taking care of his mother Susan who has passed away after battling a prolonged illness a few month’s prior to the beginning of the story, Alan now spends his days working in a charity bookshop. He lives just a few miles away in his mother’s empty house on the top of a nearby hill. Liz, the store’s proprietor, seems to be fixed on modernizing her shop and she has therefore hired a new helping hand, David, a university student, to bring things up to date. One day a man called Eli Webb comes into the store with the intention of donating a box of books to the store. One volume in particular, a collection of horror stories which is presented equally as an occult work and a grimoire called ‘The Supernatural Omnibus’, catches Alan’s attention. D.P. Watt manages to infuse a sense of melancholy and nostalgia with a skillfully controlled mounting sense of dread, and finally, a hard earned sense of revelation which also serves as a pitch perfect conclusion to this skillfully assembled anthology of horror stories. A sentence on the volume’s last page underneath another of Tony Lovell’s effective black and white images very appropriately reads: ‘A treebook beats an ebook, by dint of ditch or haha.’

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“…a story of loneliness and alienation,…” (Black Static #n25 – TTA Press)

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The book ends on a high note with “All His Wordly Goods” by D.P. Watt, the ghostly tale of a man who works in a charity shop and discovers that a donated volume – the Supernatural Omnibus – refuses to leave him alone. Well written, and suffused with a creepy, small town claustrophobia, this tale also nails that fragility of lost childhood.

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All His Worldly Goods by D.P. Watt  The anthology is rounded of in great fashion with rather sad tale that builds with a great sense of menace and dread, this is the perfect story to finish off this anthology.

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Watt’s “All His Worldly Goods” is an excellent, solid piece of fiction where a copy of Montague Summers’ “The Supernatural Omnibus” ( that anthology really exists! I got a copy on my shelves…) keeps haunting a lonelybookshop clerk.  A great mix of horror and nostalgia.

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While most writers make an effort to make characters engaging, quirky or interesting, Mr. Watt has deliberately given us a horrifically dull individual, who apparently has no interests, hobbies, friends, or discernible personality. As the character says himself, he may as well be dead, and in the end, death is the most interesting thing that happens. Yet the story is gripping – an excellent coda for a wonderful book.

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In D.P. Watt’s story, “All Your Worldly Goods”, we are introduced to the deceptively cosy world of a charity shop volunteer.  His carefully regulated life is gradually undermined when a mysterious man brings a fateful book into the shop.  The very ordinariness of the man’s life, its petty jealousies and creeping sense of worthlessness creates a profoundly moving setting.

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“The quiet ‘effectiveness’ of ‘All His Worldly Goods’”

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Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will appear in the comments below.
My own views: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/

Genuinely humorous as well as memorable even if two of them are not terribly ‘helpful’ to potential readers.

http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2007/04/weirdmonger-by-df-lewis-reviewed-by.html
http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2009/04/best-of-df-lewis-by-df-lewis.html
http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2007/10/zencore-nemonymous-7.html

There is currently a prize from me for anyone who finds the lost Zencore! book

Photo: Tim Nickels

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THE FOLLOWER by Tony Lovell

In The Follower, Tony Lovell invites us to follow the life of his protagonist Dorothy through well chosen moments stretching from her early childhood to a time when she is a grownup and a parent to her son Kevin. Books and readings of particular books, at certain points in time have different consequences, consequences that Dorothy herself comes to terms with- or fails to come to terms with- on various levels. The sections depicting the young Dorothy were effectively done, and the echoes and repercussions of those experiences later in her life are well handled as well, the scenes between Dorothy and Kevin particularly effective towards the end of the tale.

“The Follower” by Tony Lovell traces the melancholy connection between a woman and the stories of “her” anthology from youth to old age.

Other favourites include The Follower by Tony Lovell a moving tale focusing on one woman’s life and the emotional power of books.

TREE RING ANTHOLOGY by Daniel Ausema

Daniel Ausema uses the cross-section of a tree to show us a map of its history, drawing us far back in time beginning at the tree’s heartwood pith and tracing an unsettling line all the way to the present day at the very outer edge of the cambium, and in a final twist- beyond. The story is densely packed with rich, suggestive imagery. The original variation on the theme is refreshing, and the tale’s fantastical elements are also aptly employed to highlight environmental concerns.

Second up is my favourite story in the book. “Tree Ring Anthology” by Daniel Ausema is one of those unique and wonderful curiosities that always pop up in DF Lewis publications. The extraordinary account of a tree’s life, it is told through an analysis of its rings that map out the residual scars of disease, fire and human intervention. Anthropomorphic, dark and strangely moving, this is a superb piece of unconventional storytelling and a great twist on the theme.

Perhaps the most interesting of these interpretations is Tree Ring Anthology by Daniel Ausema that uses the pattern of rings in a tree trunk to chart significant events over the course of many years – including a nuclear holocaust and what appears to be the appearance of extra-terrestrial life forms. It’s a clever story, beautifully written and even manages a sting in the tail.

Daniel Ausema’s “Tree Ring Anthology” uses the description of the rings on a tree stump to recount a range of ecological nightmares with a science fiction edge, demonstrating again that perspective and voice can lend any subject a strange and disturbing atmosphere.

There’s environmental awareness in Tree Ring Anthology by Daniel Ausema a powerful, at times poetic, piece which uses the rings of a tree as an anthology of the impact of man on the environment.

Colin Insole masterfully interweaves elements of hagiography, developmental child psychology, and fin-de-siècle paranoia, with a carefully chosen tableau of arresting images. ‘We nail our lies to the ghosts of suspicion.’ This is a magnificent tale, and one of the best I have read this year.

the cruelties of a decayed city whose residents keep elaborate records of the nastier aspects of their history.

“The Apoplexy of Beelzebub” by  Colin Insole ( an extraordinary emerging talent) is a marvelous, dark tale in which a researcher perusing the city archives unearths past tragedies and disreputable events involving her own family.

“The Apoplexy of Beelzebub” consists of many macabre or tragic digressions, miniature myths and fables all woven together with, and at times dominating, the main strand of his narrative to create a grotesque, pullulating effect.

This is dark, disturbing and unrelentingly grim. We can all feel trapped by family, place, convention, culture. In Mr. Insole’s nightmare city, insularity is celebrated, cruelty the greatest tradition, escape the worst sin. This will resonate with anyone who lives in any kind of community, or has a family, and will stick with me for a long time.

Another story, equally chilling in its ability to reveal the power of stories to corrupt our lives, is Colin Insole’s “The Apoplexy of Beelzebub”.  Insole has created a city somewhere between a fantasy city and a city in Britain’s North East, Hull comes to mind, in which a daughter strives to get away from her wicked (step?) mother and the poisonous web of libel and gossip which festers in the city archives.  Is the daughter in control of her destiny of not?  Will she escape the web of words?

Best Short Story – ‘The Apoplexy of Beelzebub’ by Colin Insole

“…the best story in the book, written with a style and panache which seems both in love with the grotesque things that it describes and at the same time to recoil from them, addressing themes of bullying and retribution.” (Black Static # 25 – TTA Press)

Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will be shown in comments below.

Reggie Oliver juxtaposes scenes of quiet tenderness between husband and wife, with a deep sense of loss and frustration, helplessness and existential dread – depicted literally or in the mind of the narrator through terrifying glimpses of a vast, churning abyss of wilted flowers and nightmarish form

Flowers of the Sea by Reggie Oliver follows that story and is my favourite of the collection. A slow burning story it uses a first person perspective from a not entirely sympathetic narrator and conjures up images in its climax that are truly unsettling

And the haunting “Flowers of the Sea” by Reggie Oliver uses a particularly upsetting homemade anthology to reflect on the ravages of dementia and grief.

Flowers Of The Sea by Reggie Oliver is a typically, beautifully written and moving tale where a woman sinks into the wilderness of dementia.

Reggie Oliver’s contribution (“Flowers of the Sea”) is even darker than his previous work , a masterly told story of desperation, helplessness and loss of identity with a deeply unsettling horrific taste.

An artist with advancing dementia creates works that mirror her deteriorating mental state. It seemed a little contrived once or twice, but the imagery and metaphor make for a powerful and affecting tale.

We are drawn in by a true and skillfully depicted human tragedy, hypnotized by visionary weird elements, then stunned with the horror of a climax which shockingly melds the tale’s ideas and emotions with a vivid physical presence

And I think “Flowers of the Sea” has perhaps the slightest of edges on all the others: rarely has a story torn itself out of the page and taken on a something-elseness, a state beyond writing and reading. I was seriously wondering (correction: I continue to wonder) whether Reggie was employing some sort of hypno-word rhythm to lure the reader’s mind into another place

Reggie Oliver has a story here, and I’m beginning to fall head over heels in love  with his writing.  Reggie is one of my discoveries of the year. Flowers of the Sea, is a heart breaking, moving, and poignant story that will move you when you read.

“Flowers of the Sea” by Reggie Oliver follows the physical and mental decay of an artist, as told by her husband, whose slowly dawning consciousness of the process of the disease has a haunting emotional depth.  The narrator’s realisation of his own mortality is rendered with great skill.  The story seems to draw out the themes of the collection’s other narratives, to focus their sometimes only half-expressed ideas, with a disturbing clarity.

Ah, another person who was so hypnotised by Reggie’s story in the Ha of Ha! I consider it to be one of the best short stories I’ve read in years. In fact, possibly THE best

“…the itinerary of a journey into the depths of hell, the story one of the most disturbing in the book, with its unnerving imagery and account of the slow inevitable loss of self…” Black Static #25 (TTA Press)

After 19/1/12, further reviews on this story will appear in the comments below.

It emerged at exactly Moon, straight into Midnight’s arms.  Fired straight from between the cylindrical hugging of the tunnel-walls within the custom-built, man-sized, rifle-scoured barrel, it found itself to be a highest-quality foundry’s  top-notch  cannonball, tougher than steel, heavier than iron, more sparkling than fairy-dust, lighter than light itself, faster than the fastest atoms-in-collision.

Meanwhile, being aware of itself as a land now plagued by orcs of no orc-ish pedigree countenanced by any previous truth or fiction, it had magicked weapons into its allies’ hands, weapons equally conscious as the weapon-handlers themselves but, more importantly, less clumsy and indeed strategically cleverer, too.

Beyond strategy, however, with regard to tactics, the land looked to the story-tellers or history-writers that came afterwards to pick up the pieces of destiny and put them back together again.  It was a shame that nobody realised that strategy and tactics were never differentiable or clear-cut and, even if they were, they should have been shared out differently in the so-called ‘playground’ of war. One potato, two potato, three potato, more.

So much for the land. A land called Zencore by those who were tenants or allies of that land.  A land called Zoocern by the land itself.  But that sounded too much like Susan.  A land called Sue. And the land was male.  Yet the land knew nothing about gender. Only about clearing its fields and byways of orcs of any persuasion, especially orcs with an ugliness beyond the pale of reason, the land’s reason or the reason of the land’s tenants or allies. No reality could incubate such ugliness and continue to remain reality.

Although our friend the cannonball was fired faster than it was possible to imagine it being fired, there was sufficient time for it, first, to become aware of its own essence of self, then its gender, second, his purpose, third, his end, before he ended and became ‘it’ again, fourth, his friends and foes, fifth, his trajectory, sixth, his this that and the other, seventh, his food and necessary bowel movements, last.  Even so he had to fit in tactics and strategy between each stage because he knew at the back of his mind that the weapon-handler’s aim had not been all that good and he needed to adjust his own trajectory: a word he had learnt between two earlier stages of his existence.

The chief orc stood akimbo on the brow of the land: its preened feathers caked with the flesh they spiked. The lesser orcs stood around it. The land forgot how story-tellers avoid descriptions because they know that all any reader needs is a standard imagination to outdo them. This was a case in point.  The historians were better at their own descriptions, in any event.  Often uglier than the orcs themselves.

There remained nothing but the chief orc’s befouled feathers after I finished by hitting the target bang on. The body that had grown such feathers no longer existed, never had existed, although I had felt it squelch as I hit it.  The other orcs would have vanished in scattershots of light if they had been there in the first place so as to be able to vanish.  Collateral damage in deadly hindsight.

“One potato, two potato, three potato, more,” chanted Sue with her fists out-stretched as tokens to count rather than weapons to use, then going off to skip with her skipping-rope near the statue of a stone-carved, metal-hatted soldier that was moustachioed with potential humour and bearing another statue of a large fish or lizard conjoined upon the original statue’s back in yet more seamless, unbroken carving.  Or that is what she would have told me that she saw had I possessed ears with which to listen.  Perforated drumbeats, I guess.  The end had come before the end.

Stones can’t cry.  But they can hurt you.