A review of my only novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT….

The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

https://trumpetville.wordpress.com/2023/01/10/or-nemonymous-night/

Above is the link to  a major review in 2011 by Peter Tennant of my only novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT. The review was in print at the time, and it has just now been transferred to a blog post!

 

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Chômu Press

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I have just heard that Chômu Press is sadly closing down very shortly. Thanks to them for publishing my one and only novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT so brilliantly in 2011 when I was 63, This is possibly one of the most ‘obscure’ novels ever written and if you want to experience it you should get it before the end of January.

The Dream Sickness

The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

“Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.” – from Prelude of Nemonymous Night

I had genuinely forgotten some of the now possible relevances in this book, but I have just been reminded on Facebook to look for them in my long novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chômu Press 2011) — and I found this:

“The dream sickness – like a ‘flu pandemic – caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered …”

**See more in the comments to this post below**

EDIT: The great cover is by Heather Horsley

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Nemonymous Night – Chômu Press

ORDERING: HERE

I have a few author copies of the book available for any reviewer who is not due to receive one from the publisher and who is also willing and able to formally review it on-line or in print. Please contact me at dflewis48@hotmail.com

“Um…Bird Flew?”

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Sep 11: Heather Horsley seems to have now created a variation on the Nemonymous Night cover:-

Roger Keen

Some AI visual experiments triggered by my reviews of Roger Keen, reviews linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/literary-stalker/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/29/the-empty-chair-roger-keen/

David Mathew

AI visual experiments triggered by my gestalt reviews of his novels and stories, reviews linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/david-mathew/

The Films of His Life by Brian Howell

(A mini-novel in four screen ratios)

“What is the next step? Write a film review, make a film, become a cinema manager …”

As I have done recently with my pet art AI (HERE) shot by shot, frame by frame, screen by screen, but this short quadcunxed story somehow wonderfully conveys the excitement of the  old days of moving big faces on cinema screens, the Westerns et al that Mark’s father saw and imbued his son with, those  cinema fascinations, and I follow the box shapes I grew up with in the fifties and then the later various panorama screen ratios of Mark’s listed experiences, many of the named Directors and films shuttling past my inner megascopic screen as I remember most of these types of art film etc. here being straddled by Mark’s sodomic days blending, segueing or soft.-focussing into a dream scene of his potential straight-lined marriage and a daughter whom he’d imbue with cinema films, too — transcending any possible disratios of any old AI, I guess.

“What I want to know is what is the ratio of my dreams, what is the ratio of yours?”

A story in NEURO MAGAZINE #3

My previous reviews of Brian Howell: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-howell/

More of my single desseminations of the new as due to be linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

‘Yawar Jaguar’ by Arturo Calderon (from NEO-DECADENCE EVANGELION: ZAGAVA)

As reviewed and image-triggered by Des Lewis…

 From “Origine du monde” (beware looking at this famous Courbet painting here!) to “a roulette of friends and lovers [went] in and out her life as fast as a starving cheetah after a pronghorn antelope.” This is the unmissable and truly MIND-WILDING story of a girl in Lima, late of Cuzco, and her Jaguar obsession, her computer streaming services, from a “constant chain of epiphanies”  to “A constant chain of messages and replies [was] in constant flow in the weeks after that first virtual face-off,…” And her meeting with a  girl with similar proclivities, who includes the skills of the mending and mantling of computers.  A were-Jaguar Sapphic alliance of powerful cosmoverse repercussions. Alongside a Bowenesque ‘shadowy third’ in the shape of a tattoo man, and the words he instils are now inscribed upon the the reader that is me. Took me to the limits of reading.

“Anti-climax at its best.”

***

A story presented to me by the editor Justin Isis as just one example of the work in the Neo-Decadence Evangelion anthology in 2023. It’s available here: https://zagava.de/shop/neo-decadence-evangelion?edition=19

My previous reviews of Justin Isis: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/justin-isis/

My previous reviews of ZAGAVA: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/zagava/

The above review is part of Des’s DESSEMINATION project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

THE ENIGMA OF TIMOTHY ROME by ALAN PRICE

“Become the music itself.”

This is a most inspiring portrait of a man, as seen by a co-climber  bloke who knew him in life, climbing a tree for its own sake, if not scaling the world’s demands, his inability to fit into the working world, his attraction to women that he ever failed to optimise! His neuro-diversity, his immersion above all in the majestic music of Bruckner, a composer who, with his gaucheness, we are told once counted all the leaves in a tree, as I ever count in aggregation the meanings and gleanings in the stories I read,  but also there is the branched ricochet with a Schoenberg string quartet as an atonal analogy of contrast that his life often became. Both are  favourite musical passions of mine, as it happens. I lived again through this story, and became its music. A landmark work, certainly for me. Not wholly an enigma variation, but a fixed and honest truth harboured within it. What will it mean to you?

A story forthcoming in TIME AND PROPINQUITY, an anthology that will be published later this year by the Montag Press.

My previous reviews of Alan Price: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/the-illiterate-ghost-alan-price/

The above review is part of my project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

DUCK EGG FARM by Andrew Humphrey

This is the poignant story of two brothers (narrated by the bookish one of them) caught up in the drug and eventually more violent crime scene in Norwich from the Seventies onward, neatly characterised and placed, including their relationship with  each other, with their mother, and their fellow crooks….and the wide-ranging reading literary material of the narrator made me think that what might have killed them, or what might have saved them, was this fiction’s vested interest? A tantalising ending.

A story from a collection by this author — ‘A Punch to the Heart’ published by Head Shot Press: https://headshotpress.com/a-punch-to-the-heart/

My previous reviews of Andrew Humphrey: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/andrew-humphrey/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/the-alsiso-project/

More of my single Desseminations of the new as due to be linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

The First Suspect by Brian Howell

The story of a man finding what appears to be items of child porn near a day centre which children frequent, and he takes these items home in a quandary of guilt as to what he should now do, not even looking beyond the first  impressions of the images’ details. His anxiety is magnified… as is mine in reading this story at all and having to write about it. Possession or destruction! A story that has no repercussions other than those stemming from its own fiction as potential truth. A clever gaslighting of the reader. A crime waiting to be discovered, a crime that was never a crime in the first place, as the crime in the story was fiction, far-fetched fiction? But fetched from where and unto where?

***

A story in BANG! an anthology of Noir Fiction coming from the Headshot Press this March.

My previous reviews of Brian Howell: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-howell/

More of my single desseminations of the new as due to be linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

The House Party at Smoky Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1935)

This is a story that any review of it will inevitably SPOIL, I guess. But here I precariously go… without even a single mention of the white parrot….The fact that I was there, too, among the listed company invited to a social gathering on Smoky Island, at the house thereon, and the nature of the narrator’s knowledge of the various guests about most of whom you receive penned thumbnails. In particular a certain couple as ‘item’ who hold the ominous limelight of the ‘frame’ story, yes, a massive frame story when compared to the ghost story-telling night’s stories that they tell each other, stories about which we receive, again, penned thumbnails. A gamut of a period. The portrait of an era. And thus I particularly felt an affinity with the ‘Bright Young Things’, who, amidst the ghost story-telling, “sat cross-legged on the floor with arms around one another quite indiscriminately as far as sex was concerned … except one languid, sophisticated creature in orange velvet and long amber ear-rings, who sat on a low stool with a lapful of silken housekeeper’s cat, giving everyone an excellent view of the bones in her spine.” That is where I shall leave it, its guestalt complete.

***

Context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/womens-weird-more-strange-stories-by-women-1891-1937/

THE WEDDING RING: Ellen Tierney 1884–1904, by Bernard MacLaverty

“‘You’ll not lay a finger on me,’ said Ellie, laughing. She bunched her fists and held her elbows tightly in to her waist.”

This is a poignant story, poignant literally, sniggerable, too, perhaps, as two sisters dress and clean the dead body of their 20 year old niece Ellie, died from UTI, I infer, unless I misremember something. The older sister, with hung gold cross vertical on a chain to stop abrading the chin, stricter than the other sister, and such strictures extended to not only the spitting upon an iron to see how hot it is but also inserting a hot poker into a goffering iron for smoother lace to be put on the body, and, later, a pointed intimacy with the corpse to absolve the message given by a gold ring they found around Ellie’s neck. “Why would anyone want to wear the likes of that? Instead of on your finger.” There’d been no such poker for Ellie, thank God, judging by the auntopsy! (My word, not the story’s). Ellie died before she fulfilled her love with a man who that aunt considered to be unworthy, one of three lodgers in their house — as we see in extended flashback — a love affair as a single kiss after he eased a skelf from Ellie’s finger with a needle! Any ‘brothel sprouts’, notwithstanding!

“And if it isn’t foulness and filth they’re after, it’s a round-about way to lead up to foulness and filth.”

***

Context of this review: https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/781-2/

THE TROJAN SOFA by Bernard MacLaverty

“In one dream I’m in school and nobody in the class knows what ‘onomatopoeia’ is except me. But I can’t put my hand up. I’m paralysed. Another dream is of me snoring. And jerking awake to stop me snoring.”

This is a classic story. Is it already a classic story I happen not to have encountered before, i.e. a work that has already been deemed by others to be a classic? I shall check after I have written this review of it. A story about a skinny, precociously smart 11 year old boy and his experiences within sofas as a so-called righteous means of Catholics burgling Protestants. His pissing and sleeping arrangements within the sofa are larger than life, but wildly believable, as are his father and uncle who are part of the gang selling furniture then burgling the house where it is delivered, the boy in the middle of the night cutting himself out of the sofa and letting them in! There is so much more to take in about these laterally thought-out manoeuvres, particularly the manoeuvre here in question in what can only be deemed an unforgettable Swiftian masterpiece.

“It’s that soap with the wee label that never goes away. Imperial Leather. The last thing to go is the wee label. How do they make it do that?”

***

Full context of this review: https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/781-2/

THE STRATHANTINE IMPS: STEVE DUFFY

The creepiness in the previous story above is now apotheosised in “a mad little castle in Bavarian gothic dropped on the Ayrshire coast.”

***

“…Lettice was running full-tilt up the gravelled path—she was an ungainly sprinter, her elbows stuck out comically as she ran,…”

An occasion recalled later when there was a fire and a certain masked imp… I have long been impressed by the stories of Steve Duffy, not least this new one… they seem to linger long after you want them to, and I guess that is a compliment!
Here a 13 year old girl called Amanda is the story’s leasehold narrator, living an insular life in the ‘mad little castle’ with her father and brother, and, inter alia, she has her first experience of thinking she is going mad, but this can happen at any age, I could tell her. She certainly does her best in her new life with the latest Twinkle at the end of this story when she is older, and one mystery at least is solved: how she knew earlier how to spell “Aljaniu qadim” after merely hearing it being spoken by her father’s friend during the long drought of 1976 that we all remember, a friend called Alge (who was accompanied by a woman called Lettice), a man whom Amanda suspected of importuning her younger brother Euan in that large house with that diffident, even uncaring, acid-taking father (Her father’s “voice was lethargic and somehow long-suffering, as if I was in the habit of disturbing his journeys in the higher void”) and the recurrent kind governesses all called Twinkle … she recalls those strange words NOW as written down but THEN as only heard: unless those two words, and other similar words, were implanted by the person she later spoke to around bonfires, not all of them to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. But who implanted them first? The freehold author? The children’s bonfire day at the ‘mad castle’ was an echo of earlier and later campfire truths, I guess.
Euan was a chirpy lad until, he, too becomes an ‘old soul’ in the ‘higher void’? (“…there wasn’t the incessant string of babble at my elbow, the endless questions and endearing observations.”) I shall not forget the masked imps at the bonfire party nor the smell of Alge’s incense, nor Amanda’s feeling incensed: when she’d ‘never been so angry with’ her father. For me the 1976 heat drought did eventually finish, too, with its momentarily awakening thunderstorm, but worse was due to come, wasn’t it?

“…as if I might fall off the surface of the earth into the void above.”

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/steve-duffy-reviews/

***

Full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/19/the-best-horror-of-the-year-volume-fourteen/

ON TERMS by Christine Brooke-Rose

The nature of consciousness after death as a literary experiment in repetition and point of view, a street like a vampire’s jaw, suicide, decay, wedding, bride, an older lady, coffin, wedding carnation stolen from the coffin’s flowers, etc. and I suggest that most people will either not finish reading it or become a ghost of themself, as I just did. Someone else is writing this review of it, and, with the story’s author being dead, I take some responsibility for it like a literary Godparent. The nearest any set of words has come to describing what a ghost is and how it can possibly exist and being ‘on terms’ with it as oneself. A new self born, as the old self finishes reading it, but the old self is still here as a ghost in the brain helping to write this review.

***

Context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/twentieth-century-ghost-stories/

THE BLOSSOMING by Elizabeth Taylor

“As his voice trailed off, he was thinking of all the old-age pensioners looking after aged parents. This was the way it was going. Soon they would be looking after grandparents.”

A prophecy of our times today? And this lingering tale of an ageing Miss Partridge, and having lost her mother, she is now rich enough to please herself, and she begins to win a new Miss Partridge! 

“In the sink squatted a large spider. He seemed to own the place. ‘We’ll be alone together tonight,’ she thought – ‘the spider and I!’ She suddenly contorted her face and turned on the tap with a gush, washing the poor thing – all broken legs and frantic reluctance – down the plug hole.”

The house decaying is now chivvied up by new wallpaper, roses and other blossoms, a gamut of colour that sounds garish to me! But the workmen, after her failed holiday in Hove, chivvy her up, too! Especially with their own thermos tea and sandwiches and offers of fags amidst the “recidivist flower-beds.”
She even helps them with the scraping of walls.

Now with the workmen gone off to a new job, they become ghosts of her place to keep her company.

“Christmas is always a bad time, she reminded herself; but it will pass.”

***

My ET reviews indexed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/21/my-reviews-of-elizabeth-taylor-stories-in-alphabetical-order/

HUSBANDS AND WIVES by Elizabeth Taylor

“The ash-leaves came down in bunches, still softly green, but the beech-leaves swirled in the air, flat, like coins, or curled and convoluted like sea shells.
It was like a painting by Monet, Alison thought, standing at the sitting-room window and watching. Leaves. They dripped, cascaded; they mounted up in columns like something from the Old Testament or fell like a fountain. Inside, they would lisp drily along the passage or sail in and float in the soup. In the morning she would find them in bed with her.”

Those leaves, and now her husband Eric’s welcome leave impends, not death but his leave from the army during the war. People in the area had worried about Alison in the lonely house by the woods that Eric had built with the latest mod cons, but sadly no children, as they had planned. She managed. She yearned for his seven days leave. She was often approached by the gypsy Rose and her dirty children, a woman who lived nearby with her knife-grinder husband. An ironic perception of those who were poorer off but in someways richer and perhaps a danger to Alison…as she later hears Rose screaming she was being beaten by her husband, screams in the night outside in the night, the night before Eric was due to return …Beating the children, too?
A potentially powerful, nightmarish, Walter de la Mareish story…

“For a man – she remembered that much of the law – must be allowed to beat his own wife. It is not for the police to interfere.”

***

Other ET reviews here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26961-2/

A FOREIGN DIGNITARY by Bernard MacLaverty

The story reviewed below seems not to be included in his collected stories, but it should be. I sought it out because of today’s exchange HERE

“…and even though there is no hope of a reply I inquire after our daughter, Elgiva. She is a young woman who is ill with a skin complaint which makes her avoid the company of all but her closest female friends.”This is story of a colonial dignitary from the British Isles who thus writes home to his wife not expecting a reply because of postal logistics. And it is somehow a short work that truly creeps under our own skin, not only ELGIVA’s. It is genuinely oblique in an Aickman fashion, but even more horrific, with a similar brinkmanship of absurdity and disarming strangeness. Kafkaesque, too, when he is invited to a prison and he sees all the containers the prisoners are kept in, containers like claustrophobic cuboid bells, ‘bells’ that if they are naughty are thumped with a sledgehammer relentlessly, or so I recall, without somehow daring to re-check. One of them holds a girl prisoner. The night before, a pubescent girl performs a salacious dance for him at a ceremony to which he is invited and he is offered her for overnight pleasure which he politely declines. I think the word VAGILE actually covers the impression of both the above scenes as a singularity, by this word’s straightforward meaning of agile freedom as well as by its askew implication. Not a fable or parable, I sense, but simply a work that is what it is. A great horror story.

My other reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/29/the-collected-stories-of-bernard-maclaverty/

BONER MCPHARLIN’S MOLL: Tim Winton

“In his Levi’s and thongs he had that truckin stride, like a skater’s wade, swaying hip to hip with his elbows flung and his chest out.”

This is a story that somehow encompasses the most believable portrait of a person encompassing the most believable portrait of a woman narrator portraying him from their age 13 onward, contemporaries at school, with her even filling in some of his words in such a striking manner when his taciturn nature became verbose just one time, filling them in because what he otherwise said was beyond her to understand! 

These two characters really LIVE off this novelette’s pages. No way I can do justice to it all. The sadnesses, poignancies, roughness, the unreal pornographic collage upon paper, the down to earth meat chainsaws implied by the previous story above. The parents of both these two people, they LIVE, too, off the pages. Everything LIVES. But specially the eponymous HIM, who boned meats and had a boner the narrator arguably visualised and never experienced, even though I infer they were in sporadic LOVE. 

To nail this work in a short review would be like harpooning a shark. Arguably, the strongest story as a STORY in this whole book so far. Full of many Glimpses of Truth. Earning every single necessary permit to build fiction characters as realities just like or unlike her father’s “building code was a branch of Calvinism perfected by the omission of divine mercy.” Just like she said she owned the rumours about herself. Fictions as truth. Or vice versa?

***

THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/that-glimpse-of-truth-6/

THE COLD OUTSIDE: John Burnside

“To be honest, I like hauling treacle more than anything else.”

I turned the pages of this work easily, page-turningly, but it also felt like hauling treacle. The empathisable story of a man, still young enough, after 30 years marriage to Sall with a daughter across the other side of the globe in Montreal, all of them, past and future, with their own stolen silences by small talk, a man young enough, yes, to be working at a paid job with what he called molasses, but also old enough to be dying of cancer, and just recently told how soon. He picks up, after a treacle trip, a hitchhiker in the almost-snow of sleet amidst Scottish distances, a 18ish year old boy in the dress of drag after a party that he didn’t seem to have enjoyed, with mysterious bruises, and a gash. The driver and the passenger, too, survived each other with silences stolen by small talk. Yet it was good we were there to infer what was going on in their respective worlds, but did each of us infer the same things? After all, we are all dying alone in our own ways and speeds. Only the demarcated distances on childhood’s maps have the safety of forever. And, now, maybe even they can be unsafe — because not only are frontiers, as ever, liable to change, but also so is the intrinsic globe itself upon which such frontiers sit? And now, because of his condition, too late to travel far enough to visit his daughter…

My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/best-british-short-stories-2011/#comment-11854

***

THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/that-glimpse-of-truth-6/#comment-26070

CUN: Nguyen Huy Thiep

K’s father, a male version of Walter de La Mare’s Midget (currently being reviewed here) or something called CUN from the womb of woman called DIEU, i.e. something (a word used advisedly) far more deformed and inhuman, or rather un-human, not inhuman at all? So someone writes a story based on that character CUN who became the father of K, and CUN’s old guardian called HA. A story that is its own truth or something far more rarefied that exists in an un-human world that only such fiction can reach?

“‘Cun, you’ve grown up. I’m about to die. You are about to lose me, your main support in life,’ old Ha whispered weakly. ‘Actually, I’m not your main support. You and I live together … like earthworms, crickets, bees, ants.’ The old man had a fit of coughing, then cried: ‘Human beings don’t live like us. Good heavens, why do they persecute us like this? We only want to live like everyone else, but are not able to.’”

HA left CUN gold rings, real gold. Only in a story can this un-human own gold and entice DIEU with it… DIEU who said to CUN: “Hey, Blob-with-the-Beautiful-Face, you are about to have a child! I couldn’t have believed that anything as strange as this would have happened either.”

So, CUN died, somehow giving birth to this fiction as a glimpse of truth or something far more rarefied than truth but even truer! HA! (But who was K?)

***

THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH context of above review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/11/22/the-stories-of-walter-de-la-mare-6/

LET ME COUNT THE TIMES: Martin Amis

“The time after that, she had her elbows hooked round the back of her knee-caps as a 15 stone Chinaman feasted at his leisure on her imploring sobs.”


Following SOLID GEOMETRY (above yesterday) and PEELING (here yesterday), this human-blowing story contains the mathematics of sex as averages or rogue medians, as we watch Vernon progressing and/or regressing into a mōbius section of truly rampant rutting to the power of the nth degree, a process, through streaming words both amiss and apposite, alongside alogarithmic ecstasy — initially doing it multiply with his wife, then with himself alone, later, by projecting onanistic fantasising to produce the finest penile kicks, he does it with named figures from literature, and eventually with cataclysmic rôle-visionary SF creatures and scenarios… But I think his downward retroactive spiral (if that was what it was) towards a renewed but now bloodily ‘moist uxoriousness’ was arguably triggered by an earlier ‘débacle’ of doing it it within ‘The Rainbow’… the intentional fallacy’s apotheosis? If so, a veritable glimpse of truth, indeed, a major Quimcunx.

“He waited several minutes, propped up on an elbow, glazedly eternalized in the potent moment.”

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/career-move/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story/#comment-24433/

THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/that-glimpse-of-truth-6/