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Text of the page (random words):
s extremely well at the heart of this piece hotel rooms cabins on a ferry and a physical distance between a couple that is also a distance of minds fates souls who knows i don t but i don t care i love the writing and there s an overt or perhaps not overt but core kafka strain to the development over only three pages sometimes i think i ve cracked des lewis he s a kafkaesque writer resembling the kafka of a country doctor but no that s not quite right great story great the body in the bed not as convincing a piece but still good it s a tale of perversion but the perversion is never made explicit or perhaps the perversion is only a background detail or setting for some reason i initially assumed the narrator was a dog and it can be read that way except for a few troubling details that contradict this assumption he takes a train on his own it s odd it s dark i don t really know what else to say about it october 28th the last word i would ever use in connection with a des lewis story is conventional he s absolutely not a conventional writer neither in subject matter nor form therefore i was suprised when i read cloysters awesome what a great story let me explain if i can it s very un des like it doesn t feel like a des lewis story on certain levels so if i claim it s one of his best will that somehow logically suggest that his normal work is too odd a neat paradox that i feel no because although this story doesn t feel like des in its packaging it s des through and through underneath and although we might read it as a non des story we ll think about it later as a bonfide total des lewis tale one of his best as i ve already said the format is orthodox a rich businessman and his wife move out of the rat race of the city and into the country things go wrong in an unsettling way a return to the urban jungle results in a slide down into misery i have often said that des lewis doesn t use algorithms in his writing but this story is as algorthmical as a roald dahl or may sinclair tale but it s far denser and stranger than anything by those very good writers the writing the prose is just excellent there are the curious similes and weird angle narrative approaches but there s nothing here that couldn t be use to teach a class of creative writing students and they would undoubtedly be better at the end of it knee jerks for nancy this is also much more conventional in terms of narrative drive than most des lewis stories but unlike cloysters it has more of a colloquial style and therefore i didn t enjoy it as much though it s still a neat tale a waking nightmare about baby sitters and the mundane horrors of modern domestic life if cloysters deserves a mark of 10 10 and it does i would give this one 6 10 that s just the way i feel reading cloysters this morning made me regret taking another break from this collection after the body in the bed november 15th time is one of the many things i am short of i am also short of arms and eyes having only two of each otherwise i would read this collection faster than i have been doing perhaps anyway my estimated time of completion is january 2013 and so mr rampives just like the narrator of this story i have sometimes been asked to help fix a car i don t own a car of my own and i don t know too much about car mechanics i was an electronics engineer not a mechanical engineer i understand valves and transistors not gears and pistons but anyway on the few occasions where i did successfully fix a car engine it was always because the spark plugs were malfunctioning sometimes it was enough to take them out clean the ends and re insert them i doubt that such repairs were more than very temporary though anyway this story is a minor delight there are overtones of menace but they remain overtones only thankfully nancy s mother i have a vague memory of having read this story somewhere before according to the publication information at the beginning of the book it was published in the first issue of a magazine entitled uneasy reading which i m positive i never received so maybe my memory is false it s a very vague memory though some flavour some wisp of atmsophere seems familiar and yet it s not one of the best stories in this volume far from it it s a fairly unremarkable brief account of a grotesque wedding not that there s anything wrong with it it just is what it is the horn of europe great title for a story i wish i had come up with this title brilliant this is a great little philosophical tale the sort of tale i wish more writers would write more often it wears the cloak of a horror story but it s not really the possible horror is only incidental maybe a maniac attacked a little girl that s not what the story is really about it s about time and change and that curiously intense bittersweet feeling that comes when we truly think about the state of the universe about entropy about everything being in flux it s a heraclitian story a time travel story without a time machine a story about memory and supposition one of the most important stories in the book so far december 22nd another long pause i am going to try to read the remaining short stories this month and the two novellas in january 2013 real time reviewing is harder than it looks actually all reviewing is harder than it looks or maybe i m just finding it harder as i get older i find myself growing increasingly reluctant to review anything if i like something i ll plug it to my friends and people who i think might appreciate it if i dislike something i m tending more and more just to keep quiet about it there doesn t seem too much point in saying too much either way however as i have started this real time review i ll certainly try to finish it i note however that des himself has given up writing them rightly so in my view he s done more than his fair share on contributing to the cause of weird fiction it s time others made a contribution too was that a message or a movement another good title another enigmatic brief tale the interior location has almost a dickensian flavour des is good at dickensian flavours there s a growing sense of unease as the main character donald waits to learn what is being planned for him it turns out that well i still don t know what was being planned for him and maybe neither does he suitably it has a christmasy feel to it perfect for the season in which i read it a benchmark for ghosts crikey this story feels very very familiar but why when i checked the publication credits i can see that it wasn t published in any small press magazine i might have encountered in the 1990s and yet i m sure i ve read it before where and how it s a good story set in des own stamping ground on the essex coast with probably accurate autobiographical elements co opted into this tale of loss and the passing of time at least this is what the tale seems to be about to me regrets hankerings the failure to carpe diem and let me add that it s easy to urge people to carpe diem but i have found through long experience that women don t like their diems to be carped without a fair amount of work which is something that the narrator of this story also seems to be extremely annoyed about though he ll only admit to being mildly jealous glimpse a classic sudden fiction less than a page long it packs a punch it s a brief philosophical fable or disquisition des does these short pieces brilliantly this could almost be a pu songling tale in terms of brevity conciseness and punch of theme although the incidental mechanics are completely different of course superb january 1st 2013 i failed to read all the short stories before the end of 2012 no matter i ll read them now and also read one of the novellas before the end of january this means i ought to finish the book in february nipping the bud a menacing and very dark little tale almost evil des does what he does best he gives us a slightly sordid neo dickensian interior but riddled painfully through with shafts of bleak loneliness and with such a concrete absence of warmth and sentiment that the reader feels relief that he is outside the tale even as he feels disturbed by the ghost of an idea that perhaps the reality described in the text is around him in essence it s a gruesome and effective black gem of a horror story it s perfectly des esque and not bulked out by a single unnecessary word i note that it appeared in 1990 in the very first issue of the fairly well known in british small press horror circles magazine peeping tom des was more popular back then than he is now this tale demonstrates why he was popular and also makes inexplicable the fact he is less popular now but maybe republication in this book will help to rectify this situation inside the bud this title makes the story sound as if it might be a sequel of some sort to the preceding tale but it s not it has one of the best opening lines i have ever encountered i have dreams whilst dreams have me but betrays itself a little later at least in my eyes by introducing h p lovecraft into the story and presenting him as some sort of guru of the imagination which i don t believe he really was this story was written for a magazine called crypt of cthulhu so this example of lovecraft licking may have been a tactical device though des rarely plays tactical games of this nature so probably not it s not a bad story but not a patch on the one that came before clad bone a dream story but i don t get it i don t get it in the sense that i don t really believe there s much going on it anyway but also that i don t understand why des decided to include it in this magnificent collection it s a neither here nor there story female vampires in a dream not my cup of tea was my cup of tea once when i was about 18 years old but that was a long time ago one of the weaker stories in the book so far the five mentagras a biggie one of those crypto novelettes made up of separate and supposedly linked stories that aren t even really stories but chapters from an unwritten book or from many unwritten books i feel i have read this work before it s not listed on the publication credits page why then is it vaguely familiar was i present when des was discussing it on some online forum or other but he doesn t do that in detail the first pseudo chapter the drogulus nice allusion to logical positivism there is a jerky and odd tale in which des refers to himself in the third person but not in an annoying way because it s perfectly metafictional the second pseudo chapter the famulus takes us right back into the heart of des esque excellence but how it fits in with what has gone before isn t clear to me at all but it s a superb piece of writing so who cares the subsequent pseudo chapters the grinagog the hummum and the mentagra all go about their business of being just themselves while nodding and gesturing at each other in ways that i m barely aware of this suite of tales this crypto novelette has a perfect ending that probably does tie everything together it s a seeking of the opposite of something that is cast as sense but in fact is nonsense the logical positivists believed that all mystical questions were simply nonsense put into the form of sense anyway i enjoyed the mentagras but i can safely say that 10 years ago i wouldn t have enjoyed it at all one must learn to loosen up when confronted with des s work it s almost never pretentious as i once assumed it often was but just oddly faceted january 20th it has been snowing not much certainly not enough to get into a flap about but a perfect excuse for staying indoors by the fire and reading so now i have finally finished all the short stories contained in this book i have only the two novellas left to read here are my remarks for what they re worth about the stories i have lately read build a character des himself said something a while back to the effect that he was very happy with this story he didn t actually say that in those words i can t recall what he did say but it gave me that impression namely that he was proud and pleased with this story i read it and thought well it s not bad but it isn t a classic not in my view anyway it s a sort of metafictional piece which describes the creation of a character without any pretence that he s a real person the story then gives this character an adventure with mythical overtones an airy fairy but well written crepuscular rummage through a magical fantasyland but with gothicky overtones freak show flavour like angela carter but not quite then the character is metafictionally dismantled i love metafiction but this piece has just a little too much respect for the writer as an important and powerful creator writers generally aren t important creators and they are virtually never powerful my own experience as a writer is that i m not important or powerful enough to avoid my tax demands and national insurance bills for example between white lines the first d f lewis story i ever read and ah it brings back memories memories of the early 1990s british small press scene i look and i see that this was published in 1991 in the eighth issue of a magazine with the charming title dementia 13 it must have been the first issue i ever saw of that magazine which was soon after to publish a number of my earliest tales i remember chatting via letter with pam creais the editor of dementia 13 about this story and about des in general i rarely know what his stories mean but they are addictive anyway she told me yes that s exactly right i think that between white lines is about two sentient cars like dark herbies or like the robot racing cars in roger zelazny s very first published short story passion play or they might be dragons or rocs instead of cars who knows i loved this when i first read it 22 years ago and i love it again now the lost balcony a brief tale about a very specific kind of obsession i recall when i was young playing in the grounds of a large deserted house and noticing a tiny balcony on a high wall but there seemed no access to it there was no window behind the balcony and no ladder or staircase up to it maybe it was a balcony solely for the benefit of climbers specifically those climbers who indulge in the difficult and dangerous variation called buildeering buildings tend to be more symmetrical than rockfaces so hoping for unexpected ledges or big handholds is generally pointless this story is good but not remarkable when i was an old man a superb title that needs to be said first of all a truly great title and i am a connoisseur of titles as for the story itself this one feels odd even odder than the average des story which is odd enough already i think that the extra oddity comes from the science fictional element which is unusual and weirdly unsuited to des style des has done a few sf stories in his time and none of them are normal sf by a long way but the images in this story are acute and wonderful the giant drill on a ramp brings into mind at the earth s core or when worlds c...