Des's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 02 Apr 2025 07:45:30 -0700 60 Des's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Black Static #74 53317830 96 Andy Cox Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.50 Black Static #74
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
It seems sacrilegious to even think that I might be able to do justice to such a major reading experience with an attempted summary, let alone the creation, as is my usual wont, of connections with the rest of this set of fictions. So be it, for the very first time since I started book reviewing, I won’t do any of this. A novelette that will haunt you forever and one that will be anthologised many times into many futures. It now has a unique place in my heart as a work of literature.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction]]> 28100566 818 Leena Krohn Des 5 Please see my detailed review, equally massive, posted elsewhere under my name.

Merged review:

A massive unmissable book.
Please see my detailed review, equally massive, posted elsewhere under my name.]]> 4.23 2015 Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction
author: Leena Krohn
name: Des
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves:
review:
A massive unmissable book.
Please see my detailed review, equally massive, posted elsewhere under my name.

Merged review:

A massive unmissable book.
Please see my detailed review, equally massive, posted elsewhere under my name.
]]> <![CDATA[Transactions of the Flesh: A Homage to Joris-Karl Huysmans]]> 19398798 254 D.P. Watt Des 5 “Grow old along with me.�
A fascinating and creepy tale of a graveyard � tombs now beset with floods � then another of this book’s ‘rock structured� walls of a church, wherein our protagonist � while investigating, MR James-like, the history of the sculptress of the Angel Head on one of the tombs outside � is trapped by a seemingly mad curator. But that gives you no clue or premonition of what happens and how it happens. There is, for example, a spy-hole like that in the front of this book through which a pole is poked towards a Real Presence upon the mad curator in a mode not dissimilar from Derek John’s earlier religio-sexual moments� I give up! Read it. It’s brilliant. And, oh yes, as you can tell from my quote above, there is another budding future ‘lady wife� for our hero…possibly.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
]]> 4.48 2013 Transactions of the Flesh: A Homage to Joris-Karl Huysmans
author: D.P. Watt
name: Des
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/09/08
shelves:
review:
Angel Head by Harold Billings
“Grow old along with me.�
A fascinating and creepy tale of a graveyard � tombs now beset with floods � then another of this book’s ‘rock structured� walls of a church, wherein our protagonist � while investigating, MR James-like, the history of the sculptress of the Angel Head on one of the tombs outside � is trapped by a seemingly mad curator. But that gives you no clue or premonition of what happens and how it happens. There is, for example, a spy-hole like that in the front of this book through which a pole is poked towards a Real Presence upon the mad curator in a mode not dissimilar from Derek John’s earlier religio-sexual moments� I give up! Read it. It’s brilliant. And, oh yes, as you can tell from my quote above, there is another budding future ‘lady wife� for our hero…possibly.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

]]> <![CDATA[The Eighth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories]]> 3927079 7 � Introduction (The Eighth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories) � (1972) � essay by Robert Aickman
11 � The Haunted Haven � (1972) � short story by A.E. Ellis
22 � The Red Lodge � (1928) � short story by H. Russell Wakefield [as by H.R. Wakefield]
37 � Midnight Express � (1935) � short story by Alfred Noyes
43 � Meeting Mr. Millar � (1972) � novelette by Robert Aickman
87 � The Gorgon's Head � (1899) � short story by Gertrude Bacon
100 � The Tree � (1972) � short story by Joyce Marsh
109 � The Haunted and the Haunters � (1882) � novelette by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (variant of The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain 1859) [as by Lord Lytton]
151 � Bezhin Lea � (1852) � short story by Иван Тургенев? (trans. of Бежин луг? 1851) [as by Ivan Turgenev]
176 � The Last Séance � (1926) � short story by Agatha Christie]]> 190 Robert Aickman 0006166121 Des 5
“In the handling of the unknown there must always be danger, but the cause is a noble one, for it is the cause of Science.�

Science being literally knowledge, thus making the unknown known. I said, when reviewing earlier the second of these Fontana books, that it was possibly Aickman’s greatest and most dangerous achievement � and I would now add: in the world of literature as a powerful fount (Fontana) of knowledge. As if at this conclusion of his versions of these Fontana books with the 8th volume (although, for some as yet unknown foreordained reason, I still have four of them to re-read and Gestalt review) he knew it may be his own last séance of science as knowledge, of literature itself, of the dangerous if noble horror in tapping some universal Bulwark of a Brain � here symbolised by the concept of ectoplasm as a child brought back from the dead for its ‘big and black� mother (Cf The Whitehead Lips) being a physical part of the medium herself not of the risen child now perceived alive � leaving the medium, like this book’s earlier Tree of Blood, shrunk red, if not dead. Left unread. As many of these stories now are.
Aickman is now roped up and finished with Fontana. At least where Time had brought him then, if not having leapfrogged what else he did later? He did not dare turn back in case he was monumentalised in stone too soon?

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.46 1972 The Eighth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
author: Robert Aickman
name: Des
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/25
shelves:
review:
THE LAST SÉANCE by Agatha Christie

“In the handling of the unknown there must always be danger, but the cause is a noble one, for it is the cause of Science.�

Science being literally knowledge, thus making the unknown known. I said, when reviewing earlier the second of these Fontana books, that it was possibly Aickman’s greatest and most dangerous achievement � and I would now add: in the world of literature as a powerful fount (Fontana) of knowledge. As if at this conclusion of his versions of these Fontana books with the 8th volume (although, for some as yet unknown foreordained reason, I still have four of them to re-read and Gestalt review) he knew it may be his own last séance of science as knowledge, of literature itself, of the dangerous if noble horror in tapping some universal Bulwark of a Brain � here symbolised by the concept of ectoplasm as a child brought back from the dead for its ‘big and black� mother (Cf The Whitehead Lips) being a physical part of the medium herself not of the risen child now perceived alive � leaving the medium, like this book’s earlier Tree of Blood, shrunk red, if not dead. Left unread. As many of these stories now are.
Aickman is now roped up and finished with Fontana. At least where Time had brought him then, if not having leapfrogged what else he did later? He did not dare turn back in case he was monumentalised in stone too soon?

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories]]> 3927172 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Playing With Fire"
* Edith Nesbit "Man-Size in Marble"
* Robert Hichens "How Love Came to Professor Guildea"
* Elizabeth Bowen "The Demon Lover"
* Sir Max Beerbohm "A. V. Laider"
* Edgar Allan Poe "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"
* Lord Dunsany "Our Distant Cousins"
* Robert Aickman "The Inner Room"
* Perceval Landon "Thurnley Abbey"
* John Metcalfe "Nightmare Jack"
* Ambrose Bierce "The Damned Thing"
* Edith Wharton "Afterward"]]> 252 Robert Aickman Des 5 I wrote this in my Fontana review above: “� the bringing of all these stories together in one volume possibly being Aickman’s most singular and dangerous achievement?!�

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.]]> 3.86 1966 The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
author: Robert Aickman
name: Des
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves:
review:

I wrote this in my Fontana review above: “� the bringing of all these stories together in one volume possibly being Aickman’s most singular and dangerous achievement?!�

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.
]]> <![CDATA[The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories]]> 633331 Contents
7 � Introduction (The Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories) � (1967) � essay by Robert Aickman
13 � The Accident � (1936) � novelette by Ann Bridge
36 � Not on the Passenger-List � (1915) � short story by Barry Pain
48 � The Sphinx Without a Secret � (1887) � short story by Oscar Wilde
53 � When I Was Dead � (1896) � short story by Vincent O'Sullivan
57 � The Queen of Spades � (1927) � novelette by Александр Пушкин? *translation of Пиковая дама? (1834) [as by Alexander Pushkin]
83 � Pargiton and Harby � (1926) � short story by Desmond MacCarthy
98 � The Snow � (1929) � short story by Hugh Walpole
107 � Carlton's Father � (1936) � short story by Eric Ambrose
119 � A School Story � (1911) � short story by M.R. James
126 � The Wolves of Cernogratz � (1913) � short story by Saki
131 � Mad Monkton � (1931) � novella by Wilkie Collins [as by William Wilkie Collins]]]> 192 Robert Aickman Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.87 1967 The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
author: Robert Aickman
name: Des
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves:
review:
I personally thank Aickman for drawing this work to my attention. It feels as it must be an influence on his own work. And I still have one chapter yet to read!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies]]> 12189846
Colleen Anderson � IT’S ONLY WORDS 3414

Daniel Ausema � TREE RING ANTHOLOGY 2066

Dominy Clements � THE USELESS 3463

Rhys Hughes � TEARS OF THE MUTANT JESTERS 1852

Colin Insole � THE APOPLEXY OF BEELZEBUB 5456

Nick Jackson � PAPER CUTS 4097

Rachel Kendall � HORROR STORIES FOR BOYS 3215

AJ Kirby � COMMON MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS REGARDING RITA KENDALL 10004

Joel Lane � MIDNIGHT FLIGHT 3223

E. Michael Lewis � THE FIFTH CORNER 3866

Tony Lovell � THE FOLLOWER 7330

David Mathew � RESIDUA 10723

Christopher Morris � THE AMERICAN CLUB 6828

Mike O’Driscoll � THE REDISCOVERY OF DEATH 9201

Reggie Oliver � FLOWERS OF THE SEA 6295

Rosanne Rabinowitz � THE PEARL AND THE BOIL 10023

Clayton Stealback � THE WRITER 8487

S.D. Tullis � HORROR PLANET 3703

Mark Valentine � YOU WALK THE PAGES 3138

D.P. Watt � ALL HIS WORLDLY GOODS 6842



I am confident that many of these stories will become classics of this genre.

A total of around 113,000 words.

================================

The Book’s Electronic Introduction

This is a basic, no frills, no-introduction, highly adequate, perfect-bound paperback book, conveying its wonderful stories and strikingly brilliant photo images. Ironically, yet meaningfully, this delightful handleable real book with hauntingly memorable items of short horror fiction plotted around real horror anthology books has only been made possible by basic electronic facilities in necessary tune with whatever skills I have as editor, typesetter and publisher � and it serves as something that will never become an E-Book. And the lasting image is just that - on page 323 where the book ends.

df lewis]]> 324 D.F. Lewis 1447757351 Des 0 to-read 4.00 2011 The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies
author: D.F. Lewis
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ode on a Grecian Urn 36611642 John Keats (1795�1821) was an English Romantic poet. The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.]]> 302 John Keats 8027230012 Des 5 Ode and Urn. The art of the curved meaning, the art that this urn has earned or owed.
Its art is one of permanence amid silence.
Beyond man’s transience.
Music untouched by time, as a single held note of silence?
Letting go of the self, becoming a receptor; imagination transcending the poet’s intentionality.
Poet as controlling vehicle but not controlling it consciously himself.
But ultimately mysterious.
Truth as Beauty amid the spiritual as now turned into a fleshy ‘ecstasy� in our times of Fake News! The only eternity that the urn has owed or earned?
It is only mortal love that becomes human passion, a passion that is soon parched, but the love depicted as frozen on the urn lasts forever. And those depicted on the urn will never return to where they live. As it is the urn that has earned and owned their existence?
Mysterious with many meanings, even beyond the poet’s intention?
Truth is both negative and positive, the Beauty of its ambiguity.

Ode on or to or even by a Grecian Urn.]]> 4.33 1819 Ode on a Grecian Urn
author: John Keats
name: Des
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1819
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/02/27
shelves:
review:
Ekphrastic, as ekphrasis covers three dimensional art as well as flat art.
Ode and Urn. The art of the curved meaning, the art that this urn has earned or owed.
Its art is one of permanence amid silence.
Beyond man’s transience.
Music untouched by time, as a single held note of silence?
Letting go of the self, becoming a receptor; imagination transcending the poet’s intentionality.
Poet as controlling vehicle but not controlling it consciously himself.
But ultimately mysterious.
Truth as Beauty amid the spiritual as now turned into a fleshy ‘ecstasy� in our times of Fake News! The only eternity that the urn has owed or earned?
It is only mortal love that becomes human passion, a passion that is soon parched, but the love depicted as frozen on the urn lasts forever. And those depicted on the urn will never return to where they live. As it is the urn that has earned and owned their existence?
Mysterious with many meanings, even beyond the poet’s intention?
Truth is both negative and positive, the Beauty of its ambiguity.

Ode on or to or even by a Grecian Urn.
]]> A Trick of the Shadow 53930549
A Trick of the Shadow contains the extraordinarily unnerving ‘Object� and the disturbing, Arthur Machen-inspired ‘A Tantony Pig�, as well as the novella ‘Bird-hags�, which in all truth might not be for you.

“I found myself thinking of these unsettling stories long after I’d finished reading them. Subtle, strange and filled with unease, the tales in A Trick of the Shadow got into my dreams.� � Ben Mee, author of Gloom Circus]]> 210 R. Ostermeier 1999629825 Des 5 My detailed review, too impractical to post here in full:: ]]> 4.58 2020 A Trick of the Shadow
author: R. Ostermeier
name: Des
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves:
review:
A major attritional work of weird literature. Impossibly disturbing.
My detailed review, too impractical to post here in full::
]]> Wild Justice 13500631
CONTENTS

Introduction by Ellen Datlow

. . . Warmer by A. R. Morlan
Anamorphosis by Caitlín R. Kiernan
A Grub Street Tale by Thomas Tessier
Back in the Dunes by Terry Lamsley
Leave Me Alone God Damn You by Joyce Carol Oates
Butcher's Logic by Roberta Lannes
A Lie for a Lie by Pat Cadigan
Keeping Alice by Simon Ings
A Punch in the Doughnut by David J. Schow
Unforgotten by Christopher Fowler
O, Rare and Most Exquisite by Douglas Clegg
Martyr and Pesty by Jonathan Lethem
Foreign Bodies by Michael Marshall Smith
Ships by Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann
A Flock of Lawn Flamingoes by Pat Murphy
Touch Me Everyplace by Michael Cadnum
The Screaming Man by Richard Christian Matheson
Rare Promise by M. M. O'Driscoll]]> 313 Ellen Datlow 1553101901 Des 4 needs has itself twisted into molten shapes of cruelty and possibly under-age sodomy before the reader’s own iris-spinning eyes.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.33 1996 Wild Justice
author: Ellen Datlow
name: Des
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/08/26
shelves:
review:
I’d say that only two male writers sparking off each other � with some concomitant, contaminant synergy of the dual male characters respectively in ‘A Punch in the Doughnut� and, less vilely, ‘Martyr and Pesty� [or female writers, too, in Morlan-Kiernan (even if that unofficial collaboration was more by magic serendipity than by consciously deliberate creative connection)] � can even hope to reach such heights or depths of vileness through fictioneering. This particular cosmically punch-drunk fable starts with the protagonist’s own burial-as-dead in tune with this book’s own burial thematics, semi-premature as his burial turns out to be, and travels through the demon/angel-smacking Bible Belt of space along with a sort of collaborative ‘William Blake : Norman Spinrad� ring-doughnut-markings (the Marriage � or here the ‘lethal kiss� � of Heaven and Hell as filtered through that earlier Marriage in the Cadiganate aphasic, but, here, amnesic Eye of a Seraph) � and the defilement of the treasure-sown “goldens sands� of the reader’s complacency into what this sex-twisting-into-new-shapes-merely-by-dint-of-sexual-needs has itself twisted into molten shapes of cruelty and possibly under-age sodomy before the reader’s own iris-spinning eyes.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[The 6th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories]]> 633337 Contents:
7 � Clarimonde � (1953) � novelette by Théophile Gautier? *translation of La morte amoureuse (1836)
39 � The Grey Ones � (1953) � short story by J.B. Priestley
56 � The Door in the Wall � (1906) � short story by H.G. Wells
73 � Priscilla and Emily Lofft � (1922) � short story by George Moore
88 � Sorworth Place � [Ralph Bain] � (1952) � novelette by Russell Kirk
107 � Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched � (1922) � short story by May Sinclair
128 � Oke of Okehurst � (1890) � novella by Vernon Lee *variant of A Phantom Lover (1886)
178 � The Lips � (1929) � short story by Henry S. Whitehead]]> 190 Robert Aickman 0006132499 Des 5
The bullet’s final release. The killing of one’s loved one to love them the more in a more ghostly territory� To play that game of fancy-dress charades to its fullest extent. With half-moon specs of the age?
The toad with its gash in its maniac-brow’s frown of her husband (also her first cousin) whom she leaves behind by having him mad enough to shoot her. Her second miscarriage of self?
You need to read this famous attritional Gothic house novelette for yourself, in order to appreciate its relentless description of Alice Oke, not just the glimpse of her at the beginning of the above Sorworth story, where the gash in the brow of her saviour in this Paget work was there a crack in the back of his head! So, yes, not just a telling glimpse or impression, but teems and teems of teasing tantalisations of her, borrowing the attritionally descriptive effects in the above Clarimonde. Suffering endless boredoms of such heartfelt samenesses, now reaching for a fulfilling apotheosis of self.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.58 1970 The 6th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
author: Robert Aickman
name: Des
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/25
shelves:
review:
OKE OF OKEHURST by Vernon Lee

The bullet’s final release. The killing of one’s loved one to love them the more in a more ghostly territory� To play that game of fancy-dress charades to its fullest extent. With half-moon specs of the age?
The toad with its gash in its maniac-brow’s frown of her husband (also her first cousin) whom she leaves behind by having him mad enough to shoot her. Her second miscarriage of self?
You need to read this famous attritional Gothic house novelette for yourself, in order to appreciate its relentless description of Alice Oke, not just the glimpse of her at the beginning of the above Sorworth story, where the gash in the brow of her saviour in this Paget work was there a crack in the back of his head! So, yes, not just a telling glimpse or impression, but teems and teems of teasing tantalisations of her, borrowing the attritionally descriptive effects in the above Clarimonde. Suffering endless boredoms of such heartfelt samenesses, now reaching for a fulfilling apotheosis of self.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #1)]]> 8686068
When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime...]]> 298 Keigo Higashino 0312375069 Des 5 No spoilers here.
“How short is a lifetime […] compared to the time it will take humankind to find all the rich veins of mathematical ore where they lie sleeping and tease them forth into the world.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.16 2005 The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #1)
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Des
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/25
shelves:
review:
Great mind-expanding fiction (couched disarmingly simply as wide print lines upon rough hear-through walls of paper), yes, so-called fiction like this one puts the reader inside each character, and even then you still fail fully to understand their motives as each constituent yet separate Proustian or guest self struggles to complete the circle of the whole self when seen in hindsight at the point of stepping into the aforementioned abyss. And then wondering why you hadn’t guessed the gestalt or guest self already all read! The “coordinates� (a word used in these final chapters) is thus finally triangulated into the matrix of life, aggregated into you the reader’s own personal life, subtracted from what one thought one already knew but didn’t know at all, then divided between each one of us reading it. Now we need to get together and multiply our real-time notes chapter by chapter. Did you guess ahead? I didn’t.
No spoilers here.
“How short is a lifetime […] compared to the time it will take humankind to find all the rich veins of mathematical ore where they lie sleeping and tease them forth into the world.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[First Person Singular: Stories]]> 54614599 A riveting new collection of short stories from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami.

The eight masterful stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator: a lonely man. Some of them (like With the Beatles, Cream and On a Stone Pillow ) are nostalgic looks back at youth. Others are set in adulthood--Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, Carnaval, Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey and the stunning title story. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Haruki himself is present, as in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. The stories all touch beautifully on love and loss, childhood and death . . . all with a signature Murakami twist.']]> 245 Haruki Murakami 0593318072 Des 5 “Or maybe what I had seen was a long, strange, realistic dream.�
When this story � unforgettable beyond any risk of the previous story’s memory losses or of similar such lapses that, within this story itself, beset the women with whom its eponymous monkey falls in love � becomes as famous as this story is likely to do, most of its reading enthusiasts may well become hung up on the Bruckner references, his seventh symphony in particular being a nod toward the elderly monkey’s maximum limit of loving seven human women about whom it tells the narrator in the hot springs hotel. Or what about Bruckner’s Symphonies numbered 0 and 00 as symbols of loss of personal items as well as the women’s memory loss of their own names?�. Well, if these readers do concentrate on Bruckner, they must also remember that Richard Strauss is explicitly mentioned at least once in the text. As is a ‘coffee lounge� where the narrator eventually meets perforce a woman who may have brought the total to eight, my own favourite Bruckner symphony.
A truly wonderful story to have a long hot soak in, one that actually somehow makes you disarmingly believe, with exquisite naivety, in the talking monkey already hiding within it. And as a result of its publication, it is possible that several more women, once they have read it, will understand why they lost, say, their driving licence on the same day that they forgot their own name. Haydn is likely to have enough numbered symphonies to cope, I trust.

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.]]> 3.58 2020 First Person Singular: Stories
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Des
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/07
shelves:
review:
CONFESSIONS OF A SHINAGAWA MONKEY
“Or maybe what I had seen was a long, strange, realistic dream.�
When this story � unforgettable beyond any risk of the previous story’s memory losses or of similar such lapses that, within this story itself, beset the women with whom its eponymous monkey falls in love � becomes as famous as this story is likely to do, most of its reading enthusiasts may well become hung up on the Bruckner references, his seventh symphony in particular being a nod toward the elderly monkey’s maximum limit of loving seven human women about whom it tells the narrator in the hot springs hotel. Or what about Bruckner’s Symphonies numbered 0 and 00 as symbols of loss of personal items as well as the women’s memory loss of their own names?�. Well, if these readers do concentrate on Bruckner, they must also remember that Richard Strauss is explicitly mentioned at least once in the text. As is a ‘coffee lounge� where the narrator eventually meets perforce a woman who may have brought the total to eight, my own favourite Bruckner symphony.
A truly wonderful story to have a long hot soak in, one that actually somehow makes you disarmingly believe, with exquisite naivety, in the talking monkey already hiding within it. And as a result of its publication, it is possible that several more women, once they have read it, will understand why they lost, say, their driving licence on the same day that they forgot their own name. Haydn is likely to have enough numbered symphonies to cope, I trust.

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.
]]> Mills of Silence 57659112
The full table of contents is as follows:

Part I : The Uncertain Staircase
The Immaterialists
A Coastal Quest
The Surrey Alterations
Beyond the Lace
These Words, Rising from Stone
The Private Thinker
Evening at the Aubergine Café
To Sharpen, Spin
Septs
The Migration of Memories
The Horseshoe Homes
Part II : Mills of Silence]]> 256 Charles Wilkinson Des 4 So ends a review that issues its own tender cruelties, I guess, to repay those that this book has wielded upon me.

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.]]> 4.38 2021 Mills of Silence
author: Charles Wilkinson
name: Des
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/05/07
shelves:
review:
I am left genuinely shell-shocked and unconsoled by this book, by its uncertain staircase towards meaningful meaninglessness. Paradoxically in inspired as well as disturbed ways. It will go down in literary history, but which of the many possible reasons that it could be thus remembered for is the one that is important to you? Blindness is temporary, but insanity is not, it says somewhere here. But please do not believe everything you read in fiction.
So ends a review that issues its own tender cruelties, I guess, to repay those that this book has wielded upon me.

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.
]]> Celestial Navigation 31180 288 Anne Tyler 0449911802 Des 5
Suffice to say, there were ‘surprise� whistles, and the winterizing of windows by stuffing equivalents, I guess, to his artwork installation ingredients into new frames!
Not forgetting his possibly foolhardy trip on a dinghy to ‘air the sails� of a boat�

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.

]]> 3.77 1974 Celestial Navigation
author: Anne Tyler
name: Des
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/07
shelves:
review:
Then his impulse of non-Jeremyish bravery with the bus map � and if I tell you where he went, and with what clumsy difficulty and blinkered determination he made this journey, and whom he visited, and what their or his reactions were, and what he did there for them � all that would be sacrilege on my part, in case you accidentally read about it here before reading it in this incontrovertibly great book. A book that I have managed to get round to before it became too late.

Suffice to say, there were ‘surprise� whistles, and the winterizing of windows by stuffing equivalents, I guess, to his artwork installation ingredients into new frames!
Not forgetting his possibly foolhardy trip on a dinghy to ‘air the sails� of a boat�

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.


]]> <![CDATA[Literary Stalker: The Adventures of Crazed Author Nick and his Alter Ego Jago]]> 36341569
Nick first met Hugh Canford-Eversleigh at a reading more than a decade ago and fell madly in love with him, interpreting their encounter as the start of a magnificent affair. Nick’s feelings soon expanded into full-blown obsession, and he stalked Hugh, believing his love would eventually be returned. Nick was repeatedly rebuffed, much to his anger, but it was years later that his rage reached murderous proportions, due to an unexpected and outlandish twist of fate. Now through his novel, The Facebook Murders, Nick is settling all his old scores, blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction � and with his obsessions reaching fever pitch, blurring the lines between writing about nasty stuff and doing nasty stuff for real.]]> 182 Roger Keen Des 4 4.00 Literary Stalker: The Adventures of Crazed Author Nick and his Alter Ego Jago
author: Roger Keen
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/05/07
shelves:
review:
I have now read more chapters, further into this often very enjoyable and once potentially great book, with its genuine promise of an even greater book that could have been written without the in-jokes or that will still be written by this author, but it would be unwise to delve too deeply into THIS extremely well-written book in a public review. Needs to be read fearlessly from scratch in private, especially if one is involved on-line with the packs of ambitious authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, readers and other generally good eggs that mill about, often the same people in a permutation of these roles. Thank heaven that live conventions were halted when they were or pray for when they will be reopened so that we can all hug our sorries and/or congrats to each other. The few, the very few, who made it through the packs into genuine stardom included.
]]> Black Static #78/#79 57613860 190 Neil Williamson Des 5
The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.]]> 3.79 Black Static #78/#79
author: Neil Williamson
name: Des
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/07
shelves:
review:
Another set of remarkable Black Static stories, and good luck in crossing its new watersheds of horror literature to come.

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.
]]> The Secret in Their Eyes 40671606 The Secret in Their Eyes is a meditation on the effects of the passage of time and unfulfilled desire.

Eduardo Sacheri’s tale is imbued with the subdued terror that characterized the Dirty War of 1970s Argentina, and was made into the Academy Award winning film of the same name in 2009.]]> 398 Eduardo Sacheri 1590514513 Des 5
The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.]]> 3.99 2005 The Secret in Their Eyes
author: Eduardo Sacheri
name: Des
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/07
shelves:
review:
It is certainly as if I was meant to read this book at this increasingly crucial stage of my life! Thanks to all the fateful turnings that brought me to this book.

The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.
]]> To Drown in Dark Water 56558669
Containing six new dark visions and a curated selection of reprints, including three stories from the acclaimed Best Horror of the Year series, To Drown in Dark Water is a veritable feast of gruesome delights.]]> 272 Steve Toase 198896427X Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.13 2021 To Drown in Dark Water
author: Steve Toase
name: Des
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/04/13
shelves:
review:
A wonderful reading experience that transcends reading itself and one that will make you inspired as well as sad. Only reading it will justify the experience of so doing.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Sot-Weed Factor 24835 The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem.

On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has a lasting relevance for readers of all times.]]> 756 John Barth 1903809509 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.09 1960 The Sot-Weed Factor
author: John Barth
name: Des
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/04/10
shelves:
review:
Reading this massive mighty book again at this late stage in my life is indeed one such bold resolve. But you know how beautifully smooth and limpid it reads, with no need to resist its page-turning compulsion (now yellow pages!) complete, though, sown with chunky philosophies and real histories and blatant indecisions leading to a Zeno’s Paradox of consistency and inconsistency in mutual synergy. Nor do I need to remind you of the start of Ebenezer Cooke’s early life with his twin sister Anna, their tutor Henry Burlingame and what has already unfolded up to the point I have read. This indeed promises to be the book of a lifetime it always was, and I am now Unconsoled that I had forgotten how truly great it is, outvying all its competitors in my reading life.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> I Would Haunt You If I Could 56366619 I would haunt you ...

The debut short story collection from Seán Padraic Birnie does indeed haunt. Sown with seeds of sorrow and grief, and imbued with disquieting bodily horrors, the tales in "I Would Haunt You If I Could" are the product of an uncanny and febrile imagination. Birnie's writing balances on the knife's edge of the horror and literary divide. Stories that cut and bleed. Stories that linger and haunt.

...if I could.]]> 252 Seán Padraic Birnie 1988964261 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations.]]> 4.01 2021 I Would Haunt You If I Could
author: Seán Padraic Birnie
name: Des
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/04/10
shelves:
review:
It seems sacrilegious to even think that I might be able to do justice to such a major reading experience with an attempted summary, let alone the creation, as is my usual wont, of connections with the rest of this set of fictions. So be it, for the very first time since I started book reviewing, I won’t do any of this.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations.
]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

“The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.�
� Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)]]> 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Des
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/24
shelves:
review:
Are we how we actually are or what people see and the feelings they have for us? In a very special way, this book addresses these matters in a revelatory way that only strongly imaginative and often oblique fiction fashions for itself BY itself�. an autonomous release of an empathic entity by those special artifice friends like Ishiguro who have chosen to facilitate such releases of artifice into the public domain. The final consolation for us unconsoled, ever on the tantalising brink of it being grasped� Bespoke for each of us. The Aiaigasa of Author and Another like me. Resisting Proprietary Observation. The Atrial Fibrillaters...

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

“The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.�
� Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)
]]> Time Present and Time Past 17847097
As he goes about his life, working and spending time with his family, Fintan begins to experience states of altered consciousness and auditory hallucinations, which seem to take him out of a linear experience of time. He becomes interested in how we remember or imagine the past, an interest trigged by becoming aware of early photography, particularly early colour photography. He also finds himself thinking more about his own past, including time spent holidaying in the north of Ireland as a child with his father's family. Over the years he has become distanced from them, and in the course of the novel this link is re-established and helps to bring him understanding and peace, although in a most unexpected way.

Time Present and Time Past, Deirdre Madden's eighth novel for adults, is about time: about how not just daily life and one's own, or one's family's past, intersect with each other.]]> 208 Deirdre Madden 0571290884 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.60 2013 Time Present and Time Past
author: Deirdre Madden
name: Des
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/24
shelves:
review:
This Madden book, having been recommended to me out of the blue a few weeks ago, seems highly fortuitous at least! A preternatural phenomenon, perhaps, so in keeping with my experience over the years as generated by gestalt real-time reviewing books of so-called fiction. Some phrases from this chapter thus haunt me even more than they otherwise would have done, viz. “air of the past�, “the quality of time�, “…smiling at the camera in a way that is both beguiling and slightly unnerving�, a woman in one ancient photo when compared to Martina “the resemblance they bear to each other is quite uncanny�, and “It’s a pity it’s in black and white rather than colour”�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Episodes 41556955
Eleven stories are included, along with commentary and reflection from the author. Within these pages you will discover the stage magic-inspired horror of ‘The Head and the Hand�, the timeslip accidents of ‘futouristic.co.uk�, the impossible romance of ‘Palely Loitering� and the present-day satire of ‘Shooting an Episode�.]]> 368 Christopher Priest 1473226007 Des 5 Literature is a time travel tontine lottery during lockdown and this is its most complexly rich exposé from 2009 in the most disarmingly simplistic of prose styles. No mean feat. Whatever the evidence, this is NO co-vivid dream as you will discover should you dare click on the waking reality of the link in the title!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

]]> 3.69 2019 Episodes
author: Christopher Priest
name: Des
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/24
shelves:
review:
futouristic.co.uk
Literature is a time travel tontine lottery during lockdown and this is its most complexly rich exposé from 2009 in the most disarmingly simplistic of prose styles. No mean feat. Whatever the evidence, this is NO co-vivid dream as you will discover should you dare click on the waking reality of the link in the title!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.


]]> <![CDATA[The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen]]> 55271919
Using fascinating unpublished correspondence, The Shadowy Third exposes the affair and its impact by following the overlapping lives of three very different characters through some of the most dramatic decades of the twentieth century; from the rarefied air of Oxford in the 1930s, to the Anglo-Irish Big House, to the last days of Empire in India and on into the Second World War. The story is spiced with social history and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf.

In the style of Bowen, a novelist obsessed by sense of place, Julia travels to all the locations written about in the letters, retracing the physical and emotional songlines from Kolkata to Cambridge, Ireland to Texas. With present day story telling as a colourful counterpoint to the historical narrative, this is a debut work of unparalleled personal and familial investigation.]]> 386 Julia Parry 0715653571 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.24 2021 The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen
author: Julia Parry
name: Des
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/13
shelves:
review:
I love the way these biographical details are couched, so very Elizabeth, so very much the book’s author herself and her own implied character, too, and how she discovered these details by travel and lemon serendipities. Genius loci or “place-feeling� important to this book as well as to Elizabeth’s fiction. The place with ‘apple trees, mentioned in the chapter, where Humphry and Elizabeth (the latter being “a gifted schemer�) met early in their affair, thump, thump, thump�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Death's Dark Abyss 505775 A riveting drama of guilt, revenge, and justice, Massimo Carlotto's Death's Dark Abyss tells the story of two men and the savage crime that binds them. During a robbery, Raffaello Beggiato takes a young woman and her child hostage and later murders them. Beggiato is arrested, tried, and sentenced to life. The victims' father and husband, Silvano, is undone by his loss. He plunges into an ever-deepening abyss until the day, years later, when the murderer seeks his pardon, and the wounded Silvano turns predator as he ruthlessly plots his revenge.]]> 192 Massimo Carlotto 1933372184 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.89 2004 Death's Dark Abyss
author: Massimo Carlotto
name: Des
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/11
shelves:
review:
I have finished the book, in one fell swoop of irresistible reading the remaining relatively huge chunk of it. The temptation to eke it out had � at least, in part � lost its attraction ever since I blotted the plot from this real-time review to preserve your suspenseful enjoyment of the book without spoilers.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Oculus Sinister 55880841 229 C.M. Muller Des 5
…and I seem to feel the same as that final quotation about this whole book, with its wondrously pervading gestalt: its Eyedom upon the separate paths of our lives, our dislocated and poignant hopes and fears �.all now focusing together. A synergy, too, of horror with something else unseeable that transcends it, transmutes it, even enhances it. Starting with the optics of photographs and ending with them.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.]]> 4.00 2020 Oculus Sinister
author: C.M. Muller
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/02
shelves:
review:
“We reached the end. We reached something, I couldn’t see it. Or maybe I could, but it won’t stay in my brain; like I only know of it when I’m staring directly at it.�

…and I seem to feel the same as that final quotation about this whole book, with its wondrously pervading gestalt: its Eyedom upon the separate paths of our lives, our dislocated and poignant hopes and fears �.all now focusing together. A synergy, too, of horror with something else unseeable that transcends it, transmutes it, even enhances it. Starting with the optics of photographs and ending with them.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.
]]> <![CDATA[Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3]]> 31935382 Acclaimed editors Simon Strantzas and Michael Kelly bring their keen editorial sensibilities to the third volume of the Year's Best Weird Fiction. The best weird stories of 2015 features work from Robert Aickman, Matthew M. Bartlett, Sadie Bruce, Nadia Bulkin, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Conn, Brian Evenson, L.S. Johnson, Rebecca Kuder, Tim Lebbon, Reggie Oliver, Lynda E. Rucker, Robert Shearman, Christopher Slatsky, D.P. Watt, Michael Wehunt, Marian Womack, Genevieve Valentine
No longer the purview of esoteric readers, weird fiction is enjoying wide popularity. Chiefly derived from early 20th-century pulp fiction, its remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and a healthy helping of the outre. At its best, weird fiction is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the Laws of Nature. It is not confined to one genre, but is the most diverse and welcoming of all genres.
]]> 337 Simon Strantzas Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations.]]> 3.76 2016 Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3
author: Simon Strantzas
name: Des
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/22
shelves:
review:
This is a very striking story, a consuming word portrait of a state of existence as a bone knot (or, for me, as ‘ligottus�, three such ligotti in this museum that the little girl emulates) � it reminds me of the broad tenor of some SF stories that appear over the years in Interzone, and this state of existence is almost between states as that title pertains. The contortion that is made for Piedra, then as a sculpture hung from the ceiling for her Baron. The depiction of the knotting of this particular ligottus, to which I can do no justice here, is utterly beautiful, effete, fey � ultimately cruel, but an apotheosis of some need one can even empathise with. Or is it an ironic view of gender politics in a Swiftian Modest Proposal mould? Whatever the case, it is a very fine culmination of this equally fine eclectic book as a whole.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations.
]]> All the Things We Never See 46257497 250 Michael Kelly 1988964156 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.53 2019 All the Things We Never See
author: Michael Kelly
name: Des
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/22
shelves:
review:
This book is the greyest of blue skies. Or vice versa. Things in life most often come out of the blue. Good and bad things. And this book has many colours. Too many colours as gestalt might make a sludgy grey, yet this book manages its multiple interpretations well, interpretations of colours as well as of other leitmotifs. The better sort of books do. And books that have been considered great weird literature, like this one has, achieve an act of thought-radiating best of all. Be alert, though, until your final breath, because some great weird literature is not labelled such. You need to keep looking in unlikely places for the most lasting disarming strangenesses that dog or bless existence. Also all the things we never see, never seem. A quiet axiom.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Evidence 51784467 Todd Fremde is an author, a writer of police procedurals and criminal mysteries. Invited to the remote island of Dearth, far across the Dream Archipelago, to talk at a conference, he finds himself caught up in a series of mysteries. How can Dearth claim to be completely crime-free, yet still have an armed police force? Why are they so keen for him to appear, but so dismissive when he arrives? Is his sense of time confused, or is something confusing happening to time itself?
And how does this all connect with a murder committed on his home island, ten years before, and seemingly forgotten?

Fremde's investigation and research will lead him to some dangerous conclusions...

]]> 304 Christopher Priest Des 5

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations.

]]> 3.42 2020 The Evidence
author: Christopher Priest
name: Des
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/22
shelves:
review:
A fascinating, increasingly entrammelling chapter, when back home, with all manner of clues as to frustrations and dislocations and putting out of mind of the Carnival Museum Murder, a crime now with a spur to things of its possible financial implication, and realisations that I am a bit of a reviewing fraud and have always been aware of the correct spellings of certain names, and I somehow recognised Fremde’s tapping into ‘mutability� itself to write his latest crime fiction with developing characters and the eventual culprit, and later there is possible quarantine or viral infection on his computer stemming from a key from the Dearth hotel that it still knew he possessed. The hotel at which he had stayed, I now recall�.and how this book is infecting my own computer by transposing my thoughts to it about the book, infecting my computer if not my brain, say, with the dawning enormity of the Archipelago as a group of endless-seeming islands, the divorcement of authors from some pragmatic verities �. and how I once worked in high finance, as this author claims he didn’t. You are where you are and nowhere else.


The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations.


]]> Tony and Susan 2177370
Austin Wright's novel is a disturbing and dazzling work: it describes a special reading experience, combines the suggestiveness of a thriller and the depth of a psychological novel. He talks about fear and regret, revenge and maturation, marriage and failure.]]> 374 Austin Wright 0446601055 Des 5 �, how print fastens ephemeral words to the page like flattened animals on the road, so that you can go back and inspect them in their non sequitur,…�

Thanks so much to whatever ‘wilderness angel� out there put me on to this significant work of fiction, thus strengthening my fearless faith in the passion of each reading moment.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.

]]> 3.23 1993 Tony and Susan
author: Austin Wright
name: Des
average rating: 3.23
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/22
shelves:
review:
And words as nocturnal animals?
�, how print fastens ephemeral words to the page like flattened animals on the road, so that you can go back and inspect them in their non sequitur,…�

Thanks so much to whatever ‘wilderness angel� out there put me on to this significant work of fiction, thus strengthening my fearless faith in the passion of each reading moment.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.


]]> Nightscript Volume 6 55498248 An annual anthology of strange and darksome tales, which this year profiles the work of 17 contemporary scribes: Timothy Dodd, LC von Hessen, Tom Johnstone, Ralph Robert Moore, Julia Rust, Jeremy Schliewe, Dan Coxon, Charles Wilkinson, Christi Nogle, Alexander James, Francesco Corigliano, Selene dePackh, Kurt Newton, James Owens, J.R. Hamantaschen, Amelia Gorman, and Gary Budden.
"A very promising anthology." -Ellen Datlow, Best Horror of the Year
"An annual highlight of the genre." -Anthony Watson, Dark Musings
"Weirdness with truth at its heart." -Des Lewis, Real-Time Reviews]]> 196 C.M. Muller Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.00 2020 Nightscript Volume 6
author: C.M. Muller
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/19
shelves:
review:
Please forgive me for quoting so much above of this remarkable story, but I trust these choices of mine will enhance your own experience of the work itself, and to triangulate your own choices of wordings from it so as to dreamcatch or hawl its thus grafted essence, then, enhancing your own experience of the whole wonderful book, too, a book’s gestalt with which this work accidentally and/or magically and/or editorially resonates.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Resonance & Revolt 39380497 376 Rosanne Rabinowitz 1908125500 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is its conclusion.

CAVEAT: I originally published one of the stories in this collection.]]> 4.19 2018 Resonance & Revolt
author: Rosanne Rabinowitz
name: Des
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/15
shelves:
review:
Resonance & Revolt. From Didcott to Didactic, a grail or Rosannation for socialist outreach but made even more palatable as percolated by truth and inspirationally infused by the book’s creative tapping of histories, myths and alternate visions, transfigured from rustblind through to silverbright. Some very important stories in this book transcending any didacticism. And a gestalt of them all that will be enduring. And a book cover that sings out with all these things.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is its conclusion.

CAVEAT: I originally published one of the stories in this collection.
]]> The Lighthouse 51618307 is a story in which the melancholy quiet of small-town America is tinged with the faintest touches of understated mystery.]]> 38 Jeremy Schliewe 1908125780 Des 5 “Is a person who does nothing somehow less than?�
An engagingly complex story that it is impossible to cover properly. The narrator is the elder half-brother (sharing the same mother) of sketch-dabbling Charles, the narrator who returns to Lake Michigan and its characterful pier and lighthouse, but who is the buoy of whom in this relationship of brotherly buoys, where sand gradually encroaches upon the text as it does upon all steps in life? From Virginia Woolf to Jeff VanderMeer, this contains possibly the most significant items of inner-lighthouse description in all literature. And as a symbol of the half-measures in life and to be WHO YOU ARE not who others expect you to be. The intimately curving walls inward, and the over-painted iron, compared to the far too open spaces of the house where you actually live by dint of inheritance or perceived ambition to live in large places. A genuine journey, this Schliewe work, therefore, towards finding oneself. Only the young among us no longer need to distinguish between low and high culture. The only coming together is that of separation, “often in slow increments than by a sudden yank.� Later: “I would yank the door off its hinges, if necessary.� The insandation vision in this work is unforgettable, I say. Reading good books in moments of idleness is far better than sitting down with an intent purpose. And I am still dabbling, dabbling, dabbling in this one, in mutual synergy with it. A good book never ends. And lights itself from within. Sweeping elucidation across it and picking out what shall never be inundated.]]> 5.00 2018 The Lighthouse
author: Jeremy Schliewe
name: Des
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/15
shelves:
review:
“We ordered drinks, mine decaf, and took a seat in the corner. We were nearly the only customers.�
“Is a person who does nothing somehow less than?�
An engagingly complex story that it is impossible to cover properly. The narrator is the elder half-brother (sharing the same mother) of sketch-dabbling Charles, the narrator who returns to Lake Michigan and its characterful pier and lighthouse, but who is the buoy of whom in this relationship of brotherly buoys, where sand gradually encroaches upon the text as it does upon all steps in life? From Virginia Woolf to Jeff VanderMeer, this contains possibly the most significant items of inner-lighthouse description in all literature. And as a symbol of the half-measures in life and to be WHO YOU ARE not who others expect you to be. The intimately curving walls inward, and the over-painted iron, compared to the far too open spaces of the house where you actually live by dint of inheritance or perceived ambition to live in large places. A genuine journey, this Schliewe work, therefore, towards finding oneself. Only the young among us no longer need to distinguish between low and high culture. The only coming together is that of separation, “often in slow increments than by a sudden yank.� Later: “I would yank the door off its hinges, if necessary.� The insandation vision in this work is unforgettable, I say. Reading good books in moments of idleness is far better than sitting down with an intent purpose. And I am still dabbling, dabbling, dabbling in this one, in mutual synergy with it. A good book never ends. And lights itself from within. Sweeping elucidation across it and picking out what shall never be inundated.
]]> Vastarien: Vol. 3, Issue 2 56377136 Vastarien: A Literary Journal is a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas. The journal includes nonfiction, literary horror fiction, poetry, artwork and non-classifiable hybrid pieces.




Double issue! Original cover art and 13 original, full color illustrations by living legend Harry 0. Morris. 25 works of fiction by Michael Griffin, Cody Goodfellow, LC von Hessen, Sarah L. Johnson, John Claude Smith, Casilda Ferrante, Lora Gray, Matthew M. Bartlett, and others! 2 Nonfiction articles by Alex Skopic and John Palisano. 9 poems by Sonya Taaffe, Rae White, Dimitry Blizniuk and others. All new recurring column by a special guest!]]> 350 Jon Padgett 0578818892 Des 5
DISSOLUTIONS � FINAL WORKS by William Kamen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo � May 11 to September 3, 2023
by Miguel Fliguer
The fusion of an artist with his work, literally the fusion of a painting on a canvas with one’s body and soul, as brilliantly conveyed by a catalogue of Kamen’s posthumous exhibition of paintings, the fusion of words like Bartlett’s with images like Van Gogh’s�

…followed by “the drooping sack of an old man� seen in the mountain crick and a young woman’s duly bowing to the protocols or etiquettes of age as well as that crick’s sacrificial confessional in the story entitled MOUNT P (by Denise S. Robbins) containing another series of incantatory refrains, here upon the different P-words of the Mount’s name, like PERSEVERE and PRAYER, as well as POINTLESS and PITILESS. From this book’s crib to crick. That pointless hole in the wall of rock. Via Bartlett’s hospital room again. I remain in its cruel palliative care, I guess. Or at least part of me does or will. The other part still climbing more PLEASANT heights�

…with, in between, another young girl or woman in cruel transition �

ADVICE I WISH I’D BEEN GIVEN WHEN I WAS A 12 YEAR-OLD GIRL ABOUT TO WATCH ‘THE EXORCIST� FOR THE FIRST TIME
The ultimate incantatory refrain, as written or transcribed as a poem by Chelsea Davis.
Keep telling yourself that is was a movie � it was art, not life. And art is everything, I say. Hope and survival built in. But if life still ends cruelly, pray its Art perseveres.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.

]]> 4.47 2020 Vastarien: Vol. 3, Issue 2
author: Jon Padgett
name: Des
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/14
shelves:
review:
Seemingly as an inadvertent but preternaturally intended theme-and-variations on the Bartlett (that was in turn the latest representative of this whole remarkably substantial yet pervasive book’s gestalt decorated by many Harry o. Morris artworks), there follows this mighty Triptych of relatively short works�.

DISSOLUTIONS � FINAL WORKS by William Kamen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo � May 11 to September 3, 2023
by Miguel Fliguer
The fusion of an artist with his work, literally the fusion of a painting on a canvas with one’s body and soul, as brilliantly conveyed by a catalogue of Kamen’s posthumous exhibition of paintings, the fusion of words like Bartlett’s with images like Van Gogh’s�

…followed by “the drooping sack of an old man� seen in the mountain crick and a young woman’s duly bowing to the protocols or etiquettes of age as well as that crick’s sacrificial confessional in the story entitled MOUNT P (by Denise S. Robbins) containing another series of incantatory refrains, here upon the different P-words of the Mount’s name, like PERSEVERE and PRAYER, as well as POINTLESS and PITILESS. From this book’s crib to crick. That pointless hole in the wall of rock. Via Bartlett’s hospital room again. I remain in its cruel palliative care, I guess. Or at least part of me does or will. The other part still climbing more PLEASANT heights�

…with, in between, another young girl or woman in cruel transition �

ADVICE I WISH I’D BEEN GIVEN WHEN I WAS A 12 YEAR-OLD GIRL ABOUT TO WATCH ‘THE EXORCIST� FOR THE FIRST TIME
The ultimate incantatory refrain, as written or transcribed as a poem by Chelsea Davis.
Keep telling yourself that is was a movie � it was art, not life. And art is everything, I say. Hope and survival built in. But if life still ends cruelly, pray its Art perseveres.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.


]]> House of Leaves 24800
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.]]> 710 Mark Z. Danielewski Des 5
“My best guess now is that he sealed his apartment in an effort to retain the various emanations of his things and himself.�

A prophetic lockdown, with scarred floor et al, � as is, in turn, Johnny Truant’s own lockdown where he settles to read and absorb in real-time the gestalt of Zampanò’s ‘things� as a massive manuscript entitled THE NAVIDSON RECORD. But you are already familiar with this now famous opening in literature, but have you TRULY relished the style of this introduction? It has the enormous hindsight of�.the nature of its “endless snarl of words� about to be re-read in my own lockdown�

The above is in the initial part of the ongoing detailed real-time review under my name that I am conducting during a RE-read of it after a number of years.]]> 4.11 2000 House of Leaves
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Des
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/05
shelves:
review:
“For a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear. […] a few lung rasping bong hits,…�

“My best guess now is that he sealed his apartment in an effort to retain the various emanations of his things and himself.�

A prophetic lockdown, with scarred floor et al, � as is, in turn, Johnny Truant’s own lockdown where he settles to read and absorb in real-time the gestalt of Zampanò’s ‘things� as a massive manuscript entitled THE NAVIDSON RECORD. But you are already familiar with this now famous opening in literature, but have you TRULY relished the style of this introduction? It has the enormous hindsight of�.the nature of its “endless snarl of words� about to be re-read in my own lockdown�

The above is in the initial part of the ongoing detailed real-time review under my name that I am conducting during a RE-read of it after a number of years.
]]> <![CDATA[Ezra Slef: The Next Nobel Laureate in Literature]]> 56632908 The Next Nobel
Laureate in Literature
by
Andrew Komarnyckyj

The pioneering writings of celebrated Russian novelist Ezra Slef have made him a titan of contemporary Postmodernism, with a worldwide following keen to know more about the man behind the books. Enter Humbert Botekin, a disgraced former professor of literature, and Slef’s biggest admirer. He writes the definitive biography of Slef, with compendious notes, an introduction, a list of plates, and a glossary.

But Botekin’s narrative soon spirals dangerously out of control. A supreme egotist, Botekin cannot resist assuming the foreground, so that his ostensible biography of Slef gradually changes into a personal memoir in which we learn far more about the biographer than about his subject. The narrative is both sinister and darkly comic.

Botekin’s secrets include making a Faustian pact with a well-travelled gentleman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Devil—a likeness the self-absorbed Botekin fails to notice, even as his world collapses around him.]]> 260 Andrew Komarnyckyj 1912586304 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above was its conclusion.]]> 4.50 Ezra Slef: The Next Nobel Laureate in Literature
author: Andrew Komarnyckyj
name: Des
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/02/01
shelves:
review:
Whether or not this book is a masterpiece of imaginative fiction, postmodern irony, literary satire, literary experimentation, high tragedy or high comedy, even low farce, I am supremely uncertain to say (the book’s ‘intention� no doubt being to create such uncertainty) � and the work somehow seems to comprise all those things, while this fine and provocative climax to it gives me the good feeling that it sustains the tenets of what ‘philosophy� I have believed since the 1960s (when I was first given WK Wimsatt’s momentous ‘Verbal Icon� book about the Intentional Fallacy) � such now sustained beLiEFS humbly culminating in the gestalt dF LEwiS writer, publisher and reviewer of today. So upon different levels of absurdism and serious literature Ezra Slef is a gem of a book. And I seriously hope that I have brought something extra, an EXTRA SELF, to it with all my specific references and comments above �. as fellow readers of it should also do, by thus triangulating all its coordinates, joining their coordinates and extra selves to mine so as to reach eventually the essential SLEF as Verbal Icon. Somehow, in the immediate current aftermath of having read this Komarnyckyj book unique in having created such an aftermath, I sincerely mean what I have said about it, and I mean it with the serious and absurdist palimpsest of its self upon mine.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above was its conclusion.
]]> Prophecies and Dooms 40760286 102 Mark Samuels 1721970290 Des 0 4.11 2018 Prophecies and Dooms
author: Mark Samuels
name: Des
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/31
shelves:
review:
I bought this book as a completist collector of this author. And it seems full of well-written and potentially interesting anecdotes, observations and insights (some controversial, I infer), but I am no expert in such phenomena, especially with my lifetime belief in the literary theory of the Intentional Fallacy and my more recent activity in describing, interpreting and evaluating hyper-imaginative, hopefully non-didactic fiction works, an activity pursued with a sense of wonder and poetic critique based purely on the text, a text presumably provided by the author to stand alone. Or at least alone as part of the Jungian labyrinth of such literature?
]]> <![CDATA[O For Obscurity, Or, The Story Of N]]> 55246784 132 Andrew Hook Des 5 A major read for me, this book, as you can already tell.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.67 2020 O For Obscurity, Or, The Story Of N
author: Andrew Hook
name: Des
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/29
shelves:
review:
To obviate our lives today in front of mindless screens like this one � a conduit for truth, though, being true to oneself, when exploited via the nothingness of cyberspace�? And so much more here to dwell on before I become a resident in a home called death. But that singular tree in a forest of selves, will it be finally felled? The caligatio beginning to demystify or demistify at last.
A major read for me, this book, as you can already tell.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Children of Hypnos 55544839
When the sons of the God of Sleep deliberate a response to an anomalous prayer, they inadvertently release a stable of horrors bred from their father’s worst dreams. As the plague of nightmares threatens the annihilation of humanity and the order of the elder gods, the children of Hypnos must lead a suppliant widower through a dissolving world to the only source that can effectuate her desperate wish�.]]> 80 Wade German Des 0 Some terrific co-vividly oneiric stuff for our times here both in the spoken words of German’s verse and their bookish surrounds.
Spoilt for choice but take this as an example:

“Morpheus: From city to city now the Nightmares spread,
Their growth is exponential. Man is doomed;
They won’t recover from insanity.�

end]]> 5.00 2020 Children of Hypnos
author: Wade German
name: Des
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

Some terrific co-vividly oneiric stuff for our times here both in the spoken words of German’s verse and their bookish surrounds.
Spoilt for choice but take this as an example:

“Morpheus: From city to city now the Nightmares spread,
Their growth is exponential. Man is doomed;
They won’t recover from insanity.�

end
]]> <![CDATA[The Tattered Shadows / Restos de Sombras]]> 54302635 The duo John Howard and Mark Valentine have established themselves as one of the most extraordinary voices in recent literature with this complex evocation of another world that would soon be submerged in war on masterpieces such as Secret Europe, a kind of secret cartography for other word. In this first collaboration with Raphus Press, the duo offers a story that could be a Hitchcock movie (like The Man Who Knew Too Much, first version, or The 39 Steps) and at same time both pay tribute to the great literature of exile, especially active in the 1920s-40s, from Anna Seghers to Bert Brecht, from Stefan Zweig to Roger Caillois... So The Tattered Shadows/Restos de sombra is a masterpiece and for us is a honor to produce this book specially for our readers.]]> 50 John Howard Des 5 Now to a new Babel of Biabelli, a Phantomime of neologisms, a new leaping-the-babbling-brook, through Panama, on to Lisbon, neutral tentacles across the Atlantic, coupled with what I said earlier above about a Mother’s Evenson(g): ‘A misremembering and unlearning translated…�
A “thank you� by a small girl to her doll…unless the words before translation meant something else?

“There seems to be a language around in the world that has no earthly origin or nation, spoken in whispers and sighs, a fluttering kind of tongue, that can communicate those states of being for which we have no words.�
� and this marvellous novelette somehow does just that! � evolved if not written by Howard and Valentine, and I wondered who translated whom towards the concept of neutral language. A story of a trader, not in hard goods, but in papers, where the trade is what is written on them not the papers AS papers, and the narrator is more a trader in the value of an idea or the idea of a value, an added value with which print or handwriting can convert ideas into this work’s concept Idaia� a haunting filmic atmosphere of a Casablanca or a Third Man, with wartime dangers and intrigues, the narrator (from three neutral nations as his backstory) seeking in a 1939 ammonite maze of Lisbon, having translated himself from Chile, yes, seeking, without much hope, his co-Chilean translator friend who has, I infer, met his ultimate challenge, a neutral language as much as a translation now becomes more a beaming up or a beaming down, a beaming beyond even Mother’s SF into, until now, a new form of literature hinted at by this work BEING it itself. My expressions, as my way of conveying the novelette’s honed fiction ammonite with somehow neutrally frictionless ideas. The girl’s doll sadly broke, though. Entropy’s last fling as a butterfly effect that translates itself freely across a whole world’s now tattered frontiers?

end]]> 4.40 2020 The Tattered Shadows / Restos de Sombras
author: John Howard
name: Des
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
nullimmortalis August 14, 2020 at 3:29 pm Edit
Now to a new Babel of Biabelli, a Phantomime of neologisms, a new leaping-the-babbling-brook, through Panama, on to Lisbon, neutral tentacles across the Atlantic, coupled with what I said earlier above about a Mother’s Evenson(g): ‘A misremembering and unlearning translated…�
A “thank you� by a small girl to her doll…unless the words before translation meant something else?

“There seems to be a language around in the world that has no earthly origin or nation, spoken in whispers and sighs, a fluttering kind of tongue, that can communicate those states of being for which we have no words.�
� and this marvellous novelette somehow does just that! � evolved if not written by Howard and Valentine, and I wondered who translated whom towards the concept of neutral language. A story of a trader, not in hard goods, but in papers, where the trade is what is written on them not the papers AS papers, and the narrator is more a trader in the value of an idea or the idea of a value, an added value with which print or handwriting can convert ideas into this work’s concept Idaia� a haunting filmic atmosphere of a Casablanca or a Third Man, with wartime dangers and intrigues, the narrator (from three neutral nations as his backstory) seeking in a 1939 ammonite maze of Lisbon, having translated himself from Chile, yes, seeking, without much hope, his co-Chilean translator friend who has, I infer, met his ultimate challenge, a neutral language as much as a translation now becomes more a beaming up or a beaming down, a beaming beyond even Mother’s SF into, until now, a new form of literature hinted at by this work BEING it itself. My expressions, as my way of conveying the novelette’s honed fiction ammonite with somehow neutrally frictionless ideas. The girl’s doll sadly broke, though. Entropy’s last fling as a butterfly effect that translates itself freely across a whole world’s now tattered frontiers?

end
]]> <![CDATA[Crepuscularks and Phantomimes: Gothic, Ghostly & Lovecraftian Tales in the Ironic Mode]]> 54311622
"Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet's literature." (Michael Moorcock)

"It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes� fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists." (Jeff VanderMeer)

"Every Hughes story implies much, served with wit and whimsy and word-relish, high spirits and bittersweet twists." (Ian Watson)

"A dazzling disintegration of the reality principle. A rite of passage to the greater world beyond common sense." (A.A. Attanasio)

"I wore throughout the undisplaceable, unsequelchable rictus of a grin of both delight and amazement." (Michael Bishop)

"Wryly dark and creepily funny, the stories in Crepuscularks and Phantomimes simultaneously scratch the horror itch and strike your funny bone. What might happen if Firbank's head was grafted onto Lovecraft's body and then released into the wild." (Brian Evenson)

"Crepuscularks and Phantomimes is a perfect showcase for the author’s adroit wordplay, for an imagination as whimsical as it is grotesque. His voice is refreshingly original, darkly witty, dazzling and delightful. My highest recommendation." (Jeffrey Thomas)]]> 120 Rhys Hughes Des 5
A horror vision to end all horror visions. On the very road to Blake’s heaven or hell, or, rather, here, to the actual gut of a cave system, imprisoned in a stalag of tites and mites, locked down with glowing slime that perhaps becomes the very sweat of his fever at the end! The gods and goddesses to whom he does not deign to pray to or or even blame � because they do not exist, CANNOT exist? � deities who’ve never had “immunity to the diseases we carry, that they have already been wiped out by our viruses.� Wiped out, ab initio. The only hope is to become their priest? A priest without a deity to proffer can only substantiate priesthood by becoming that deity’s own leap of faith? A new nesting of monsters? Or a new logic.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.17 2020 Crepuscularks and Phantomimes: Gothic, Ghostly & Lovecraftian Tales in the Ironic Mode
author: Rhys Hughes
name: Des
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
THE FANGS OF THE UNDERWORLD

A horror vision to end all horror visions. On the very road to Blake’s heaven or hell, or, rather, here, to the actual gut of a cave system, imprisoned in a stalag of tites and mites, locked down with glowing slime that perhaps becomes the very sweat of his fever at the end! The gods and goddesses to whom he does not deign to pray to or or even blame � because they do not exist, CANNOT exist? � deities who’ve never had “immunity to the diseases we carry, that they have already been wiped out by our viruses.� Wiped out, ab initio. The only hope is to become their priest? A priest without a deity to proffer can only substantiate priesthood by becoming that deity’s own leap of faith? A new nesting of monsters? Or a new logic.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Witch-Cult Abbey 53140986 186 Mark Samuels 3945795648 Des 0
“My sole purpose, it seemed, was to hibernate until this outbreak of leprous ideologies had played itself out across the European continent.�

An engaging, often evocatively detailed, account of a narrator who is referred to, by other characters, as Mr Prior, and who refers to himself as a “half-cripple�, living during the Second World War, with the status of a guest, in a Cockney family, a London beset by air raids and nightly resorts to Anderson Shelters. Much to the sadness of his hosts, he is unexpectedly given a trial job � by dint of a previous position he once held � as a library cataloguer at Thool Abbey in Hertfordshire � and he travels there by train, an Abbey that sounds as if it had once too easily relinquished its Romishness to the sway of Henry VIII and that king’s scions.


nullimmortalis April 17, 2020 at 6:53 pm Edit
This is a hefty stylish book, 12 by 8 inches, with stiff luxurious white printed pages, interspersed with numerous black divider pages, some generously decorated, between each chapter. Some of these black pages bear quoted extracts from famous authors. My edition is numbered 50/199 and has around 190 pages.

My first gestalt real-time review in 2008 was of a Mark Samuels book. At my advanced age and in current times of Covfefe, I am determined not to finish my reading and review of this book until I am on the point of death.]]> 4.07 2020 Witch-Cult Abbey
author: Mark Samuels
name: Des
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Chapter One

“My sole purpose, it seemed, was to hibernate until this outbreak of leprous ideologies had played itself out across the European continent.�

An engaging, often evocatively detailed, account of a narrator who is referred to, by other characters, as Mr Prior, and who refers to himself as a “half-cripple�, living during the Second World War, with the status of a guest, in a Cockney family, a London beset by air raids and nightly resorts to Anderson Shelters. Much to the sadness of his hosts, he is unexpectedly given a trial job � by dint of a previous position he once held � as a library cataloguer at Thool Abbey in Hertfordshire � and he travels there by train, an Abbey that sounds as if it had once too easily relinquished its Romishness to the sway of Henry VIII and that king’s scions.


nullimmortalis April 17, 2020 at 6:53 pm Edit
This is a hefty stylish book, 12 by 8 inches, with stiff luxurious white printed pages, interspersed with numerous black divider pages, some generously decorated, between each chapter. Some of these black pages bear quoted extracts from famous authors. My edition is numbered 50/199 and has around 190 pages.

My first gestalt real-time review in 2008 was of a Mark Samuels book. At my advanced age and in current times of Covfefe, I am determined not to finish my reading and review of this book until I am on the point of death.
]]> Costumes of the Living 55141051 66 Gaurav Monga 164525044X Des 4 “Do you remember what clothes you were wearing when all this happened?�

Whatever the case, you will never think of clothes again in the same way after reading these sixty pages of prose verses giving us oblique accounts of body-consciousness and clothes, such factors for each gender and for children, with presented clothes being culturally wide. Tearing clothes, cutting clothes, wearing clothes suited and ill-suited and the underlying motives, clothes as nudity with many things inside like earrings and wigs, like objects brought to life, clothes as words, words as clothes, grammar and fabric interchangeable, the life of oneself and others made and unmade for measure, even retrocausally� “…as if by the use of a tiny pair of scissors we were altering history.�
More than frequently, I seem to know that I was destined to read a certain work when it turns out by miraculous happenstance to blend, in mutual synergy, with another work or works that I am reading simultaneously or almost simultaneously, and this is no exception, with the garbed body-consciousness and stapled skin and accoutrements of actorly identity and belongings as a journey of self, as a gestalt with Black Static 76 here, as read and reviewed yesterday.
Loved the quotes from Kafka and Woolf, too.
]]> 4.16 2020 Costumes of the Living
author: Gaurav Monga
name: Des
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
nullimmortalis September 29, 2020 at 12:37 pm Edit
“Do you remember what clothes you were wearing when all this happened?�

Whatever the case, you will never think of clothes again in the same way after reading these sixty pages of prose verses giving us oblique accounts of body-consciousness and clothes, such factors for each gender and for children, with presented clothes being culturally wide. Tearing clothes, cutting clothes, wearing clothes suited and ill-suited and the underlying motives, clothes as nudity with many things inside like earrings and wigs, like objects brought to life, clothes as words, words as clothes, grammar and fabric interchangeable, the life of oneself and others made and unmade for measure, even retrocausally� “…as if by the use of a tiny pair of scissors we were altering history.�
More than frequently, I seem to know that I was destined to read a certain work when it turns out by miraculous happenstance to blend, in mutual synergy, with another work or works that I am reading simultaneously or almost simultaneously, and this is no exception, with the garbed body-consciousness and stapled skin and accoutrements of actorly identity and belongings as a journey of self, as a gestalt with Black Static 76 here, as read and reviewed yesterday.
Loved the quotes from Kafka and Woolf, too.

]]> <![CDATA[Interzone #288 (September-October 2020)]]> 55227376 Andy Cox Des 4
“The clip represented a moment vanished, a period of purity and hope, and innocence in the history of the planet.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.42 Interzone #288 (September-October 2020)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Ostensibly amazing piece of work that boggles the future mind with enormous extrapolative conceits about how tech develops, past the huge information plague virus, to a situation of reality being enhanced with old programmes and memes and film clips bartered and poached and smuggled by a museum worker called Ash and strange characters like an old man with a goat, while beset by anti-tech warriors amid cities and plains with manned hovers and bolt guns and vine infestations. One film clip, Ash’s first sale of stolen material, was a girl in a red t shirt tossing and catching a yellow ball. Otherwise, all Ash saw were ‘fictions�. Or, at best, warped files as art installations for elite carnivals. My co-vivid dream of the day! Ash as well as tears in my eyes.

“The clip represented a moment vanished, a period of purity and hope, and innocence in the history of the planet.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Black Static #76 (September-October 2020): Horror (Black Static Magazine)]]> 55354455 125 Andy Cox Des 5
“He’s not happy in his own body.�

I always look forward to a new dose of Hargadon. But this one is possibly my last dose of it, before I leave for a new job, after years and years of passing my ardent ruler over his lines of text. A culmination, this novella, worth waiting for, measuring my critical work against it. The story is a compelling narrative about Byrne, an apotheosis of office life, his colleagues, the explicit ‘stapling� as in the LMH story above, the fatal body consciousness of Veit’s Medder and the hybrid machines as rubbish moving like a biological creature in the Cooke story (yes, I knew it would be what it is or was and now will be), the Abi-walk nightmares acting out doppelgängers in rude scenarios concocted by others, and again that autonomous never-stopping � and the routine escape routes leading not only to the Stationery cupboard, but the Stationary and Static one, too. Small-mindedness and trivial office politics. A Hargadon story that is often hilarious, but one with an eventual horror of body parts and old office equipment and the xeroxing of identities after a life of tawdry routine, leading to a vista from the office window of buildings and streets in the decrepit city, a vista interpretable as being just before the people vanished, soon to be socially distanced to that Stationery Cupboard we all dread staying in forever. This story is the great Hargadon story indeed, and that is saying something! This Black Static gestalt is surely the core of dark fiction’s gestalt as long as our memories subsist.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.43 Black Static #76 (September-October 2020): Horror (Black Static Magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
THE STATIONERY CUPBOARD by Stephen Hargadon

“He’s not happy in his own body.�

I always look forward to a new dose of Hargadon. But this one is possibly my last dose of it, before I leave for a new job, after years and years of passing my ardent ruler over his lines of text. A culmination, this novella, worth waiting for, measuring my critical work against it. The story is a compelling narrative about Byrne, an apotheosis of office life, his colleagues, the explicit ‘stapling� as in the LMH story above, the fatal body consciousness of Veit’s Medder and the hybrid machines as rubbish moving like a biological creature in the Cooke story (yes, I knew it would be what it is or was and now will be), the Abi-walk nightmares acting out doppelgängers in rude scenarios concocted by others, and again that autonomous never-stopping � and the routine escape routes leading not only to the Stationery cupboard, but the Stationary and Static one, too. Small-mindedness and trivial office politics. A Hargadon story that is often hilarious, but one with an eventual horror of body parts and old office equipment and the xeroxing of identities after a life of tawdry routine, leading to a vista from the office window of buildings and streets in the decrepit city, a vista interpretable as being just before the people vanished, soon to be socially distanced to that Stationery Cupboard we all dread staying in forever. This story is the great Hargadon story indeed, and that is saying something! This Black Static gestalt is surely the core of dark fiction’s gestalt as long as our memories subsist.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Attrib. and other stories 33656486
Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.

With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold debut collection from one of Britain’s most original new writers.]]> 169 Eley Williams 1910312169 Des 4 This story � about tantamount-to-dating with a blank man who, when in his presence, expunges her disabling but spectacular synaesthetic condition, and with her doctor, who trials her condition in certain public entertainment situations � is enthralling. A fine oblique fable, with today, in retrocausal hindsight, a moral that startlingly involves a blinding kiss!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.77 2017 Attrib. and other stories
author: Eley Williams
name: Des
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Those who read my gestalt reviews regularly over the years will already know much about the various versions of synaesthesia in life and in literature. And this story of a woman, I guess, is the perfect expression of synaesthesia of sight-to-mind’s colour-object over-synergy. Bravo!
This story � about tantamount-to-dating with a blank man who, when in his presence, expunges her disabling but spectacular synaesthetic condition, and with her doctor, who trials her condition in certain public entertainment situations � is enthralling. A fine oblique fable, with today, in retrocausal hindsight, a moral that startlingly involves a blinding kiss!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Sunrise Days / Dias de Sol 54013503 In his brief, tense verses, Wood structures a whole symbolic universe of immense wealth, something that could shape a new Gospel but actually provides elements for a new world, a forest of symbols that shines iridescently with the lights of the sun, the old god of so many religions. To create the appropriate reverberation for this work, we use as an introduction an excerpt from Christiaan Huygens's Cosmotheoros, a rather unique scientific treatise.]]> 50 Jonathan Wood Des 4
Poems by Jonathan Wood in English as well as translated into Portuguese by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel. The Preface by Christian Huygens

My interpretation � We shall meet again like my long-loved astrologically harmonic planets via this book’s Jungian Ark of beautifully couched Co-Vivid poetic dreams and hopes as well as despairs. (See my two reviews here and here earlier today about this Jungian Ark.)

“The Earth justly liken’d to the Planets and the Planets to it.�
� Christian Huygens

]]> 4.75 2020 Sunrise Days / Dias de Sol
author: Jonathan Wood
name: Des
average rating: 4.75
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
A fine aesthetic book of 2 sets of 30 pages.

Poems by Jonathan Wood in English as well as translated into Portuguese by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel. The Preface by Christian Huygens

My interpretation � We shall meet again like my long-loved astrologically harmonic planets via this book’s Jungian Ark of beautifully couched Co-Vivid poetic dreams and hopes as well as despairs. (See my two reviews here and here earlier today about this Jungian Ark.)

“The Earth justly liken’d to the Planets and the Planets to it.�
� Christian Huygens


]]> Famished 50752284 Famished explores the perils of selfish sensuality and trifle while child rearing, phantom sweetshop owners, the revolting use of sherbet in occult rituals, homicide by seaside rock, and the perversion of Thai Tapas. Once, that is, you’ve been bled dry from fluted cups by pretty incorporeals and learned about consuming pride in the hungriest of stately homes.

Famished: eighteen stories to whet your appetite and ruin your dinner.]]> 103 Anna Vaught 1910312495 Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.27 2020 Famished
author: Anna Vaught
name: Des
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This is, in the passion of the reading moment, the most supreme coda to the book’s symphony of tasty words.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Nostalgia's Boat (Saturated Spaces)]]> 56843939 313 David Mathew Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.50 Nostalgia's Boat (Saturated Spaces)
author: David Mathew
name: Des
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This seems to be a very skilful book (by instinct and/or pure deliberation), one that brings back memories of itself as prior plot and/or of your own self having read it and even remembered it, a sort of false literary self-googlesearch or a false literary déjà vu or a real one.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Flowering Hedgerow 54226860
Enlivened by thoughts on time, theology and technology, and centred upon a few acres of wooded ground, this diary provides subtle undergrowth into which the reader is invited to delve.]]> 202 Quentin S. Crisp 1645250342 Des 5 And I have today deactivated from Facebook. A momentous decision on my part.
Earlier in this section of reading this book today, Q ruminates (Q often ruminates, and here he ruminates about the Brexit vote he has just made in the then real-time, that led to M John Harrison’s Brexitania in Sunken Land, but now subsumed by Covidia and uncontrollable, yet seemingly controllable, co-vivid dreams), yes, Q ruminates here also about his life now being arguably halfway through (at his age 48?) but I, at mine of 72, the age of the Midsommar leap, wonder if I can afford the time to read this book, with so many others left unread? And it is possibly a great compliment to this book that I have decided to continue reading it and ruminating upon it here.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.35 2020 The Flowering Hedgerow
author: Quentin S. Crisp
name: Des
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Perhaps!?
And I have today deactivated from Facebook. A momentous decision on my part.
Earlier in this section of reading this book today, Q ruminates (Q often ruminates, and here he ruminates about the Brexit vote he has just made in the then real-time, that led to M John Harrison’s Brexitania in Sunken Land, but now subsumed by Covidia and uncontrollable, yet seemingly controllable, co-vivid dreams), yes, Q ruminates here also about his life now being arguably halfway through (at his age 48?) but I, at mine of 72, the age of the Midsommar leap, wonder if I can afford the time to read this book, with so many others left unread? And it is possibly a great compliment to this book that I have decided to continue reading it and ruminating upon it here.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Inner Rooms and Secret Quarters]]> 54373301 Dan Watt is on a divine and holy mission this year. Not only are we preparing the TEARS FOR EUROPA boxset (a collection of stories) but there is another book on the horizon too.

INNER ROOMS AND SECRET QUARTERS�
Essays and Other Exaggerations

A gargantuan collection of brilliant, bemusing and dazzling essays, illustrated by the exceptional Andrzej Welminski, actor, director, philosopher, artist, theoretician &c.

At over 600 pages, INNER ROOMS AND SECRET QUARTERS is Mount Abraxas’s largest book to date.

Only a few of the pieces you will find inside the book:

I. A waxen resurrection of the bio-object: The necromantic visions of Bruno Schulz and Tadeusz Kantor
II. Edmond Jabès: Double Exile and the Uncanny Fragment
III. Acting Dead and Other Maniacal Stories: The Abject Work of Cricot
IV. Becoming Headless, or My body doing its best without me: performance against Thought
V. I am become as sounding brass: The language of angels and the tongues of men
VI. Bibliophobia.
VII. The Impossible Literature of Thomas Ligotti, Puppeteer and Eschatologist

“Attention! The Comet is Coming!�

Cover illustration by Andrzej Welminski.]]> 457 D.P. Watt Des 0 Already, I am totally besotted with this book as a book. With some 460 luxurious pages, a sturdy textured blue box that it fits perfectly, a dust jacket, a red ribbon and a design somehow both to die for and to live for.
Now to read it. I sense uncertainly that I shall likely be dabbling with diableries of non-fiction as well as poring closely over its fiction, if any.
We shall see. Bear with me. In due course.

The review under my name elsewhere shows contents of this non-fiction etc.]]> 4.00 2020 Inner Rooms and Secret Quarters
author: D.P. Watt
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
It is easy to become enamoured with Mount Abraxas Press books, even before starting to read them. Yet, I don’t mind saying this item is the most exquisite package imaginable. A solid nugget, an amorphous giant, interspersed with many colour pages of text amid the multitudinous white. My copy numbered 6/144.
Already, I am totally besotted with this book as a book. With some 460 luxurious pages, a sturdy textured blue box that it fits perfectly, a dust jacket, a red ribbon and a design somehow both to die for and to live for.
Now to read it. I sense uncertainly that I shall likely be dabbling with diableries of non-fiction as well as poring closely over its fiction, if any.
We shall see. Bear with me. In due course.

The review under my name elsewhere shows contents of this non-fiction etc.
]]> Mrs. Dalloway 14942 194 Virginia Woolf 0151009988 Des 5
“’K � R � � said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say ‘Kay Arr’…�

This book is about shell shock. Not only that of Septimus in 1923 but all of us today. Toward or from our shells.

The constructively unfinished review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.80 1925 Mrs. Dalloway
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Des
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
An aeroplane spelling out …what? and below it a car with a bubbled lockdown of people within, people of the day’s Royalty, it not being the earlier assumed ‘Proime Minister’s kyar� (sic)?

“’K � R � � said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say ‘Kay Arr’…�

This book is about shell shock. Not only that of Septimus in 1923 but all of us today. Toward or from our shells.

The constructively unfinished review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Feather: Tales of Isolation and Descent (Paperback)]]> 13035529 380 David Rix 1908125071 Des 5
The disarming feeling of an author with his or her character somewhere else in the same train trundling towards a lonely seaside halt. And, as in the final scene of the film of The Railway Children, her mouth in an agape, seeing through the smoke she calls to her Father. Here the author similarly calls to their Feather. A classic ending to a book that will never become a classic in itself because it will sadly never have enough readers as a quorum to measure it and decide. But, meanwhile, how do I simply measure a rictus?

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.92 2011 Feather: Tales of Isolation and Descent (Paperback)
author: David Rix
name: Des
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
“The sea where emotions and yearning suddenly seem belittled.�

The disarming feeling of an author with his or her character somewhere else in the same train trundling towards a lonely seaside halt. And, as in the final scene of the film of The Railway Children, her mouth in an agape, seeing through the smoke she calls to her Father. Here the author similarly calls to their Feather. A classic ending to a book that will never become a classic in itself because it will sadly never have enough readers as a quorum to measure it and decide. But, meanwhile, how do I simply measure a rictus?

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Black Static #75 (May-June 2020)]]> 53868943 122 Andy Cox Des 4 to-read �, blushes of colour obscured by an all-encompassing blackness.�
I like accessible, and somehow this story is limpidly accessible, too

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

]]> 3.50 Black Static #75 (May-June 2020)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves: to-read
review:
An artist � caught between thinking his own Tate Modern installations ‘bullshit� and a talkative cancer diagnosed and now self-untreated inside his body and, later, outside it � has an accompanied Pilgrim’s-Progress, as it were, from Beethoven chamber music to a cancer’s concupiscence to the eponymous Goya. The epiphany of having given birth to those who walk the world today. This story is sheer black disturbance in the darkest chasms of literature, I opine. Indeed, as impossibly black as ‘vantablack� (see my recent review where I first encountered that word: amid much ‘bullshit� modern poetic em-dashed prose made into greatness from word installations.)
�, blushes of colour obscured by an all-encompassing blackness.�
I like accessible, and somehow this story is limpidly accessible, too

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.


]]> <![CDATA[Interzone #287 (May-June 2020): New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine)]]> 53589393 133 Andy Cox Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.79 Interzone #287 (May-June 2020): New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This is a heartfelt and powerful work. It needs to be read by everyone. A didactic work that for once transcends didacticism itself � as well as, here at least, transcending the taint of fake news by a cleansing tang of inner truth in such creative fiction.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Armageddon House 53287687
Michael Griffin's riveting new novella ARMAGEDDON HOUSE grabs you and doesn't let go. It will stay with you long after you've turned the last page. This is a haunted house of a different sort.]]> 124 Michael Griffin 1988964202 Des 4
“The world flips, darkens, shifts.�

But finally opening its walled panorama from its outset all those days-of-reading ago.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.37 2020 Armageddon House
author: Michael Griffin
name: Des
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This book, whether intentionally or not, has a strong special meaning for me today. In my current circumstances.

“The world flips, darkens, shifts.�

But finally opening its walled panorama from its outset all those days-of-reading ago.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Black River 4199638 0 Melanie Tem 0747258376 Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.00 2013 Black River
author: Melanie Tem
name: Des
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
I imagine this author once having written this novel with a river of black ink�.. from her eyes, or from her pen. Or both as metaphor, via her fingers.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Snow / A Neve 52560708 60 Justin Isis Des 5
Plus Songling Pu

The review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.96 2020 The Snow / A Neve
author: Justin Isis
name: Des
average rating: 4.96
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Much, too, on algebra, the nature of some gloves, midges looking like eyelashes, and more.

Plus Songling Pu

The review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Interzone #286 (March-April 2020)]]> 52590248 Andy Cox Des 4 COFIWCH ABERYSTWYTH by Val Nolan

“‘Why should we not sing during the war?� the Prime Minister had asked.�

Peppered with Welsh words as subtitles, this novelette must surely be an alternate world narrative of future apocalypse, other than perhaps the still ringing-true of the PM asking us to sing, as he has done recently during our own unseen covfefe cloud of a Third World War now emerging since this work was written. I say it must be an alternate world narrative because the future people here remember the word ‘Brexit�, a word recently, in my own real-time, soon to become irrelevant or airbrushed out of history. Whistling down the road. What, me? No, not me, guv. Meanwhile, this is an engaging enough story based in a country where my father was born: Wales. And a seaside place with a pier and a university, and here it is compared to Chernobyl � Aberystwyth as a future genius-loci which is nicely built up here. As three female VanderMeer type pioneers, i.e. three vloggers (one of whom is the narrator), aided by drones, arrive at this dangerously ruined place after a mutiny by post-Brexit British militarists in a submarine had caused it to be nuked! I, for one, doubted the reliability of the narrator from the start! But, of course, I may be an unreliable reviewer�


nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 10:21 am Edit
ROCKET MAN by Louis Evans

“And yet unbeknownst to all, at the heart of every checklist is a lacuna, an absence. A small silent question, implicit and unanswered. A space for free will.�

Free will here freewheels? That space another airbrushing I mentioned above? This is the story narrated by one of the kamikaze rocket men himself, where Chernobyl above now becomes Hiroshima, or rather Moscow during the Cold War. Today’s cold and coughing war, notwithstanding. This Rocket Man’s glitch of free will is the MISS in mission and missile. MISS in inadvertent mutual synergy with the recurrent act of a FALL in VS Pritchett’s old story I recently read here. And I wonder, based on his subsequent dreams and trucking, whether this narrator is as unreliable as the previous one above!

nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 12:43 pm Edit
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS)

From the internet: “The organ of Corti is the sensitive element in the inner ear and can be thought of as the body’s microphone. It is situated on the basilar membrane in one of the three compartments of the Cochlea. It contains four rows of hair cells which protrude from its surface.�

ORGAN OF CORTI by Matt Thompson

“The desert seemed almost habitable after Madrid.�

“If the nest was a listening organ, did it not make sense that there would also be eyes, and fingertips, and lungs?�

Not that unseen enemy of today’s Madrid, a pervasion I mentioned earlier above, but a story of the Corti-Cochlea and of a seeming sand tsunami into the city, and this more reliable narrator, I guess, who, after being abandoned by his ‘wife�, takes us, or is taken by, five well-characterised other pioneers into the desert surrounding the city, towards a series of artfully limned towers, a seeming termitory or nest, down into which they explore, with guiding tablet, a journey as Clark Ashton Smith might have described today with a leaner text than his earlier exotic curlicues � an attritional tour-de-force of a narrative that is like Xenakis music transfigured into the meaning of words in a story, smoothed out with linear melodies that are recognisable as an audit trail of fiction as felt truth. Vestigial, fissured organ, the narrator Elias with now unreliable companions that become nightmarish incantatory refrains of tinnitus in whisper and word, a sound system of parasites within parasites (see my paragraph on viral dolls within dolls here in the just completed Black Static review) the SURVIval of now pionEARS, I guess. Starting off as a comforting, womb-like place, the characters now encounter seeming fabricated ants, snakes, Gila Monsters, jerboas, random timeswitches, a hall of mirrors, abandoned annexes, loops of lostness beyond LOST itself, phonemes, glossolalia, stereocilia, acoustic configurations � and with a constructive absurdism the lost companions singly or multiply resonate as irritants to the those remaining, their voices as intrinsic part of the linear Xenakis music as well as its now non-linear aspects, its rises and dying falls, as heard in this sonic morass of a nest or whatever it is. Today, in the real-time news, the Real Madrid was far more frightening, I guess. Here at least two of the characters can manage to make love. Do we now believe in the “Smart systems filtered into elixirs of life� � and when do my long-term efforts in ‘mutual synergy� finally become this story’s “mutual repulsion�?


nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 2:19 pm Edit
CARRIERS by James Sallis

I found this novelette a bit laboured and confusing as a plot, but there are many wonderful passages with provocative thoughts about life and its expectations � with eventually one’s self as the Ghost beyond its own myth’s ending. Yet somehow, as history teacher, one’s self is writing this out for astonished posterity.
Featuring street kids growing up amid the brutal social results of virus, and doctors battling for the lives of others, and rag tag armies, curfews, military coups �.
Assuming it was written before the current situation in our own real-time started, it is as remarkable, in at least this one respect, as the Reichard story reviewed yesterday here, by adding to it a striking picture of how we might extrapolate how our current predicament will evolve�. “Broken bones, beatings, malnutrition, the latest strain of virus trying for a foothold. Treat and street. With ever diminishing funds, insufficient staff and makeshift supplies,� […] It’s a curious sort of infection and, years later, I was part of the defense, one cell among antibodies flooding in to challenge it, little suspecting that I myself hosted a similar infection. […] Somehow you’ve become a frontier doctor,…�
…or that virus within a virus mentioned about the previous work above. Mushrooms with gills, notwithstanding.

“I do my best to stay away from news, but sometimes it finds you anyway.”]]> 3.30 2020 Interzone #286 (March-April 2020)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 9:48 am Edit
COFIWCH ABERYSTWYTH by Val Nolan

“‘Why should we not sing during the war?� the Prime Minister had asked.�

Peppered with Welsh words as subtitles, this novelette must surely be an alternate world narrative of future apocalypse, other than perhaps the still ringing-true of the PM asking us to sing, as he has done recently during our own unseen covfefe cloud of a Third World War now emerging since this work was written. I say it must be an alternate world narrative because the future people here remember the word ‘Brexit�, a word recently, in my own real-time, soon to become irrelevant or airbrushed out of history. Whistling down the road. What, me? No, not me, guv. Meanwhile, this is an engaging enough story based in a country where my father was born: Wales. And a seaside place with a pier and a university, and here it is compared to Chernobyl � Aberystwyth as a future genius-loci which is nicely built up here. As three female VanderMeer type pioneers, i.e. three vloggers (one of whom is the narrator), aided by drones, arrive at this dangerously ruined place after a mutiny by post-Brexit British militarists in a submarine had caused it to be nuked! I, for one, doubted the reliability of the narrator from the start! But, of course, I may be an unreliable reviewer�


nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 10:21 am Edit
ROCKET MAN by Louis Evans

“And yet unbeknownst to all, at the heart of every checklist is a lacuna, an absence. A small silent question, implicit and unanswered. A space for free will.�

Free will here freewheels? That space another airbrushing I mentioned above? This is the story narrated by one of the kamikaze rocket men himself, where Chernobyl above now becomes Hiroshima, or rather Moscow during the Cold War. Today’s cold and coughing war, notwithstanding. This Rocket Man’s glitch of free will is the MISS in mission and missile. MISS in inadvertent mutual synergy with the recurrent act of a FALL in VS Pritchett’s old story I recently read here. And I wonder, based on his subsequent dreams and trucking, whether this narrator is as unreliable as the previous one above!

nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 12:43 pm Edit
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS)

From the internet: “The organ of Corti is the sensitive element in the inner ear and can be thought of as the body’s microphone. It is situated on the basilar membrane in one of the three compartments of the Cochlea. It contains four rows of hair cells which protrude from its surface.�

ORGAN OF CORTI by Matt Thompson

“The desert seemed almost habitable after Madrid.�

“If the nest was a listening organ, did it not make sense that there would also be eyes, and fingertips, and lungs?�

Not that unseen enemy of today’s Madrid, a pervasion I mentioned earlier above, but a story of the Corti-Cochlea and of a seeming sand tsunami into the city, and this more reliable narrator, I guess, who, after being abandoned by his ‘wife�, takes us, or is taken by, five well-characterised other pioneers into the desert surrounding the city, towards a series of artfully limned towers, a seeming termitory or nest, down into which they explore, with guiding tablet, a journey as Clark Ashton Smith might have described today with a leaner text than his earlier exotic curlicues � an attritional tour-de-force of a narrative that is like Xenakis music transfigured into the meaning of words in a story, smoothed out with linear melodies that are recognisable as an audit trail of fiction as felt truth. Vestigial, fissured organ, the narrator Elias with now unreliable companions that become nightmarish incantatory refrains of tinnitus in whisper and word, a sound system of parasites within parasites (see my paragraph on viral dolls within dolls here in the just completed Black Static review) the SURVIval of now pionEARS, I guess. Starting off as a comforting, womb-like place, the characters now encounter seeming fabricated ants, snakes, Gila Monsters, jerboas, random timeswitches, a hall of mirrors, abandoned annexes, loops of lostness beyond LOST itself, phonemes, glossolalia, stereocilia, acoustic configurations � and with a constructive absurdism the lost companions singly or multiply resonate as irritants to the those remaining, their voices as intrinsic part of the linear Xenakis music as well as its now non-linear aspects, its rises and dying falls, as heard in this sonic morass of a nest or whatever it is. Today, in the real-time news, the Real Madrid was far more frightening, I guess. Here at least two of the characters can manage to make love. Do we now believe in the “Smart systems filtered into elixirs of life� � and when do my long-term efforts in ‘mutual synergy� finally become this story’s “mutual repulsion�?


nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 2:19 pm Edit
CARRIERS by James Sallis

I found this novelette a bit laboured and confusing as a plot, but there are many wonderful passages with provocative thoughts about life and its expectations � with eventually one’s self as the Ghost beyond its own myth’s ending. Yet somehow, as history teacher, one’s self is writing this out for astonished posterity.
Featuring street kids growing up amid the brutal social results of virus, and doctors battling for the lives of others, and rag tag armies, curfews, military coups �.
Assuming it was written before the current situation in our own real-time started, it is as remarkable, in at least this one respect, as the Reichard story reviewed yesterday here, by adding to it a striking picture of how we might extrapolate how our current predicament will evolve�. “Broken bones, beatings, malnutrition, the latest strain of virus trying for a foothold. Treat and street. With ever diminishing funds, insufficient staff and makeshift supplies,� […] It’s a curious sort of infection and, years later, I was part of the defense, one cell among antibodies flooding in to challenge it, little suspecting that I myself hosted a similar infection. […] Somehow you’ve become a frontier doctor,…�
…or that virus within a virus mentioned about the previous work above. Mushrooms with gills, notwithstanding.

“I do my best to stay away from news, but sometimes it finds you anyway.�
]]> Engines Beneath Us 52721787
When Lee Wrexler moves into The Crescent, he brings with him something dangerous from the outside. Not just a reputation for trouble, but an outside perspective that will ultimately show Rob that the home he always thought he had a measure of is a stranger and far more unsettling place than he could have imagined.]]> 96 Malcolm Devlin 1916362907 Des 4 ENGINES BENEATH US
By Malcolm Devlin

“We took care of the city, we took care of Mr Olhouser, and he took care of us.�

When I was a small boy in the 1950s, and often put to bed too early, I created in my mind or BY my mind a hub outside the working class house where we lived near the recreation ground or green, a hub in the pavement that reached beyond itself into a machine room below our terrace of houses from where I could control somehow the roots of my downtrodden background in what then seemed a communication with the rest of the world, where I seemed to work at these things, as perhaps this novella’s Mr Olhouser worked. I have since related my memory of that hub to the then future Internet. Now the memory has darker roots, those relating, in this novella itself, to when my own, as well as Rob’s, Dad’s “overalls smelt of iron and oil and earth.� So reading this just now has taught me a lot, as well as hinting to me why my story ‘A Halo of Drizzle Around an Orange Street Lamp� in the Big-Headed People book was written, a story wherein a night picnic was arranged on the green whereon these houses bordered� and why the events of that night were later recorded in the Family Bible …But this novella varies it: “A circle of orange streetlights against a velvet blue black sky; the thin white halo which surrounded The Works. The street was still and Old Elsie had gone.� You will never forget Old Elsie, the bag lady, as described by this novella, as told by the story of Rob, as narrator, and of another boy who comes anew to the Crescent called Lee. And The Works as a sort of hub of the Crescent (part of today’s working class or gang-controlled streets), a hub for the city with machines throbbing below: The Works that are sometimes more like mining or hawling rocks, rocks grinding together. My Welsh forebears were coal hawlers and miners. Miners of mine. And the tunnel-back two up two downs or back lane houses, even semi-detached, reflecting each others� interiors, housing insidious cultures that do more good than harm, I now hope. A culture like today’s coronavirus (that orange drizzle and halo mentioned above!) and we surely need Mr Olhouser’s ‘tonic� (“clawing at my lungs, reaching deep inside of me.�) even more! Notwithstanding the teeming mice and their pink squirming young. Rob’s encounter with the true nature of the Works and wondering if he shall ever meet Lee again, as he now sometimes does or does not, in later life. Headstrong and crime-sneaky Lee, in those boyhood days, with his comic heroes and rumours of what he had once done to his Mam, Lee who then tempted more than he should have done vis à vis Mr Olhouser. Childhood seen from a distance, it says somewhere here. Even a taste for opera in the case of Rob’s Dad. Lee’s narration about following some strange antics by Old Elsie are melodramatic info-dumps of dialogue, but is he acting, speaking by rote, pretending, still tempting the untemptable? Slow and quick at once. The city that is older than the law, hawled by such Crescent forces. Fragments re-jigsawed from those lodged in deep memory. Someone elsewhere in this novella has a metaphor about jigsaws, that I cannot find now, but this ostensibly was beyond what such a humble working-class mind might have thought of. But it was part of the hawling beneath her feet, I guess, making such humility the greatest wisdom of all…the greatest gift of wisdom from among many such in this bespoke haunting novella. Bespoke for each reader. I have merely told you mine. My mother, too, when I was that child with whom I started this review � “She’d set a fresh glass of tonic on the cabinet. She told me I should stay in bed, and she reached across to feel my forehead, as though either of us believed I might have a temperature.�

“The day resumed as though it had stopped to watch me fooled.”]]> 4.35 Engines Beneath Us
author: Malcolm Devlin
name: Des
average rating: 4.35
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

ENGINES BENEATH US
By Malcolm Devlin

“We took care of the city, we took care of Mr Olhouser, and he took care of us.�

When I was a small boy in the 1950s, and often put to bed too early, I created in my mind or BY my mind a hub outside the working class house where we lived near the recreation ground or green, a hub in the pavement that reached beyond itself into a machine room below our terrace of houses from where I could control somehow the roots of my downtrodden background in what then seemed a communication with the rest of the world, where I seemed to work at these things, as perhaps this novella’s Mr Olhouser worked. I have since related my memory of that hub to the then future Internet. Now the memory has darker roots, those relating, in this novella itself, to when my own, as well as Rob’s, Dad’s “overalls smelt of iron and oil and earth.� So reading this just now has taught me a lot, as well as hinting to me why my story ‘A Halo of Drizzle Around an Orange Street Lamp� in the Big-Headed People book was written, a story wherein a night picnic was arranged on the green whereon these houses bordered� and why the events of that night were later recorded in the Family Bible …But this novella varies it: “A circle of orange streetlights against a velvet blue black sky; the thin white halo which surrounded The Works. The street was still and Old Elsie had gone.� You will never forget Old Elsie, the bag lady, as described by this novella, as told by the story of Rob, as narrator, and of another boy who comes anew to the Crescent called Lee. And The Works as a sort of hub of the Crescent (part of today’s working class or gang-controlled streets), a hub for the city with machines throbbing below: The Works that are sometimes more like mining or hawling rocks, rocks grinding together. My Welsh forebears were coal hawlers and miners. Miners of mine. And the tunnel-back two up two downs or back lane houses, even semi-detached, reflecting each others� interiors, housing insidious cultures that do more good than harm, I now hope. A culture like today’s coronavirus (that orange drizzle and halo mentioned above!) and we surely need Mr Olhouser’s ‘tonic� (“clawing at my lungs, reaching deep inside of me.�) even more! Notwithstanding the teeming mice and their pink squirming young. Rob’s encounter with the true nature of the Works and wondering if he shall ever meet Lee again, as he now sometimes does or does not, in later life. Headstrong and crime-sneaky Lee, in those boyhood days, with his comic heroes and rumours of what he had once done to his Mam, Lee who then tempted more than he should have done vis à vis Mr Olhouser. Childhood seen from a distance, it says somewhere here. Even a taste for opera in the case of Rob’s Dad. Lee’s narration about following some strange antics by Old Elsie are melodramatic info-dumps of dialogue, but is he acting, speaking by rote, pretending, still tempting the untemptable? Slow and quick at once. The city that is older than the law, hawled by such Crescent forces. Fragments re-jigsawed from those lodged in deep memory. Someone elsewhere in this novella has a metaphor about jigsaws, that I cannot find now, but this ostensibly was beyond what such a humble working-class mind might have thought of. But it was part of the hawling beneath her feet, I guess, making such humility the greatest wisdom of all…the greatest gift of wisdom from among many such in this bespoke haunting novella. Bespoke for each reader. I have merely told you mine. My mother, too, when I was that child with whom I started this review � “She’d set a fresh glass of tonic on the cabinet. She told me I should stay in bed, and she reached across to feel my forehead, as though either of us believed I might have a temperature.�

“The day resumed as though it had stopped to watch me fooled.�
]]> <![CDATA[Black Static #74 (March-April 2020): Horror Fiction & Film (Black Static Magazine)]]> 53807136 122 Andy Cox Des 4
“Some believe this plague is a punishment.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.20 Black Static #74 (March-April 2020): Horror Fiction & Film (Black Static Magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
If you ask me, the whole powerful panoply is of a spiritual and physical plague subsuming ALL the characters and even ALL the readers! It certainly did me! Worth reading for many aspects, particularly the overwhelming sight of Zviv’s church spire across this city.

“Some believe this plague is a punishment.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Voice of the Air 52186348
The Voice of the Air gathers three episodes from Luca’s life. As he thinks back over his career, the people and tumultuous events he has been associated with, small tokens from this past allow him to step out of his daily concerns and observe what may really be going on � the secrets that lie behind the rapidly changing world in which he finds himself.

Now available together for the first time, “The Fatal Vision� and “The Lustre of Time� were previously only published in highly limited editions. “The Process of Fire� appears for the first time. While these novellas are loosely connected, each is also intended to stand as an independent story which can be read on its own.]]> 192 John Howard 1916465757 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.24 2020 The Voice of the Air
author: John Howard
name: Des
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
But I say that is what such books are for, and only the greatest can give its reader such potential gifts of imaginative autonomy.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Collected Stories 12022480 864 William Faulkner 0099546051 Des 3
Still keeping my powder dry.
See my constructively unfinished review under my name elsewhere. ]]> 3.84 1950 Collected Stories
author: William Faulkner
name: Des
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
I feels as if I have just been put through a wild literary wringer of dialogue and misshapen naive religious nightmare that could not have been written other than when it was and by whom it was. Anyone interested in the plot, it’s all over the internet. I am one of the big headed people to believe a review such as this can thus pass off its responsibilities to others with littler heads!

Still keeping my powder dry.
See my constructively unfinished review under my name elsewhere.
]]> Collected Stories 1184102 900 William Faulkner 0394722574 Des 3 4.03 1950 Collected Stories
author: William Faulkner
name: Des
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Shadows & Tall Trees 8 50718309
SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD-WINNER (Vol. 7)

WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST (Vol. 6)

"Michael Kelly's Shadows and Tall Trees is a smart, soulful, illuminating investigation of the many forms and tactics available to those writers involved in one of our moment's most interesting and necessary projects, that of opening up horror literature to every sort of formal interrogation. It is a beautiful and courageous series."

-- Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story

"Shadows and Tall Trees epitomizes the idea of, and is the most consistent venue for weird, usually dark fiction. Well worth your time."

-- Ellen Datlow, Best Horror of The Year

Alison Littlewood - Hungry Ghosts

Brian Evenson - The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

Carly Holmes - Tattletale

Charles Wilkinson - A Coastal Quest

C.M. Muller - Camera Obscura

James Everington - The Sound of the Sea, Too Close

Kay Chronister - Too Lonely, Too Wild

KL Pereira - You, Girls Without Hands

Kristi DeMeester - The Quiet Forms of Belonging

Kurt Fawver - Workday

M. Rickert - The Fascist Has a Party

Neil Williamson - Down to the Roots

Rebecca Campbell - Child of Shower and Gleam

Seán Padraic Birnie - Dollface

Simon Strantzas - The Somnambulists

Steve Rasnic Tem - Sleepwalking With Angels

Steve Toase - Green Grows the Grief

V.H. Leslie - Lacunae]]> 229 Michael Kelly Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.12 2020 Shadows & Tall Trees 8
author: Michael Kelly
name: Des
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This book itself I shall now put in my satchel. It deserves it. Or I do. And I know it will keep coming back. Each of its disarming stories a precarious step over the next lacuna…or do all people become overgrown hobbling dolls as in the Everington � Evenson’s self meeting self?

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Cartes de Visite 50922259 60 Mark Valentine Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.00 2019 Cartes de Visite
author: Mark Valentine
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Won in Translation

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Breathing Through My Nose 50656221
"You want me to have your babies?"

"No."

Her face registered hurt surprise that he didn't laugh at her joke.

“While we were making love? I felt a small lump in your breast."

She said nothing. Tilted her coffee cup towards her, saw it was empty. "Wait. What?"

"I felt a small lump in your breast.� He pointed at her right breast. "Is that something you're already aware of?"

She stared at him, eyes reddening.

"I didn't mention it at the time. For selfish reasons. And I thought maybe you already knew."

She slipped her left hand under the top of her blouse.

"Do you want me to show you�"

"Shut up."

He sat across from her at the small table, watching as her five fingers, underneath the front of her blouse, moved from one side of her right breast to the other.

Anger and relief in her voice, she said, as her fingers kept pressing, "Son of a fucking bitch, Roy, if this is some kind of sick, fucking joke�"

Her voice stopped.

Her fingers stopped.

Her dark eyes looked across the table at him.

Fingers moving again under her blouse.

In one spot.

He could tell she was pressing against the lump with her fingertips, trying to gauge its submerged size, and to see if it was painful.


Breathing Through My Nose documents eight cases in which Donald Duke entered someone’s life.]]> 307 Ralph Robert Moore 1696447917 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 5.00 2020 Breathing Through My Nose
author: Ralph Robert Moore
name: Des
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This author needs reading to see whether you had the guts to have read him in the first place. Then even more guts to do something about it. This review is just the beginning. Salt on the steak.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Arms Against A Sea (and Other Troubles)]]> 48669763 134 Rhys Hughes Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.20 2019 Arms Against A Sea (and Other Troubles)
author: Rhys Hughes
name: Des
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Taking symphonic experimentations (atonal or otherwise) of such composers as Havergal Brian, Scriabin, Stockhausen et al to absurdist, apocalyptic and global lengths, I was obviously inspired, this being my ideal dream of music taken to such lengths, with danger to the body as well as the mind, also involving an increasingly constructive stridency as a tontine of orchestral performers, judicially spaced according to instrumental strength, and never in diminuendo even if their performing numbers, by dint of mortality, are!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[SYNTH #4: An Anthology of Dark SF (SYNTH: An Anthology of Dark SF)]]> 49376988
ISSUE #4 features the dark visions of Mike Adamson, Forrest Aguirre, Donna Scott, Daniel Marrone, David Gill, Vicki Lindem, Steve Toase, and Jay Caselberg. It is edited by CM Muller, creator of the award-winning Nightscript anthology series.

If you are a fan of Black Mirror, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Alphaville, and the like, then SYNTH may well be your next literary fix.

For more information, please ]]> 120 C.M. Muller Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.00 SYNTH #4: An Anthology of Dark SF (SYNTH: An Anthology of Dark SF)
author: C.M. Muller
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
A story of a metal and flesh virus, feeding off a metal crane’s tumour, one to the other and back again, we hope, and the ability or not to ‘return�, along with rot and stench. Counter jib and counterweight. A wonderful reading experience that transcends reading itself and one that will make you inspired as well as sad. Only reading it will justify the experience of so doing.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[The Far Tower: Stories for W.B. Yeats]]> 50259010
Stories of magic and myth, folklore and fairy traditions, the occult and the outré, inspired by the rich mystical world of Ireland’s greatest poet, W. B. Yeats. We invited ten contemporary writers to celebrate Yeats’s contributions to the history of the fantastic and supernatural in literature, drawing on his work for their own new and original tales. Each has chosen a phrase from his poems, plays, stories, or essays to herald their own explorations in the esoteric. Alongside their own powerful qualities, the pieces here testify to the continuing resonance of Yeats’s vision in our own time, that deep understanding of the meshing of two worlds and the talismans of old magic.

Contents

"Introduction"
Mark Valentine

"Under the Frenzy of the Fourteenth Moon"
Ron Weighell

"Daemon Est Deus Inversus"
D. P. Watt

"The Shiftings"
Rosanne Rabinowitz

"Hermit for Hire"
Caitriona Lally

"The Property of the Dead"
John Howard

"Cast a Cold Eye"
Timothy J. Jarvis

"The Messiah of Blackhall Place"
Derek John

"This Crumbling Pageant"
Lynda E. Rucker

"Shadowy Waters"
Reggie Oliver

"The Hosts of the Air"
Nina Antonia

Limited to 400 copies. The first 100 were numbered and came with postcards.]]> 184 Mark Valentine Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.94 2019 The Far Tower: Stories for W.B. Yeats
author: Mark Valentine
name: Des
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This is so delightfully disorientating, even confusing � from decontroversialised city club to Galway, amid Irish history, a father son relationship � that I am tempted to let this story’s architecture stand alone, an emblem for you to seek, one in honour of Yeats� gyres and interpenetrating cones. The book’s eponymous tower itself.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Yellow Wood 13308405
Alexandra left as soon as she turned eighteen, the only way she could keep from being swallowed up by her father, her only chance of having a life of her own. Alexandra grew up with her father’s voice in her head, his will on her in one form or another. Now, though she vowed she never would, she is going back. Because his voice came into her head, ordering her home.

The longer Alexandra stays with her father in her childhood home, the stronger her suspicions that his control over her is more insidious than she knew. Her siblings are all oddly under his control, exactly what he made them, and she discovers evidence of what he has planned for her.

“She fled to live her own life,� Alexander observes. “As if there ever were such a thing.”]]> 320 Melanie Tem 0786950986 Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.06 2014 The Yellow Wood
author: Melanie Tem
name: Des
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This is the crystallised Temch, I guess. As I head towards the end of my recent spate of Tem real-time reviewing. So please forgive this lengthy quote. And as I have these thoughts, Bella suddenly jumps with a start in the reader’s arms, as if having a fit � or having some sort of infantile sex imposed upon its presumed dead mind if not its body? Just as Alexander, equally perhaps heading towards his own dead mind, not of stunted babyhood, but of cut-down senility, is asked for sex by his long estranged and also now dying wife. This book makes one ask some very strange questions, make even stranger connections and have many inchoate thoughts about it.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Nostalgia That Never Was 43485787 145 Rhys Hughes 1793162999 Des 4 4.00 2019 The Nostalgia That Never Was
author: Rhys Hughes
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Sermons In a House of Grief 48585513 59 Benjamin Tweddell Des 4 In this my final review of 2019, I reprise the quote I made above yesterday:
“I’ve heard it said that the more a man strives for the light, the deeper his roots twist into the dark, and I doubt it not.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.64 2019 Sermons In a House of Grief
author: Benjamin Tweddell
name: Des
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

In this my final review of 2019, I reprise the quote I made above yesterday:
“I’ve heard it said that the more a man strives for the light, the deeper his roots twist into the dark, and I doubt it not.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[O Baluarte Tomado / The Bastion Overwhelmed]]> 48713763
Como usual em Damian, há uma busca nessa estranha narrativa de transformar as possibilidades do tempo narrativo, aparentemente progressivo e linear, em um evento cíclico, como as estações do ano e os rituais pagãos (que sobrevivem, vagos, em nossa memória coletiva) que as celebram. Este será o primeiro volume da série Raphus Chartae, que trará para os leitores em língua portuguesa a riqueza e a complexidade de certas tendências (ou nuances) da nova narrativa fantástica, de terror e decadente.]]> 56 Damian Murphy Des 4
The review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.20 2019 O Baluarte Tomado / The Bastion Overwhelmed
author: Damian Murphy
name: Des
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
…Ink blots on text, not on a book’s images, engravings etc. A powerful story of a man whose wife � a gardener � died five years before, and her memory as person or doer forms associative images or dreams with his current life today.

The review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Interzone #284 (November-December 2019): New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine)]]> 48892985
Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

Fiction:

The Kindest God is Light by Joanna Berry
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

She and I and We by Timothy Mudie

Dent-de-lion by Natalia Theodoridou

Parasite Art by David Tallerman
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Duchess of Drinke Street by Tim Chawaga
illustrated by Dave Senecal

Dream of the High Mountain by Daniel Bennett

Features:

Guest Editorial
Joanna Berry

Future Interrupted: The Resistible Rise of Argos Panoptes
Andy Hedgecock

Climbing Stories: Mega-Robot Rampage Repellant
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Books reviewed include Automatic Eve by Rokuro Inui, Incomplete Solutions by Wole Talabi, From the Moon to the Stars by Duncan Lunan, Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko, The New Voices of Science Fiction edited by Hannu Rajaniemi & Jacob Weisman, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, The Sea Inside Me by Sarah Dobbs, Earwig by B. Catling, Tales from the Spired Inn by Stephen Palmer, Poems by Diana Wynne Jones, Around Alien Stars by G. David Nordley

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Ad Astra, Joker, Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie, Abominable, Gemini Man, It Chapter 2, Addams Family, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Terminator: Dark Fate, Synchronic, Zombieland: Double Tap]]> 145 Andy Cox Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.20 2019 Interzone #284 (November-December 2019): New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
…that is part of the revelation, and again cannot be described but simply FELT. Bennett’s hotel retreat on a precarious coastline, with prescribed hallucinogenics, including random italicised lines for some DNA ‘egg� of poetry thrown into space to take you as humanity beyond Terran apocalypse, a man who also sexually colludes with a feistily contra-opinionated woman, and he also has a daughter who once worked for the Chinese in Lagos�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Black Static #72 (November-December 2019): Horror Fiction & Film (Black Static Magazine)]]> 48804306
The cover art is 'SETI' by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

The String People by Matt Thompson
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

The Longest Night by Emily B. Cataneo
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Hope Chest by Sarah Read

Don't Come Looking by Jack Westlake

As Dark as Hunger by S. Qiouyi Lu
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Watching by Tim Lees

Features:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
I CAN'T HELP FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOU: THE COMFORTS OF HORROR?

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
BE PREPARED

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Mike O'Driscoll: Catfish Lullaby by A.C. Wise � Daniel Carpenter: Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood � David Surface: One Good Story: The Little Mermaid by Douglas Clegg � Gary Couzens: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk, Tommy by Kit Power, Sight Unseen by Brian Howell � Andy Hedgecock: The Uneasy by Andrew Hook, The Forest of Dead Children by Andrew Hook, The Bone Weaver's Orchard by Sarah Read � Sadie Hartmann: Out of Water by Sarah Read � Laura Mauro: And the House Lights Dim by Tim Major

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Rabid (1977) � Rabid (2019) � Suspiria (2018) � Child's Play (2019) � The Banana Splits Movie � Critters Attack! � The Dark Half � The Stand � Nightbreed � An American Werewolf in London � Legend of the Witches � Secret Rites � And Soon the Darkness (1970) � The Invitation � The Dead Center � Marianne � The Curse of La Llorona � Skinner � Double Date � American Horror Story: Apocalypse � Harpoon � The Wind � The Furies � Isabelle]]> 223 Andy Cox Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.10 Black Static #72 (November-December 2019): Horror Fiction & Film (Black Static Magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
It is as if this story has been watching the previous five, being their instinctive coda and gestalt, blending, for example, the grim hotel in the String People and the flaying of the mermaid, the abuse of those in such rooms with doors � here abuse of boys by men, men wanting new lanyards? � watched by one already with memories of being thus abused. A telling staccato of deadpan irony. Seeking a wholeness withered, a final gestalt gone.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> All That Is Solid 48721058
These are the words Gosia hears as she heads home from a night out with friends. It’s the summer of 2016 and London is simmering with tension after the Brexit referendum. She is Polish-born and a Londoner for most of her adult life, but now she feels like a stranger in the place she calls home. Nothing is certain anymore; even the ground beneath her feet and the surface where she rests her hand feel unstable and likely to dissolve. Though she takes part in demonstrations, she feels very much alone. When her friend Ilona suggests therapy to help her face her fears, Gosia decides to have a go. It couldn’t hurt� could it?

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s compelling novelette ranges through activism and art therapy to the reality of city life to present a portrait of Brexit Britain, capturing a moment in time and a period in history.]]> 36 Rosanne Rabinowitz 1908125934 Des 4
“She ends up at the busy bus stop on Kingsway in front of a Wetherspoons. But that’s the chain with the Brexit beer mats.�

I, too, have not been in a Wetherspoons since June 2016; one can’t say it enough. Put it in all fiction and I will quote it in all my reviews.
This is an engaging but anxiety-ridden story about two friends, well-characterised women of relatively dissimilar ages who have made their home in Britain for some while now. We are allowed to empathise allusively with each of their points of view, as one visits the other or vice versa in South London � powerfully so, in view of the story’s eventual ending within the nature of this book’s gestalt. Two women who feel excoriated by Brexit. And by all Brexit’s barbed accoutrements. The Brexitwire borders as an art installation in a theatre of cruelties, where only the worst can happen, as a fear fulfilled. This story will stay with me for a long time. It has found its home in my brain. Perhaps only such telling fiction will remain there even when that brain becomes the otherwise unsolid space it is destined one day to become.]]> 3.80 2019 All That Is Solid
author: Rosanne Rabinowitz
name: Des
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
ALL THAT IS SOLID by Rosanne Rabinowitz

“She ends up at the busy bus stop on Kingsway in front of a Wetherspoons. But that’s the chain with the Brexit beer mats.�

I, too, have not been in a Wetherspoons since June 2016; one can’t say it enough. Put it in all fiction and I will quote it in all my reviews.
This is an engaging but anxiety-ridden story about two friends, well-characterised women of relatively dissimilar ages who have made their home in Britain for some while now. We are allowed to empathise allusively with each of their points of view, as one visits the other or vice versa in South London � powerfully so, in view of the story’s eventual ending within the nature of this book’s gestalt. Two women who feel excoriated by Brexit. And by all Brexit’s barbed accoutrements. The Brexitwire borders as an art installation in a theatre of cruelties, where only the worst can happen, as a fear fulfilled. This story will stay with me for a long time. It has found its home in my brain. Perhaps only such telling fiction will remain there even when that brain becomes the otherwise unsolid space it is destined one day to become.
]]> Pareidolia 48817210
Pareidolia contains new dark and surreal stories by Sarah Read, Eliza Chan, Tim Major, Rich Hawkins, Carly Holmes, G.V. Anderson, Charlotte Bond, Daniel Braum, Rosanne Rabinowitz and Andrew David Barker.

Step inside, and see if you see what they do.]]> 223 James Everington 1913038335 Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.00 Pareidolia
author: James Everington
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
An ominously quiet coda to this haunting and overtly pareidoliac book, a 200+ page paperback that sits neatly in the pocket. My brain above ever scries pictures through its lent lens of memory and death. The shadow flits.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Animals of the Exodus 52591636 A door was opening.
“Karen: I will see you again.�
Together, they would reach a new place.
A 70-page festival for the world-broken. Because there are paths.

Dark and surreal, these four interlinked stories examine the places of refuge sought out by damaged individuals.]]> 70 Alexander Zelenyj 1908125829 Des 5 TAKING KAREN AWAY

“He’d never known it before Karen.�
Surrounded by forming then fading walls, this is a short ever-resonating vision of love-making as an Anker in a “miracle-place� that is cruelly or kindly bespoke to its particular coupling, “before the crickets were awake to greet the new day�.


nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 2:40 pm Edit
CELESTE HAD TO GO AWAY

“� the strength she got from the music created by this mysterious collective, from the words of their songs and what it all meant when taken together…�

A luminous story about a 17 year old girl called Celeste and her Dad’s spiritually pragmatic facilitation of the mythical punk music band, The Deathray Bradburys, that she yearned to see perform in a return concert � as a means of transcending the painful irreparable trauma in her previous life, so as to take her away as a version of Karen (Anker) being earlier taken away, but whereby, with Celeste, this archetypal paternal anchor can somehow become a release via aesthetic euthanasia because of � or despite � its earlier anchoring of her to the earth, such a mooring depicted by the ankh- or anchor-winged device from the book copied above, a device now a gathering angel formed from the effulgent visionary escape vehicle purposefully floating untethered above, at times like heat lightning. Celeste was not the only one in the small audience to share this exodus or deathly diaspora. (As an aside, the celeste or celesta � after which musical instrument the 1970s group Celeste was named � was neither here nor theremin.)

nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 3:38 pm Edit
SOME SAW THE FIRE EXODUS

“In the deepest place yawning like a black hole inside of you, begging to be filled —�

Here a different ‘our Father� as anchor. And we now as readers seem again to be linked into this trauma-healing deathly-diaspora or exodus, now with both Celeste and Karen reappearing in interface with a sibling or in connection with some “weird hippy commune� or more serious sorcery whereby a white-robed congregation of disciples reach towards their gathering angels, a träumtrawling here as fires leaving the roof and rising into the summer sky “into the heart of the twin stars…� (Also a game of hopscotch is mentioned in this Zelenyj, and only this very morning by chance I read and reviewed here a work entitled ‘Delivery Night� where hopscotch is connected with angels coming for you upon your death. And in 1990 I had a brief story ‘The Tide of Time� published in ‘Dark Star #7� (republished here), a work that I now find to be in mutual synergy with this Zelenyj work.)

nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 4:44 pm Edit
THE MAYFLIES WANT TO FLY

An important substantive work of literature, of love between boy student and his “goddess� teacher, she attracted to him because of his nature of Greek poems and uncruel eyes, his love for her on a cruising car journey, she sometimes a statue, where guilt and mishap happen, even human roadkill and a pair of stars, a pair of rare birds, crickets, mayflies, fireflies, birds, motels, and we fit together a “pattern of forward motion�, a pattern of what happens and how they dealt with it, with additional elements towards the end of this work that echo people and events in the previous works of this chapbook. Roadkills. Holes dug towards some puddly heart of darkness, and here is where I go off kilter, even in my own terms, my own star field, ghosting the lines between the text’s own raptures, ruptures, and other listless students. That “old dream�. And that ‘girl-child� in the goddess teacher’s arms, blood upon the vivid geographies of a white dress. A procession of animals like an exodus. Then a new dust ghost. A new place. Anchors are magnets, too. A Lawrencian balance of two stars in the vastness above and below.

“Mayflies fluttered everywhere, following in the air over the procession like a host of frenzied guardian angels.�

end]]> 4.83 2019 Animals of the Exodus
author: Alexander Zelenyj
name: Des
average rating: 4.83
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 9:03 am Edit
TAKING KAREN AWAY

“He’d never known it before Karen.�
Surrounded by forming then fading walls, this is a short ever-resonating vision of love-making as an Anker in a “miracle-place� that is cruelly or kindly bespoke to its particular coupling, “before the crickets were awake to greet the new day�.


nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 2:40 pm Edit
CELESTE HAD TO GO AWAY

“� the strength she got from the music created by this mysterious collective, from the words of their songs and what it all meant when taken together…�

A luminous story about a 17 year old girl called Celeste and her Dad’s spiritually pragmatic facilitation of the mythical punk music band, The Deathray Bradburys, that she yearned to see perform in a return concert � as a means of transcending the painful irreparable trauma in her previous life, so as to take her away as a version of Karen (Anker) being earlier taken away, but whereby, with Celeste, this archetypal paternal anchor can somehow become a release via aesthetic euthanasia because of � or despite � its earlier anchoring of her to the earth, such a mooring depicted by the ankh- or anchor-winged device from the book copied above, a device now a gathering angel formed from the effulgent visionary escape vehicle purposefully floating untethered above, at times like heat lightning. Celeste was not the only one in the small audience to share this exodus or deathly diaspora. (As an aside, the celeste or celesta � after which musical instrument the 1970s group Celeste was named � was neither here nor theremin.)

nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 3:38 pm Edit
SOME SAW THE FIRE EXODUS

“In the deepest place yawning like a black hole inside of you, begging to be filled —�

Here a different ‘our Father� as anchor. And we now as readers seem again to be linked into this trauma-healing deathly-diaspora or exodus, now with both Celeste and Karen reappearing in interface with a sibling or in connection with some “weird hippy commune� or more serious sorcery whereby a white-robed congregation of disciples reach towards their gathering angels, a träumtrawling here as fires leaving the roof and rising into the summer sky “into the heart of the twin stars…� (Also a game of hopscotch is mentioned in this Zelenyj, and only this very morning by chance I read and reviewed here a work entitled ‘Delivery Night� where hopscotch is connected with angels coming for you upon your death. And in 1990 I had a brief story ‘The Tide of Time� published in ‘Dark Star #7� (republished here), a work that I now find to be in mutual synergy with this Zelenyj work.)

nullimmortalis October 30, 2019 at 4:44 pm Edit
THE MAYFLIES WANT TO FLY

An important substantive work of literature, of love between boy student and his “goddess� teacher, she attracted to him because of his nature of Greek poems and uncruel eyes, his love for her on a cruising car journey, she sometimes a statue, where guilt and mishap happen, even human roadkill and a pair of stars, a pair of rare birds, crickets, mayflies, fireflies, birds, motels, and we fit together a “pattern of forward motion�, a pattern of what happens and how they dealt with it, with additional elements towards the end of this work that echo people and events in the previous works of this chapbook. Roadkills. Holes dug towards some puddly heart of darkness, and here is where I go off kilter, even in my own terms, my own star field, ghosting the lines between the text’s own raptures, ruptures, and other listless students. That “old dream�. And that ‘girl-child� in the goddess teacher’s arms, blood upon the vivid geographies of a white dress. A procession of animals like an exodus. Then a new dust ghost. A new place. Anchors are magnets, too. A Lawrencian balance of two stars in the vastness above and below.

“Mayflies fluttered everywhere, following in the air over the procession like a host of frenzied guardian angels.�

end
]]> Tomorrow, When I Was Young 48577091 50 Julie Travis 190812587X Des 5 I must say I found this novelette captivating in a way that stopped me questioning how it managed to be so captivating, naively, disarmingly so. I enjoyed the character of Zanders and her search for an ancestor in Peru and the people she met along the way. But, above all, I loved the Golden Sea Captain whose ship the Giantess has a potentially shapeshifting or, rather, shapedetaching figurehead. A transformational yage and genderation of still slanting self. And the giant creature in the Golden Sea that went against the grain of gestalt by splintering off into many tiny creatures with divisive knives. Ah, there is so much more I have not told you about this book’s journey that Zanders was making, and her connection with England, and I miraculously found myself being part of her journey rather than simply sharing it. By dint of both her smile and her sorrow. And I know that we all shall one day doff our clothes to enter our own particular Golden Seas and hopefully find more than just pronouns to define us. Towards synchronicity, � ”It was Zanders who first noticed how the gap between the elder’s speech and the Captain’s translation was narrowing.”]]> 4.14 2019 Tomorrow, When I Was Young
author: Julie Travis
name: Des
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
“‘Shapeshifting is necessary sometimes,� said the elder, ‘it is neither good nor bad.’�
I must say I found this novelette captivating in a way that stopped me questioning how it managed to be so captivating, naively, disarmingly so. I enjoyed the character of Zanders and her search for an ancestor in Peru and the people she met along the way. But, above all, I loved the Golden Sea Captain whose ship the Giantess has a potentially shapeshifting or, rather, shapedetaching figurehead. A transformational yage and genderation of still slanting self. And the giant creature in the Golden Sea that went against the grain of gestalt by splintering off into many tiny creatures with divisive knives. Ah, there is so much more I have not told you about this book’s journey that Zanders was making, and her connection with England, and I miraculously found myself being part of her journey rather than simply sharing it. By dint of both her smile and her sorrow. And I know that we all shall one day doff our clothes to enter our own particular Golden Seas and hopefully find more than just pronouns to define us. Towards synchronicity, � ”It was Zanders who first noticed how the gap between the elder’s speech and the Captain’s translation was narrowing.�
]]> Panic Soup 52156430
Julie Travis, Author of We Are All Falling Towards the Centre of the Earth

Characters' messy lives intersect with danger in this nervy, gritty, warped collection from David Mathew. These tales featureaphrodisiac bombs, illegal tritium deals, giant hedgehogs, dreamangels, and the impending anxiety of parenthood. The urbansprawl and rural dystopia reflect the sordid emotional and innerworld of the characters who are fighting, sometimes for their lives, sometimes to be understood, or sometimes for just a pint. Panic Soupis best served with shots, in a noisy neighbourhood pub where all thepatrons are insane.

Stephen Scott Whitaker, National Book Critics Circle, Managing Editor of The Broadkill Review

If you love stories with bite, brutality, wit and wonder, you willlove Panic Soup. As the title suggests, there is dread here, warmth, trepidation, a multitude of flavours. Drink deep.

Paul Meloy, Author of Adornments of the Storm

David Mathew has an eye for nudging characters from the everydayto the disturbing.

CC Adams, Author of But Worse Will Come]]> 342 David Mathew 1940233631 Des 4 A collaboration with Lawrence Dyer

“Watching me watching myself,� Flynn explained. “Taking the pieces of my past � my real past � and twisting them into dramas for you. Including this: right now.�

As if I am the book that I am gestalt reviewing, the book that is me, but reading it for the first time in real-time. An amazing work, perhaps worth as much as WORTH, about the eponymous Irishman forced aka gratuitous serial killer of the woman in a pet shop who dodges his bullets by becoming his daughter. All for an audience watching through the implant in his eye. But it is even more disorientating, and I wonder who watched the watcher watching himself, who was tattooed to fix the identity of whom, who dyed the manthew.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

CAVEAT: I published or collaborated on one or two stories in this book.]]> 4.00 Panic Soup
author: David Mathew
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
CULCHIE
A collaboration with Lawrence Dyer

“Watching me watching myself,� Flynn explained. “Taking the pieces of my past � my real past � and twisting them into dramas for you. Including this: right now.�

As if I am the book that I am gestalt reviewing, the book that is me, but reading it for the first time in real-time. An amazing work, perhaps worth as much as WORTH, about the eponymous Irishman forced aka gratuitous serial killer of the woman in a pet shop who dodges his bullets by becoming his daughter. All for an audience watching through the implant in his eye. But it is even more disorientating, and I wonder who watched the watcher watching himself, who was tattooed to fix the identity of whom, who dyed the manthew.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

CAVEAT: I published or collaborated on one or two stories in this book.
]]> Nightscript Volume 5 52124265 243 C.M. Muller Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.73 2019 Nightscript Volume 5
author: C.M. Muller
name: Des
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
That, for example, this end story was also written as a coda for this book without knowing what was in the rest of this book before its author wrote it, and now there emerges a square in the knots of the wooden floor as a Pareidolia trapdoor, under which this Nightscript book has resided all the time till eventually lifted out by faith in fiction. The wolf at the door, too. Or grumbling just beyond the yet doorless wall of belief? By the way, this end story also brackets the whole book with the Hansel and Gretel one at its beginning.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> The Cockroach 53021592 That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.

Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain � and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way: not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy.

With trademark intelligence, insight and scabrous humour, Ian McEwan pays tribute to Franz Kafka’s most famous work to engage with a world turned on its head.

]]> 109 Ian McEwan Des 3 BEWARE SPOILERS

ONE

“a mosaic of memories, impressions and intentions that scattered as he tried to hold them down.�

A remarkable inversion of Kafka’s metamorphosis for our Prime Minister in fine McEwanese, as you have become accustomed to such fine McEwanese over the years, untainted, so far, by the AI infiltration in Machines Like Me. This in Brexit times Swiftianly couched as Reversalists versus the Clockwisers. It even predicts the very recent proroguing stunt!

“He was a tiny element in a scheme of a magnitude that no single individual could comprehend.�

“The collective pheromonal unconscious of his kind bestowed on him an instinctive understanding of his direction of travel.�

Conveniently, too, only a week or so ago I reread METAMORPHOSIS and real-time reviewed it...

My latest Brexitese real-time here:

nullimmortalis October 7, 2019 at 10:31 am Edit
TWO

“The origins of Reversalism are obscure and much in dispute, among those who care. For most of its history, it was considered a thought experiment, an after-dinner game, a joke. It was the preserve of eccentrics, of lonely men who wrote compulsively to the newspapers in green ink. Of the sort who might trap you in a pub and bore you for an hour. But the idea, once embraced, presented itself to some as beautiful and simple.�

Not Brexit after all, but something related to “‘reverse-flow economics� that Sir Keith Joseph recommended to Thatcher. No, it is BREXIT, I say, before Kafka got hold of it! Even the political shenanigans in the McEwan match! Retrocausality is among things I have long myself propounded with processes such as CERN Zoo, Cone Zero, Parthenogenetic Literature, Late-Labelling, Nemonymous and Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing. So I should know!!!!

“Mr Speaker: Order. There is far too much noise in this Chamber. Too many members think it is all right for them to shout out their opinions at the prime minister. Let us be clear: it is not.�

nullimmortalis October 8, 2019 at 10:30 am Edit
THREE

‘a nationalist wave of manufactured anger fed by an irrational Twitter storm�.

Well, we know how it goes and the PM tries to emulate the POTUS. Much serious shenanigan and skullduggery vis à vis the French and fishing waters. And much else on the day today in my own real-time when it seems to have been made clear that no deal is possible � EVER!

“There was nothing more liberating than a closely knit sequence of lies. So this was why people became writers.�

Kafka eat your heart out. Kafka somehow knew about Twitter storms, too. And red lines as well as red lies (worse than white ones).

nullimmortalis October 9, 2019 at 3:45 pm Edit
FOUR

“An appeal to basics would not have helped. Everyone knew that in every single law of physics, except one, there was no logical reason why the phenomena described could not run backwards as well as forwards. […] …everyone had lost the thread, even when a theoretical physicist came specially from the CERN laboratories to set everything straight in less than three hours with some interesting equations.�

“Was it really going to happen? Couldn’t the mother of parliaments bring the nation to its senses? […] Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia�.

“‘Why are you doing this? Why, to what end, are you tearing your nation apart? Why are you inflicting these demands on your best friends and pretending we’re your enemies? Why?� […] Because. Because that’s what we’re doing. Because that’s what we believe in. Because that’s what we said we’d do. Because that’s what people said they wanted. Because I’ve come to the rescue. Because. That, ultimately, was the only answer: because.�

end]]> 3.27 2019 The Cockroach
author: Ian McEwan
name: Des
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

BEWARE SPOILERS

ONE

“a mosaic of memories, impressions and intentions that scattered as he tried to hold them down.�

A remarkable inversion of Kafka’s metamorphosis for our Prime Minister in fine McEwanese, as you have become accustomed to such fine McEwanese over the years, untainted, so far, by the AI infiltration in Machines Like Me. This in Brexit times Swiftianly couched as Reversalists versus the Clockwisers. It even predicts the very recent proroguing stunt!

“He was a tiny element in a scheme of a magnitude that no single individual could comprehend.�

“The collective pheromonal unconscious of his kind bestowed on him an instinctive understanding of his direction of travel.�

Conveniently, too, only a week or so ago I reread METAMORPHOSIS and real-time reviewed it...

My latest Brexitese real-time here:

nullimmortalis October 7, 2019 at 10:31 am Edit
TWO

“The origins of Reversalism are obscure and much in dispute, among those who care. For most of its history, it was considered a thought experiment, an after-dinner game, a joke. It was the preserve of eccentrics, of lonely men who wrote compulsively to the newspapers in green ink. Of the sort who might trap you in a pub and bore you for an hour. But the idea, once embraced, presented itself to some as beautiful and simple.�

Not Brexit after all, but something related to “‘reverse-flow economics� that Sir Keith Joseph recommended to Thatcher. No, it is BREXIT, I say, before Kafka got hold of it! Even the political shenanigans in the McEwan match! Retrocausality is among things I have long myself propounded with processes such as CERN Zoo, Cone Zero, Parthenogenetic Literature, Late-Labelling, Nemonymous and Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing. So I should know!!!!

“Mr Speaker: Order. There is far too much noise in this Chamber. Too many members think it is all right for them to shout out their opinions at the prime minister. Let us be clear: it is not.�

nullimmortalis October 8, 2019 at 10:30 am Edit
THREE

‘a nationalist wave of manufactured anger fed by an irrational Twitter storm�.

Well, we know how it goes and the PM tries to emulate the POTUS. Much serious shenanigan and skullduggery vis à vis the French and fishing waters. And much else on the day today in my own real-time when it seems to have been made clear that no deal is possible � EVER!

“There was nothing more liberating than a closely knit sequence of lies. So this was why people became writers.�

Kafka eat your heart out. Kafka somehow knew about Twitter storms, too. And red lines as well as red lies (worse than white ones).

nullimmortalis October 9, 2019 at 3:45 pm Edit
FOUR

“An appeal to basics would not have helped. Everyone knew that in every single law of physics, except one, there was no logical reason why the phenomena described could not run backwards as well as forwards. […] …everyone had lost the thread, even when a theoretical physicist came specially from the CERN laboratories to set everything straight in less than three hours with some interesting equations.�

“Was it really going to happen? Couldn’t the mother of parliaments bring the nation to its senses? […] Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia�.

“‘Why are you doing this? Why, to what end, are you tearing your nation apart? Why are you inflicting these demands on your best friends and pretending we’re your enemies? Why?� […] Because. Because that’s what we’re doing. Because that’s what we believe in. Because that’s what we said we’d do. Because that’s what people said they wanted. Because I’ve come to the rescue. Because. That, ultimately, was the only answer: because.�

end
]]> Celestial Inventories 17689834 325 Steve Rasnic Tem 177148165X Des 5 CEILING

“So finally it all came down to this: an old man on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling.�

Exploring its marks as maps of far countries, as I did as a child? Or two ducks in a row? I can empathise with this inventorying old man, well, not too much empathy needed! It’s just an eye opener it has given me that things are thus inventorifiable. A job I need to do before it is too late. The next Tem I have intended to read, appropriately, is The Man on the Ceiling! If I live long enough, that is.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.61 1991 Celestial Inventories
author: Steve Rasnic Tem
name: Des
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

CEILING

“So finally it all came down to this: an old man on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling.�

Exploring its marks as maps of far countries, as I did as a child? Or two ducks in a row? I can empathise with this inventorying old man, well, not too much empathy needed! It’s just an eye opener it has given me that things are thus inventorifiable. A job I need to do before it is too late. The next Tem I have intended to read, appropriately, is The Man on the Ceiling! If I live long enough, that is.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Sight Unseen 49038353 245 Brian Howell 3945795443 Des 4
The partial review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.33 2019 Sight Unseen
author: Brian Howell
name: Des
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Well, of course, I am already captivated. Please journey with me , however slowly, into the still unknown territory of this novel, but beware of spoilers, however much I might try to suppress them.

The partial review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[The Ladies of the Everlasting Lichen and Other Relics]]> 48538897 73 Wade German Des 0 Two stitched books, each with the same printed contents and goatish or monkish internal drawings. This pair of books is bifurcated by the quite different experiences of the colour of the paper for pages and style of dust jacket, both of them well-upholstered in the frighteningly breathtaking resplendence of Abraxas. Over seventy pages in each, the blue numbered 80/88 and the pale yellowgrey 3/88.

Full of Abraxastic poems. Divided into three sections: Nightscapes, Prophecies and Dooms, The Monstrous Voice. One poem called ‘The Tomb of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire� and another ‘EURYNOMOS�. Only two of the many poems that I found myself allowing to grow on me�..

Being mainly a reviewer of fiction, I will leave you to tell me what you experience when reading these poems.]]> 4.50 2019 The Ladies of the Everlasting Lichen and Other Relics
author: Wade German
name: Des
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
nullimmortalis October 6, 2019 at 2:53 pm Edit
Two stitched books, each with the same printed contents and goatish or monkish internal drawings. This pair of books is bifurcated by the quite different experiences of the colour of the paper for pages and style of dust jacket, both of them well-upholstered in the frighteningly breathtaking resplendence of Abraxas. Over seventy pages in each, the blue numbered 80/88 and the pale yellowgrey 3/88.

Full of Abraxastic poems. Divided into three sections: Nightscapes, Prophecies and Dooms, The Monstrous Voice. One poem called ‘The Tomb of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire� and another ‘EURYNOMOS�. Only two of the many poems that I found myself allowing to grow on me�..

Being mainly a reviewer of fiction, I will leave you to tell me what you experience when reading these poems.
]]> <![CDATA[Interzone #283 (September-October 2019): New Science Fiction & Fantasy (Interzone Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine)]]> 50837155
Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

Fiction:

The Winds and Persecutions of the Sky by Robert Minto
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Of the Green Spires by Lucy Harlow

Jolene by Fiona Moore
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Palimpsest Trigger by David Cleden

Fix That House! by John Kessel

James White Award Winner:
Two Worlds Apart by Dustin Blair Steinacker

Features:

Guest Editorial
John Kessel

Future Interrupted: Irrationality, Forgetfulness and a Load of Goebbels
Andy Hedgecock

Climbing Stories: From One to the Next
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Books reviewed include A Year Without A Winter edited by Dehlia Hannah, This is How YOu LOse the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, Palestine +100 edited by Basma Ghalayini, Menace of the Machine edited by Mike Ashley, The End of the World and Other Catastrophes edited by Mike Ashley, A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay, Learning Monkey and Crocodile by Nick Wood, Driving Ambition by Fiona Moore, Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes, The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith, The Complex by Michael Walters, Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Aniara, Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Angry Birds Movie 2, UglyDolls, Playmobil: The Movie, Yesterday, In Fabric]]> 213 Andy Cox Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.91 2019 Interzone #283 (September-October 2019): New Science Fiction & Fantasy (Interzone Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
I was rather exhilarated by this story’s disarming simplicity and disguised complexity of concept, good hygiene at the bottom, breathtaking sky seen through the cracks of windows amid the bad hygiene at the top, a skyscraper with vines and vents, an amoral aviation of obviation and vitiation, and the rites of passage between these two levels, the temperaments of each ascender and descender well characterised, as obliquely evoked by the unhygienic hair of a Rapunzel figure, a character that produces countless ricochets of meaning in this work I reckon! �. Time will tell whether this is a landmark or airmark story. Probably both.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Slap-on-the-Wrist Stories 50128843 120 Rhys Hughes 1686757700 Des 5 TEN OF OUR TROMBONES ARE MISSING

“We are stuck here now. ‘Stuck at home,� I say.�

But if you are, life is still good with this book to read.
This story has 66 sections, each with 66 words. Another treat.

This whole book is like travelling in the head provided by a gifted traveller of the world as well as of his own head. Free with constraints, cloistered with sky. Meanwhile, beware the patronage spider.

The review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 5.00 2019 Slap-on-the-Wrist Stories
author: Rhys Hughes
name: Des
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:

TEN OF OUR TROMBONES ARE MISSING

“We are stuck here now. ‘Stuck at home,� I say.�

But if you are, life is still good with this book to read.
This story has 66 sections, each with 66 words. Another treat.

This whole book is like travelling in the head provided by a gifted traveller of the world as well as of his own head. Free with constraints, cloistered with sky. Meanwhile, beware the patronage spider.

The review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Glitch 46144790
This is a powerful novel of grief, family, and ideas. It’s a novel about embracing those irregularities � the recurring glitch � that seep into every aspect of life, and seeing the beauty in them.]]> 0 Lee Rourke 1911585584 Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.71 Glitch
author: Lee Rourke
name: Des
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
…this deeply felt book (surely, essential reading)�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Crystal Castles (Invitations to the Voyage)]]> 50881987
Thus, we present our readers with the collection Crystal Castles, a tribute to all the artificial paradises projected by the narrative imagination in its long history. And also our invitation for a continuous voyage � because there are not only tales here, but also memory fables, plays, poems. Here, the multifaceted worlds created by Ramon Lasalle, Rhys Hughes, Fernando Naporano, Justin Isis, Fábio Waki, Jonathan Wood, Chris Mikul, D. P. Watt, Thomas Phillips, Stephan Friedman and Tristan Corbiere in the Adam Cantwell translation.]]> 120 Alcebiades Diniz Des 4 That amazing concept of ‘default guilt� in the Friedman provocatively prevails. But smoke, as this book’s last clinch with its own gestalt, always rises, at least.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.30 2019 Crystal Castles (Invitations to the Voyage)
author: Alcebiades Diniz
name: Des
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
The book puckishly slouches towards a smoky Bethlehem in this short coda.
That amazing concept of ‘default guilt� in the Friedman provocatively prevails. But smoke, as this book’s last clinch with its own gestalt, always rises, at least.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Last Days 4309446 Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.

Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.]]> 201 Brian Evenson 0980226007 Des 4
“How do you know the moment you cease to be human?�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.71 2009 Last Days
author: Brian Evenson
name: Des
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Is this the brutally attritional endgame of mutilates being massacred one by one? Is Kline a messiah? Am I, in fact, a bodiless big-head hovering upon the brink of some godly gestalt? And how many Pauls are needed to form a cardinal corpus? Is this cloven novel as disarmingly great as it seems? How many logic-chopping questions like this am I allowed?

“How do you know the moment you cease to be human?�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Pharricide 44103235 Cordouan has saved my knives from retirement.'

Some dreams you struggle to remember. Vincent de Swarte's first novel is an unforgettable nightmare of tender brutality and violent desire.]]> 164 Vincent de Swarte 099559662X Des 4 Pages 19 � 37

“I lost the plot.�

…pages that seem fortuitously to cover the whole of October in this lighthouse keeper’s journal, except it is not a journal really, but a confession-to-self, a would-be replacing of a crucifix with a treated conger eel, amid the enforced but yearned-for loneliness, the hoist, the net, the gaff. A man who perhaps ironically calls himself “a big soft doggie.� Meanwhile, I have already learnt a lot about this man. Not sure I have properly met him yet, outside of the dark places where I would NOT like to meet anybody I didn’t already know. This specific dark place of the soul strobed by a blinding pulse, I infer. Geoffroy Lefayen would, doubtless, not welcome me, as a reader of his words, even if fleetingly visiting him aboard the lighthouse’s sporadic supply ship� And if I really did tell you what I already know about him, as I cross-section him in the flenses of my mind’s eye, as I picture these particular lighthouse environs, as I prepare to go through a presumably sea-cloying book, you would still WANT to read it for yourself, especially assuming you are of a certain literary frame of mind, but you perhaps would not NEED to read it. Yet plot is not everything, and it certainly isn’t so here. There’s something else to learn, I sense. To be alone with this man’s book of days. To become his lighthouse before he does.

nullimmortalis August 23, 2019 at 12:04 pm Edit
�> Page 50

“It’s romantic here in the evening.�

I don’t know how to even DARE broach what Geoffroy tells us in these pages about the visit of the English couple who have an ambition to get married in a lighthouse. I feel like I am one of those two gratuitous-seeming (at first) mooring-posts that they help him stake in the sand while the tide recedes. Or the mullet he later treats. Or the lion on TV he watches and imagines being party to his hobby, and no doubt you already know exactly the nature of that hobby, by means of a reader’s second sight. Better still, read it for yourself. Otherwise, I am just a medium for those who will never choose to read it. Or an invisible Christ between two criminals representing studied inference and preternatural guesswork. I know which one I prefer.

nullimmortalis August 24, 2019 at 6:54 pm Edit
Page 72
“I’m no longer setting myself boundaries.�

Do cooked things clench up when you bring a pepper mill towards them? Do readers when you dangle such a book as this before them? There is so much here as a narrative and backstory about someone who wrote it, before which you clench up. Even asleep, you sense what it is dangled before your eyelids? Understandably clenched up. My double telescope is now fully upon him. But my name is not Damien, nor am I a cockroach.

nullimmortalis August 25, 2019 at 12:38 pm Edit
�> Page 101

“� Shine a light.�

I have forbidden myself from divulging most of what is in Geoffroy’s book of days. How can a real-time reviewer deploy someone else’s thoughts� thoughts? How can even an author of them do that? How can a translator of an author, of an author who has also translated the narrative protagonist’s thoughts? All madness, perhaps, part of what is trapped at this lighthouse. Some of the sexuality eye-opening. Crucial question, though � does a madman’s diary seem mad to HIM? Crucial, but perhaps not relevant. Because who among us can truly scry madness? Or murder? Or hoarding flesh beyond any telescope’s scope?
(Anyone else seen the Swedish film BORDER?)

“Why was I not born looking on the bright side?�

nullimmortalis August 25, 2019 at 12:54 pm Edit
Flensing flesh or fish.

nullimmortalis August 26, 2019 at 9:16 am Edit
�> Page 125

“Am I in some kind of a trance when I’m concentrating on the lighthouse, and myself the rest of the time, or the other way around?�

When younger, I often got muddled up between being fazed and phased by something, but now I truly know what it’s like to be PHARED. Unlike Mr Ramsay, though, I can still complete my alphabet, without too much effort, even though this lighthouse is one where I am now myself being watched, as all lighthouses are by those in fear of rocks or in adventurous trepidation, being watched writing this real-time review as I in turn also watch Geoffroy’s ploys to assuage his own possible madness, even at one point � the windfall monkey brandy and a new companion dog notwithstanding � to the extent that he somehow sees himself as someone else. The characters who visit him, too, the Spanish smugglers, the supply ship, the telescope wielder and Joël, and, of course, Lise herself who, as implied here, can probably see things from beyond her closed eyelids! That [expletive deleted] lighthouse, “there’s no telling what it’ll make you do next.� The buffer of any translation of the author’s textual take � upon Geoffroy the lighthouse-keeper as journal-keeper � is perhaps paradoxically both a buffer AND a disguised means for ease of brokering or pimping the two-way filtering of the text’s effect. It’s a long hot summer here, today. A collective ‘seaside.�

nullimmortalis August 27, 2019 at 9:02 am Edit
�> Page 150

“Afterwards, hopefully, there’ll be dancing.�

This is the sort of book � no doubt a future classic from the past � that you will keep in your pocket, as you gad about, in case evidence is one day needed against you in any sweet moment of due justice. Well, at least regarding what you allowed yourself to read, if not otherwise do. These last pages are intensely moving, Geoffroy � a crucified Roy, Rex or Rey � sucked into all manner of natural fish-stuffed wells or oubliettes along with the hopes of marriage with orange-haired “bizarre orange�, a “damselfish�, the irresistible irrigable sucking-well of woman to hopefully marry, as well as dance with amid the live seagulls and dead ones. As things close in. Bambi is the film at which most kids when I was a kid found themselves crying for the first time in their life at a form of art. As I did in a cinema in 1953 with my then 5 year old girl friend, left there alone by our parents. A prie-dieu, pried, die you. Chocolate liqueur, monkey or not. Fishing nets on the wall. Reading clouds. FLUNTZ, a form of flensing, and only one of those telescopes shown above now needed. Or a one-eyed teddy bear. Stuffed at last, as the sea taxi comes for your last thwarted shipwreck. Yes, a most significant experience, this book. Relatively easy to understand and to appreciate its aesthetic of language, but not easy to endure as a seismic series of days. Thanks to those who have made the medium for this equivalent Bambi of my latter years. And I shall now read, for the first time, the foreword and afterword, by Patrick McGrath and Alison Moore respectively.

“� How many lives have been saved thanks to you, Geoffroy?�

end]]> 4.16 1998 Pharricide
author: Vincent de Swarte
name: Des
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
nullimmortalis August 22, 2019 at 2:53 pm Edit
Pages 19 � 37

“I lost the plot.�

…pages that seem fortuitously to cover the whole of October in this lighthouse keeper’s journal, except it is not a journal really, but a confession-to-self, a would-be replacing of a crucifix with a treated conger eel, amid the enforced but yearned-for loneliness, the hoist, the net, the gaff. A man who perhaps ironically calls himself “a big soft doggie.� Meanwhile, I have already learnt a lot about this man. Not sure I have properly met him yet, outside of the dark places where I would NOT like to meet anybody I didn’t already know. This specific dark place of the soul strobed by a blinding pulse, I infer. Geoffroy Lefayen would, doubtless, not welcome me, as a reader of his words, even if fleetingly visiting him aboard the lighthouse’s sporadic supply ship� And if I really did tell you what I already know about him, as I cross-section him in the flenses of my mind’s eye, as I picture these particular lighthouse environs, as I prepare to go through a presumably sea-cloying book, you would still WANT to read it for yourself, especially assuming you are of a certain literary frame of mind, but you perhaps would not NEED to read it. Yet plot is not everything, and it certainly isn’t so here. There’s something else to learn, I sense. To be alone with this man’s book of days. To become his lighthouse before he does.

nullimmortalis August 23, 2019 at 12:04 pm Edit
�> Page 50

“It’s romantic here in the evening.�

I don’t know how to even DARE broach what Geoffroy tells us in these pages about the visit of the English couple who have an ambition to get married in a lighthouse. I feel like I am one of those two gratuitous-seeming (at first) mooring-posts that they help him stake in the sand while the tide recedes. Or the mullet he later treats. Or the lion on TV he watches and imagines being party to his hobby, and no doubt you already know exactly the nature of that hobby, by means of a reader’s second sight. Better still, read it for yourself. Otherwise, I am just a medium for those who will never choose to read it. Or an invisible Christ between two criminals representing studied inference and preternatural guesswork. I know which one I prefer.

nullimmortalis August 24, 2019 at 6:54 pm Edit
Page 72
“I’m no longer setting myself boundaries.�

Do cooked things clench up when you bring a pepper mill towards them? Do readers when you dangle such a book as this before them? There is so much here as a narrative and backstory about someone who wrote it, before which you clench up. Even asleep, you sense what it is dangled before your eyelids? Understandably clenched up. My double telescope is now fully upon him. But my name is not Damien, nor am I a cockroach.

nullimmortalis August 25, 2019 at 12:38 pm Edit
�> Page 101

“� Shine a light.�

I have forbidden myself from divulging most of what is in Geoffroy’s book of days. How can a real-time reviewer deploy someone else’s thoughts� thoughts? How can even an author of them do that? How can a translator of an author, of an author who has also translated the narrative protagonist’s thoughts? All madness, perhaps, part of what is trapped at this lighthouse. Some of the sexuality eye-opening. Crucial question, though � does a madman’s diary seem mad to HIM? Crucial, but perhaps not relevant. Because who among us can truly scry madness? Or murder? Or hoarding flesh beyond any telescope’s scope?
(Anyone else seen the Swedish film BORDER?)

“Why was I not born looking on the bright side?�

nullimmortalis August 25, 2019 at 12:54 pm Edit
Flensing flesh or fish.

nullimmortalis August 26, 2019 at 9:16 am Edit
�> Page 125

“Am I in some kind of a trance when I’m concentrating on the lighthouse, and myself the rest of the time, or the other way around?�

When younger, I often got muddled up between being fazed and phased by something, but now I truly know what it’s like to be PHARED. Unlike Mr Ramsay, though, I can still complete my alphabet, without too much effort, even though this lighthouse is one where I am now myself being watched, as all lighthouses are by those in fear of rocks or in adventurous trepidation, being watched writing this real-time review as I in turn also watch Geoffroy’s ploys to assuage his own possible madness, even at one point � the windfall monkey brandy and a new companion dog notwithstanding � to the extent that he somehow sees himself as someone else. The characters who visit him, too, the Spanish smugglers, the supply ship, the telescope wielder and Joël, and, of course, Lise herself who, as implied here, can probably see things from beyond her closed eyelids! That [expletive deleted] lighthouse, “there’s no telling what it’ll make you do next.� The buffer of any translation of the author’s textual take � upon Geoffroy the lighthouse-keeper as journal-keeper � is perhaps paradoxically both a buffer AND a disguised means for ease of brokering or pimping the two-way filtering of the text’s effect. It’s a long hot summer here, today. A collective ‘seaside.�

nullimmortalis August 27, 2019 at 9:02 am Edit
�> Page 150

“Afterwards, hopefully, there’ll be dancing.�

This is the sort of book � no doubt a future classic from the past � that you will keep in your pocket, as you gad about, in case evidence is one day needed against you in any sweet moment of due justice. Well, at least regarding what you allowed yourself to read, if not otherwise do. These last pages are intensely moving, Geoffroy � a crucified Roy, Rex or Rey � sucked into all manner of natural fish-stuffed wells or oubliettes along with the hopes of marriage with orange-haired “bizarre orange�, a “damselfish�, the irresistible irrigable sucking-well of woman to hopefully marry, as well as dance with amid the live seagulls and dead ones. As things close in. Bambi is the film at which most kids when I was a kid found themselves crying for the first time in their life at a form of art. As I did in a cinema in 1953 with my then 5 year old girl friend, left there alone by our parents. A prie-dieu, pried, die you. Chocolate liqueur, monkey or not. Fishing nets on the wall. Reading clouds. FLUNTZ, a form of flensing, and only one of those telescopes shown above now needed. Or a one-eyed teddy bear. Stuffed at last, as the sea taxi comes for your last thwarted shipwreck. Yes, a most significant experience, this book. Relatively easy to understand and to appreciate its aesthetic of language, but not easy to endure as a seismic series of days. Thanks to those who have made the medium for this equivalent Bambi of my latter years. And I shall now read, for the first time, the foreword and afterword, by Patrick McGrath and Alison Moore respectively.

“� How many lives have been saved thanks to you, Geoffroy?�

end
]]> To Rouse Leviathan 51015123
In tales long and short, some substantially revised from their original appearances and including a new novella co-written with Mark McLaughlin, Cardin rings a succession of changes on those fateful words from the Book of Job: “Let those sorcerers who place a curse on days curse that day, those who are skilled to rouse Leviathan.�

Aside from his fiction, Matt Cardin is the editor of Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014) and Horror Literature through History (2015), and co-editor of the journal Vastarien.]]> 315 Matt Cardin 1614982716 Des 4 “suspended between two dreams.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.00 2019 To Rouse Leviathan
author: Matt Cardin
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
I see it as a substantive coda to this mighty book, one to rouse its Leviathan, not Hobbes, not Hobbits, not even Ducklings. But Hatchlings. But I am not compos mentis enough to follow it properly. It was too plotted for me. Too meticulously characterised. Art, painting, Aesthetics involving someone called Anthony Anthony. And much more.
“suspended between two dreams.�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Growing Things and Other Stories]]> 42118050 The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts..

In The Teacher, a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best short story, a student is forced to watch a disturbing video that will haunt and torment her and her classmates� lives.

Four men rob a pawn shop at gunpoint only to vanish, one-by-one, as they speed away from the crime scene in The Getaway.

In Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks, a meth addict kidnaps her daughter from her estranged mother as their town is terrorized by a giant monster . . . or not.

Joining these haunting works are stories linked to Tremblay’s previous novels. The tour de force metafictional novella Notes from the Dog Walkers deconstructs horror and publishing, possibly bringing in a character from A Head Full of Ghosts, all while serving as a prequel to Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. “The Thirteenth Temple� follows another character from A Head Full of Ghosts—Merry, who has published a tell-all memoir written years after the events of the novel. And the title story, Growing Things, a shivery tale loosely shared between the sisters in A Head Full of Ghosts, is told here in full.

From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.

Growing things --
Swim wants to know if it's as bad as swim thinks --
Something about birds --
The getaway --
Nineteen snapshots of Dennisport --
Where we all will be --
The teacher --
Notes for "The Barn in the Wild" --
_______ --
Our town's monster --
A haunted house is a wheel upon which some are broken --
It won't go away --
Notes from the dog walkers --
Further questions for the somnambulist --
The ice tower --
The society of the monsterhood --
Her red right hand --
It's against the law to feed the ducks --
The thirteenth temple --
Notes --
Acknowledgments --
Credits]]> 352 Paul Tremblay 0062679139 Des 4
Spooked with spikes, this is a treat from Mr Horror Ambiguous, with a woman, I take it, who once nursed a rabbit as a child, now nursing the vision of the ice tower, integral as a tower despite the warming, and of the climbers and Sherpas she seems to be with, and of the fact that even snow and ice can be stuffed with hot weather flies. And skin needs crampons to bite and notch against the grain of the pores so as to climb that skin and kiss the mouth. To love. To memorialise the unaccountable dead among her past and present. More anti Arctic that Antarctic, I’d say. Inverted icicle or not. And when I read this again tomorrow as if for the first time, I might have a completely different interpretation. Or it might have a completely different message to BE interpreted. Words melt and morph overnight, I reckon, even printed ones. Even its penis jokes. Or the arrival of Sam’s green army.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.50 2019 Growing Things and Other Stories
author: Paul Tremblay
name: Des
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
THE ICE TOWER

Spooked with spikes, this is a treat from Mr Horror Ambiguous, with a woman, I take it, who once nursed a rabbit as a child, now nursing the vision of the ice tower, integral as a tower despite the warming, and of the climbers and Sherpas she seems to be with, and of the fact that even snow and ice can be stuffed with hot weather flies. And skin needs crampons to bite and notch against the grain of the pores so as to climb that skin and kiss the mouth. To love. To memorialise the unaccountable dead among her past and present. More anti Arctic that Antarctic, I’d say. Inverted icicle or not. And when I read this again tomorrow as if for the first time, I might have a completely different interpretation. Or it might have a completely different message to BE interpreted. Words melt and morph overnight, I reckon, even printed ones. Even its penis jokes. Or the arrival of Sam’s green army.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> A Flowering Wound 52384186 181 John Howard Des 5
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.00 2019 A Flowering Wound
author: John Howard
name: Des
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Wandering the streets and this story’s description of the nature of developed London suburbs, like a new Machen. As if accompanied by a Proustian self. It is utterly magical, but I don’t know how, because it is so plainly, if elegantly, adumbrated by the text. His meeting of a man called David� I won’t say any more; the story itself leaves much unsaid, even unhinted. There is certainly some real magic here as I often find with this author’s work � a truly incredible serendipity or synchronicity because half an hour before reading this story I happened to read the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass�

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> Exhalation 41160292
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.]]> 368 Ted Chiang Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 4.27 2019 Exhalation
author: Ted Chiang
name: Des
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
A coda to this book, a wild ride that tries to expunge what I learnt from Omphalos! I go back and I’ll probably find that Om story has changed out of all recognition since I first read it. Good job I am a REAL-TIME reviewer, not one who looks back at things, look back at things too late.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> What We're Teaching Our Sons 39294679 192 Owen Booth 0008282595 Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.39 What We're Teaching Our Sons
author: Owen Booth
name: Des
average rating: 3.39
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
This is a book I am so pleased I picked up at a whim. A whim that has led to a unique experience of irony and absurdist wisdom.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Interzone #282 (July-August 2019): New Science Fiction & Fantasy]]> 49855756
Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

Fiction:

Verum by Storm Humbert
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse? by Erica L. Satifka
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

The Frog's Prince; or, Iron Henry by N.A. Sulway

The Princess of Solomon Pond Mall by Timothy Mudie
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Heaven Looks Down on the Tomb by Gregor Hartmann
illustrated by Richard Wagner

FiGen: A Love Story by Kristi DeMeester

Features:

Guest Editorial
Kristi DeMeester

Future Interrupted: Corporate Ziggurats and Fabulous Ruins
Andy Hedgecock

Climbing Stories: The Breath Before the Beginning
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Books reviewed include The Dollmaker by Nina Allan (plus author interview conducted by Andy Hedgecock), Beneath the World, A Sea by Chris Beckett, The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders, The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga, New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek edited by David Langford, Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald, AfroSFv3 edited by Ivor W. Hartmann

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Brightburn, Tolkien, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Men in Black: International, Aladdin, Toy Story 4, Detective Pikachu, The Dead Don't Die, Diamantino, A Dog's Journey, High Life]]> 235 Andy Cox Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.84 2019 Interzone #282 (July-August 2019): New Science Fiction & Fantasy
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
Atrazine frogs and iron deposits in rivers � this is a tantalising pre-Raphaelite visionary fairy story, a Verum journey, too, plus a steeped post-death story by Satifka’s weasel virus, frog to Prince, a Proustian memory where memories are involuntary muscle twitches, Marienbad hotel to cheap take-away restaurant, transgender another journey of self’s orientation. Not fighting fantasy, but fantasy fighting, alongside which we choose our own path to faithfulness, whatever else impinges. They are not plot spoilers, because the sheer reading experience outweighs whatever is seen to be in it. Different things by different readers. Some things the same.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]> <![CDATA[Black Static #70 (July-August 2019): Horror Fiction & Film (Black Static magazine)]]> 49949522 218 Andy Cox Des 4
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.]]> 3.25 Black Static #70 (July-August 2019): Horror Fiction & Film (Black Static magazine)
author: Andy Cox
name: Des
average rating: 3.25
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves:
review:
I consider myself to be a long-seasoned reader of RRM fiction. No mean feat, to have read so much red meat of fiction, culinary plagues as recipes of sex, soft cock or uncooked hard, or rare, and shape-shifting almost on a whim. This RRM needs handling with care, possibly the reddest rarest meat yet.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
]]>