"Real-Time Review of 'Weirdmonger' by DF Lewis" by DF Lewis

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This is an experiment suggested by a participant on the All Hallows discussion forum and is related to the real-time reviews of various books I've already conducted - as linked from HERE. 

Prime Books (2003)

The real-time review below is in celebration of 'The Intentional Fallacy', a 'literary' theory that I have been studying since the Nineteen Sixties. This theory includes the contention that a book, once posited in the audience arena, is separate from its author, the author in fact becoming just another reader or critic of it.

I shall display below, over the next weeks and months or even years, a story-by-story real-time review by myself of the above book.  Many of the stories were written decades ago and I have genuinely forgotten my intentions, even if I knew them at the time!

 For a few years, the following wording has been displayed on the book's web page (HERE) about the 67 stories:-

<< ORDER OF STORIES SHOULD NOT BE ALPHABETICAL:

Some people have contacted me over the months saying that they find the book too difficult to dissect for reading and they either are about to spend (possibly pleasurable) years reading it or have given up trying!

Some say there is a hidden built-in novel.

Others say that the stories are not separate nor a whole, a fact that is seen by some as off-putting.

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My advice, for what is worth, is to try the most accessible stories first and work outwards, and these are:
Bloodbone, Bobtail, Dear Mum, Digory Smalls, Find Mine, Gongoozler, The Jack-in-the-Box, Queuing Behind Crazy People, Scaredy and Whitemouth, The Scar Museum, Season of Lost Will, Sponge and China Tea, The Swing, The Tallest King, The Terror of the Tomb, Uncle Absolutely, Welsh Pepper.

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The next set to tackle: are those not listed above or below (i.e. the bulk of the book).

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The best stories of all, but not to be read until the above have been read:
Back Doubles, Benoko, Big Ship Little Ship & Brown, A Brief Visit To Bonnyville, The Chaise Longue, The Dead, Egnis, The II King, The Merest Tilt, Small Fry (the best of them all), Small Talk.

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Those not to be attempted at all (seriously off-the-wall or dubious):
Salustrade, Shades of Emptiness (the worst of all), The Stories of Murkales, Tentacles Across The Atlantic, Todger's Town, Tom Rose, The Weird-monger.
Hope that's helpful. >>

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I hope, too, today (14 May 09), as I embark on this experimental exercise in reviewing, that you do not consider it a highly pretentious exercise.

I somehow doubt I shall agree with my earlier self's lists of stories above and which to read first!

Inside the book itself are these words in a short author biography: "...there is something impersonal about his fiction, as if nobody wrote them: they simply were and, thanks to this Weirdmonger collection, some of them still are."

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The first story is effectively 'The Brainwright' (first published in 'Stand' magazine in 1990), and now printed in two parts on each inside flap of the dust-wrapper of the hardback version of 'Weirdmonger'.  This is the only story connected with this book that is re-printed on the internet and you can find it HERE. And read aloud by the author HERE.

"...a puddle-poet full of incomprehensibilities."  A 'brainwright' is officially a person employed to assist with the output of one's own brain.  I suggest this story is ironic!  It also has a lot of strange antique words thrown together but I enjoyed its musicality.  Whether it has any deeper significance for the rest of the book remains a moot point, but I think it is worth pointing out in this initial context that the sub-title of the 'Weirdmonger' book is: THE NEMONICON: Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction. (14 May 09)

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Year in brackets is the story's first date of publication.

The Abacus (1995)

The 67 stories are positioned alphabetically in the book. This is officially the first one and conveniently has an anticipatory appropriate opening: "The shop window was crammed with toys and contraptions which would create a devil of a fuss as soon as the batteries were fitted..."

Nostalgia of old shops and purple carbon-paper accountancy and human-like fingers and the puppet-strings of ancestry ... and bobbles of lust that thread what we count upon to what we despair of?

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Always In Dim Shadow (1991)

A very short fable of abuse made more powerful by ironic realisation of the title's acronym.

"The howling voice of a distant mongrel enhanced the loneliness." (15 May 09)

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I was both impressed and unimpressed when re-reading this one. It shows the worst crimes of my old erstwhile friend Wordy Weird – yet retaining a memorability of vision that transcends those excesses.  After negotiating the actual ghostly location that the story’s I-narrator wordily creates so as to give his existence simply a setting or rationale, the reader learns that it is possible for him magically to make himself vanish – vanish inside a wardrobe, whereby the mirror (on its door), a long almost body-shaped mirror that was due to shape further into a real vampire, shatters from his clumsy slamming of the door during the very magic trick of vanishing.  The mind boggles. (16 May 09)

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Apple Turnover (1994)

"As in a game, the more chances captured and taken from the board the more chance of new chances taking their place. Otherwise, the final catch-all chance would catch up on you all the sooner.” (17 May 09)

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Back Doubles (1993)

“There was a girl standing beside the steering-booth, hanging on to the driver’s every word – desperately longing for the casual off-duty hours when all such bus driver groupies would be presented with a Degree in Flirtation.” (17 May 09 - 6 hours later)

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Benoko (1993)

Big Ship, Little Ship and Brown  (1995)

Sex and geographically-morphing islands in a river (cf. Benoko’s morphing geography) and a missing gap (a harbour wall’s missing missing-wall!) and a near senseless imp called Measles who, once he loses his only sense (smell), merely has death as his reserve sense (a vampire with gaps for missing fangs?).  This story (of High Fantasy?) seems to have weighty things to impart in the guise of gaps between weighty things.  It was one of my favourites, I recall, from this book. I can’t imagine being able to write it today.

 “I can’t get men’s shoes out of my mind. Men’s shoes. Men’s shoes. Always men’s shoes until men’s shoes, just the sound and a new meaning attaching to the sound, take on an evil aura.” (18 May 09 - 4 hours later)

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Bloodbone (1991)

I recall choosing stories for this ‘Weirdmonger’ book in a sort of guided random process from the DFL Fiction folder on my then computer (to match the book’s eventual sub-title?).  However, ‘Bloodbone’ does contain a sentence of modestly-inbred modesty that encapsulates my time-distanced-objectified feeling towards DFL fiction – in that, self-evidently, only real writers become real writers:

 “It was the first time I had been there, so my first surprise, in a long line of other surprises, was the recognition of the likes of me by the likes of someone else.” (19 May 09)

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Bobtail (1993) 

I’d forgotten how shocking this story is, a sick girl in bed, attended by Dr Wormius and Mrs B, and worried she was being dreamed by the man who appeared to be her Grandfather or dreaming of her Grandfather dreaming about her - obsessed with the word ‘delirium’ and fear against the opening of a sash-window and the dreams at cross-purposes with the fluffy toy she’s in got with her in Bed: Bobtail (from ‘Rag, Tag and Bobtail’, a black and white ‘Watch With Mother’ TV programme I loved as a toddler in the Fifties).  I’m trying to gauge whether any of the stories so far have got things in common.  I suppose they carry things secretly like our bodies do until they suddenly rage or slither forth unwelcomingly (filters can work both ways) through the layers of disbelief that the author has insulated his meanings with. Like the monstrous vision towards the end of ‘Back Doubles’ which gives a lottery of escape with its alternative endings. No such chance of escape, though, in ‘Bobtail’!  Hmmm, unless there is a gap somewhere that went missing, some loophole...?

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW IS CONTINUED HERE. (20 May 09)

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