A gongoozler is a loiterer at canal-lock gates idly watching canal-boats and their crew work the locks. Here we have a gongoozler (as narrator) who is handsomely (and weirdly) rewarded for some unsolicited help he gave a while ago to one particular canal-boat at the locks. This is a relatively substantial story that seems to reverse the usual interactions of ‘stranger’ and ‘danger’ – combined with salacious disguises and endangered manhood à-la-Zola. The story is captivating, yet slightly reprehensible, to my 2009 eyes. I recall a whole week was spent writing it piecemeal while on a canal-boat holiday. Another “someone subsumed by self-harming upon discovering the nature of one’s identity as narrator”?

“There was also a crackly sweet sound, like children surreptitiously feasting past midnight. It continued until I eventually fell asleep. My dreams had the sound of cricket balls hitting willow bats into the morning.” (25 May 09 - another 2 hours later)

The Hungerers (2000)

I think I’ve understood this story for the first time today, upon re-reading it. A flash fiction whereby a harlot (that arrives via the chimney) is poisoned by a kiss (does she die and get stuck when back in the chimney-flue after the story finished?) -- a kiss from her shy innocent customer who once as a boy had his body poisoned (as well as his mind) by a Grandmother who loved him so much that this was the way to protect him from what she must have perceived as Great Old Ones disguised as harlots – creatures who, now, when seen in the cold light of day, distant from the banked coal-fire, are simply doing what is asked of them. Narrator (the harlot) and her customer in poignant negative-symbiosis. And if that is a series of spoilers, well, the story certainly needed being spoilt.

“‘I like live fires,’ he said. ‘When I was a child, I thought each flame had a story to tell. Only later did I realise that a single flame is never the same entity from one moment to the next.’” (25 May 09 - another hour later).

The II King (1998)

“‘Well, it’s written down in a book, so it must be true.’ / ‘What book? This one?’ I pointed to the one he simultaneously pointed at: ‘Miscreant In Moonstream.’ / ‘By Rachel Mildeyes,’ the local proudly stated, as if that capped everything.”

One of those patchwork quilt DFL stories where any connecting thread, if discerned at all, is the audit trail of plot, with the rest being dream images or automatic-writing of the ‘synchronised shards of random truth & fiction’ school of literature! Deep intake of ironic breath. Actually, this is possibly one of the best examples of this school, telling of the II King’s jester who himself tells of matters concerning the II King from within the II King’s own dream. The otherwise sloppy plot luckily has an iron hardware spine – as well as an iron codpiece! SPOILER: The ‘II’ is a dream’s stutter for ‘I’. Or a migraine effect.

“I decided I would not buy Black Haven, after all, at any price and left them to lock up. After all, I had no money in someone else’s dream.” (25 May 09 - another 3 hours later)

In Unison (1995)

What is the most horrific thing a horror writer can imagine? Being paralysed and suffering a complete shut-down of all your senses except thought. Alone in darkness with nothing but the dark fantasies you created during your life.

But who empathises with whom? This whole book here looks inward. Each story in unison with the other. Author out of step.

Meanwhile, in the plot of one of these very dark fantasies (i.e. this one), two women still vie for his attentions!

“If it were not for the stories, he’d be dead. This one about becoming a leaky vegetable was the last and the best. But never to be written. Nobody would ever read it. A dreadful shame.” (25 May 09 - another 2 hours later)

The Jack-in-the-Box (1991)

‘Colin’s Sandwich’ was a British TV situation comedy in the late eighties about a horror writer (starring (Mel Smith). It made fun of horror writers. The story’s protagonist Tim (in pre-Tim Lebbon days) is fed up with the ridicule! Interspersing a fantasy life engendered by vision of his real wife and a Dickensian shop with Ligottian knick-knacks, we have a genuinely original and disturbing story. Another that asks the question: who empathises with whom? Another tripartite war, this time between author and narrator and something else that is neither-or-both. And the story has one of the most frightening last lines of any story (in the context). It could have been done better, though. It seems to me that DFL then (and still?) often misses his chance through hurry or a desire to finish writing many of his stories in one sitting (or so it seems by a cold judgement of the stories themselves).

"He believed the general public needed to be scared stiff, their bodies jolted out of their skins and brains eased from their skulls like shellfish, so that, eventually, they might be able to forget the real evil within themselves already." (26 May 09)

The Last Prize (1994)

This story was first published in 1994, but written a number of years before that when I lived in Coulsdon near London. It is a nostalgic story about a seaside resort and its pleasure pier (a place where I was brought up as a small child) but it was a story written during a long period of living inland, so was not affected, I guess, by the immediate vicinity of the seaside and its accoutrements. I have since returned to live near that seaside resort and it is a strange war between memory and idealization and a new hindsight that I now watch take place in this story. It tells of a boy and a girl, their dreams when standing at the end of the pier, childishly inventing what is beyond the sea’s horizon, its thickening by rigs into new lands? – and fairy-creatures? It also tells of a new-born romance followed by the loss of innocence. And the encroachment by modernity and self-realised entropy. To my now eyes, the story is exquisite. But am I here steeped in intentionality...? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this experimental reviewing of ‘Weirdmonger’ as a whole seems to tempt me into sinning against what I have long believed literary criticism to be!

"The sea soared and sucked beneath the old pier, licking like grey fire the thick oaken stilts upon which its planking stretched for a good mile. On occasions, the wind whipped up its own vortices, like ghostly dervishes, around the under-hulks of this man-made shipwreck - raising the fury of the sea in gobs of giant's spit between the gaps in the boardwalk."

I seem to be reviewing the stories quicker than I anticipated. I am already a third of the way through the book. But who knows if the future will ‘thicken’ like the a diluted sea-into-land, a sluggishness of purpose as I head towards what I have considered in blurred hindsight to be a few stories unworthy of inclusion in this book, even unworthy of my name (eg: Shades of Emptiness, Salustrade, Todger’s Town, Tom Rose, Weirdmonger, The Stories of Murkales, Tentacles Across The Atlantic ... coincidence that their titles are later in the alphabet?). (26 May 09 - 2 hours later)

'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED HERE.

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