A ‘dream of real air’ from a world under water? Well sort of. It’s a chunky prose piece “using words less understandable than the alien dialect once crated to Earth in the beaks of insane, if articulate, chickens”. It is about the cynical narrator’s son bringing home a girl friend (who is a bit like one of those Haw Haw creatures in ‘Caretaker’?) – with‘coral seas beyond the stocking-tops’.

DFL stories are often frightening – not so much because they are always Horror stories – but because it’s frightening to think anyone could have written them! Or even wanted to.

"High-faluting college talk, I called it. He needed his brains flushing out.” (29 May 09 - 2 hours later)

The Sun Setting (2003)

This is one of the few works that was first published in the ‘Weirdmonger’ book. Strangely, it is the only story that is out of alphabetical order (as you will see). Perhaps a red-herring in a ‘whodunnit’ or ‘isitreallyanovel?’ novel. It is also, I believe, the shortest piece in the book. About a lake (the lake in 'Egnis'?) A genuine prose poem, as opposed to a story. I shall break some more reviewing ground by making my review of this piece the whole piece itself from beginning to end:

“THE SUN SETTING

The lake was darker than the deepest sleep. I could still sense the horizon, though, while I or someone like me stood on the water’s edge: sensing that the tideless ripples were louder because it was night and there were less distractions. There were several others, awake or asleep, I wasn’t sure, who stood ranked along the edge: as if waiting for the glorious moment of waking or sunrise whichever came first. A sense of awe. A greater sense of suspense. A sense of sense. It was difficult to express even the simplest sense of all. Meanings lost touch with reality. Whilst thoughts regained reality piecemeal, during the process: a rim of screaming orange slowly worming across the already known horizon of utter darkness. Then the sun ineluctably inched upward, a slowworm, an inchworm, a wormhole of blinding iritis of the eye: sloe gin, searing cocktail of the senses, gingerly ratcheting into focus: half up now, almost three-quarters: as the lake became a sheen of fire; I or someone like me, almost fully awake, turned to see the other watchers of the lake, standing to attention, saluting the sun or, rather, shading their eyes from the sun with their hands: they could almost see the veins under the flesh by looking at the sun through themselves: I recognised one or two of the watchers: friends, relations, enemies even. There was not a single stranger. We were all bleary eyed, squinting, shambling, shuffling, a slow-motion locomotion nearer the lake’s edge, as if in some wildly lethargic attempt to summon the sun to ourselves, gathering it to our bosom. I or someone like me closed one eye. It was like winking. Acknowledging the presence of a life-giving force: after all, the sun gave us life, and we needed to return the favour. Exchange blessings with the most sacred powerhouse of God and Mystery. If God it were. Only representatives knew whom they represented. And the sun could not speak, could not be killed for the message it brought, could not accept blame or praise. Slowly now, far more slowly than we could imagine by wading through the margins of water with which the lake ruffled our bare feet towards its blistering furnace, the sun appeared to engorge as the horizon finally released its lower arc of corona. And nigh filled the sky. I or someone like me held hands with my neighbour, and he or someone like him took hold of his neighbour and she or someone like her took hold of her neighbour … as we walked deeper into the lake. And slowly, so very slowly, watched ourselves as our lives passed before our eyes as if we had actually lived such events in the course of some unspoken reality. The worm drowned. As heads inched beneath the silken smoothness of sparkling fire, it was as if each head was its own sun setting. Some of us or some people like us decided to linger to see the real thing.” (29 May 09 - another 30 minutes later)

Shades of Emptiness (2003)

First published in this book, this is a Joycean you-monologue (you being me) that ranges in quick-fire fashion between ‘identities’, historicities, house parties, slimefests, emptinesses... There are many strong visions and images and spectacular usages of language in this very long ‘story’. But do they cohere? Not to the present reader. This is the ugly face of ‘Weirdmonger’ – perhaps paralleling or symbolising the wider frustrations and eventual failure of those audit-trailers out there or of any seekers of leit-motif from within the whole book to make a gestalt.

“So, you determined to gate-crash and then gate-crash again. If a party was worth a party, it took you ten thousand years to reach its inner sanctum, where the action actually was.” (29 May 09 - another 90 minutes later)

The Shiftlings (1991)

It is a story rather than a prose poem, but I surprisingly find it is shorter than ‘The Sun Setting’! It is a conversation of dreams and the reaching through hair towards the head itself. A wispy ghost story. We are all ghosts, perhaps.

“But you must learn to sort out the straight bits first, or the middle will never come.” (29 May 09 - another 2 hours later)

Small Fry (2003)

First published in this book, this is my favourite DFL story ... where all the various DFLeries and DFLisms come together. It tells of an extended family in Wales, their associates in the TV world of the Sixties, the near-physical ghosts, the charade party games, the obliquities that (here at least) mean far more than any linear or straightforward devices can manage, the poignancies often touching upon absurdity or grotesqueness, the tripartite war of unsexual love, sexual love and irregular lust - all conveyed by a language that here works perfectly as a blend of dense texture and clarity, of poetry and prose.

“The magic times always seemed to be saved for a Sunday, when Father took us for views. His old jalopy took the steep winding roads in its stride. Up a Welsh hill, with our breaths snatched away, we gazed awestruck at the way God was able to make things so really big and high, as if He were showing off for the benefit of us small fry.”

‘Small Fry’ makes me want to question the word ‘weirdmonger’ that one of my children invented for me in the eighties. There is something constructively ambivalent about the word. As in this very story. Not destructive as it is in the actual story entitled ‘Weirdmonger’ later in this book. There is a difference between the Weirdmonger who writes these stories and the character who stole the name from the writer and used it as its name when the writer wasn’t looking and took it on and spoilt it and gave it a spurious ‘truth’. And, damn me, then I actually found it became the overall title of the whole book! (29 May 09 - another 2 hours later)

Small Talk (1994)

“...filled with sinister back-to-back churches and tenebrous terraced steeples. Things with souls seemed to be loitering on the pavements like coffins of flesh, whose talk was so small, silent it was.”

This is a long story of a day trip by car from Croydon to Leeds and back again. It is based on the exact details of the real trip in 1988 to a SF Convention with another writer (called Gary in the story but not a Gary in real life) who was of course then much younger and unfamous. Interpolated between the outward trip and the return trip are a series of discrete (?) short stories that the driver (based on me) fictitiously told the passenger en route. Do these stories cohere and/or stand up as stories or act as reasonless ‘small talk’? Some of them concern car travel: full of every-day and grotesque and absurd images / visions (much like ‘Shades of Emptiness’ but here, I feel the format works better). It is a sort of mini ‘leit-motif to gestalt’ within a larger ‘leit-motif to gestalt’ of the ‘Weirdmonger’ book itself. Dolls within dolls. We nearly had a fatal accident on that real trip, I recall. Would the world have been a better place had that happened – to the two dolls rattled around inside like dice?

“‘Don’t turn left on Sydenham Road!’ he insisted, upon giving me directions back to Croydon. If he said it once, he said it a hundred times.” (30 May 09)

THE 'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED HERE

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