THE CLINIC by Bernard MacLaverty

“If there was one thing worse than worrying, it was wasted worrying.”

This incredibly observant story means a helluva lot to me. Empathy apotheosised. My visit to hospital clinics in recent years, observing the other patients, and interacting with those nurses and doctors who attend me as an oldish man during tests and results, and my reading literature in between as a waiting-room dewaiter! Here in this story it was Chekhov, recently mine has been MacLaverty, a godsend…. I must “degrump”!

Please excuse me quoting this whole crucial passage…

“He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was – about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present.”

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Context of above review: https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/781-2/

Couching at the Door by D K Broster

“…Art has nothing whatever to do with what is called ‘morality’; happily we know that at last!”

This is an intensely creepy work, evolving from a piece of fluff or “nothing now but a drenched smear swirling round the nymphs of Thetis!” to, I infer, a feather boa worn by the two ladies in Prague and Paris whom the writer (Augustine Marchant now at the more innocently countrified Abbot’s Medding) once met now being reconfigured in his so-called poetic work that his neighbours know little about, and then to a gigantic cobra, all three visions of such frightful realities threaded through with various images of the Garden of Eden, and, from a different point of view, we gain a glimpse of the same story as seen by the young callow illustrator who is to do the book’s artwork for Augustine’s writing and who is somehow palmed off by Augustine with this frightful furry familiar! Leaving Augustine free of it?
A work of hiding one’s art, guilt at one’s art, even absolving oneself of whatever dark creativity one does… and even writing such stuff myself and now reading, then openly reviewing this story being equivalent to my own guilty secret, but now no longer a secret as it is thus palmed off on you?!
There are some wondrous passages describing the horrific ‘familiar’, but by calling them ‘wondrous’, what is it do we do? The warmth of our snuggling up to the familiar in bed just being one thing here deployed.
I discern, to help his own self-exorcism, the older man’s grooming of the illustrator was effectively set in motion by an elbow trigger: “In the shaded rosy candle-light, his elbows on the table among trails of flowers he, who was not even a neophyte, listened like a man learning for the first time of some spell of spring which will make him more than mortal.” And each reader of this work will wrestle with their own vision of how this prose is couched. And maybe there will rear false aunt sallies to hide the actual nature of the serpent embedded in its tale? “For his own art was of infinitely more importance than the subservient, the parasitic art of an illustrator.”

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Context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/02/womens-weird-strange-stories-1890-1940/

THE JULY GHOST by A.S. Byatt

“‘No illusions are pleasant,’…”

A man’s story told to an American woman at a party about meeting a married woman at another party and then lodging — with her as his ‘landlady’ (note that word literally) — at her house to escape his loss of his own woman Anne to another man. Already a disarmingly tangled situation, but then factor in the story of a blonde haired boy with a notable smile and other recognisable clothes arriving in the garden of his landlady (whose own husband has, by now, as we watch it happen, argued with her and left her) when her lodger is sitting at the same time in that very garden, apparently the ghost of the landlady’s son that only the lodger can see and converse with, the son who left the garden one previous July and been lethally run over by a car near a South London common. What is the common ground or land? Well, it is the reader’s mind who will remain haunted by the recurring vision of this ghostly boy and his catalytic attempts for the landlady and her lodger to reproduce him. Sad and lingering story — and proof that fiction can create real ghosts. But do humans tend only to find any such visions to be uneasy or unpleasant illusions and will not let them cohere further from apparent fiction reality into the hard truth where they ever exist without our fully acknowledging them? The boy’s smile prevails and makes this story something of a rare version of fiction where the answer to that question is ‘no’ whatever the story characters (more ghostly than the ghost itself?) themselves say about illusions.

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The anthology context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/twentieth-century-ghost-stories/

TIPTOE: LAIRD BARRON

“I was a child of the 1960s.”

Me of the 50s. Lucky, unlike this narrator, I had no ‘perfect storm’ of a family to give me later complexes and fears …I think! Or is this wishful thinking?
Here in this story, it is an eeny-meanie tickling, shadow-casting father, a brother from cruel boyish tiptoe grasps to a later Vietnam jungle, an Aunt, a potential Cayce in point, all converging upon the traditional family holiday. Terror as a Lake typo. The creeping up behind of a touch from someone’s tiptoed touch on your … on your what? … for me, also a bit weird like his father was in hindsight, or more than just a bit in hindsight(!), this story has literature’s perfect elbow of a pre-climax trigger…
“…soundlessly tiptoeing along, knees to chest, elbows even with the top of his head, hands splayed wide.”


ASIDE: But do we forgive, as we begin to forget, a forgetting like my new last ditch worldly medicine today makes me weirder in my forgetting even more?

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/john-langan-nathan-ballingrud/

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Full context of above story: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/19/the-best-horror-of-the-year-volume-fourteen/

SHARDS: IAN ROGERS

The old gramophone’s old ‘needle-shard’ and the rehandled deadeners of a time none of the surviving four young people out of five — Chad, Anabelle & Mark, Donna as two item pairs on a wild break in a cabin with a spinning empty vodka bottle and who all ended up gorily slaughtering the single Marcia — would ever forget. Somehow aberrationally horror-plotted and -propped but effective, nonetheless, this centres on a distant cabin airbnb to try outdo MMS’s city airbnb above. Then the police points of view and the four separate survivor guilt points of view cohering,..Through the seasons, a separate lust for heat turned into subsuming fire despite global warmth, a lust for paradoxical non-silence, a lust for spinning like a dervish (spinning like the gramophone found by Marcia under the cabin’s trapdoor and the spinning vodka bottle as a catalyst for a sort of real-time reality TV dating repercussions) and a lust for sleep….we all know the latter, at least, and even more so, perhaps, after reading this insidiously gauche story. A gauche story. You heard that here first. My coinage in this literary context. Remember that. 

Gauche like the music played on that gramophone “The auditory onslaught continued with a deep, pummelling bass that felt like a series of hammer blows against their eardrums.” For onslaught, read onslaughter. Much like the music I myself have always loved, a paradoxical apotheosis of Xenakis et al. Marcia’s own nickname as a soundfest! And the spinning gun cylinder at the end? Gramophones stemmed from cylinders, did they not?

“Step, step, spin, step, step, spin. […] …in wider and wider circles until she left the orbit of town […] …tiptoeing…”

PS: Watch out! Already in the pipeline, an independently published book called GAUCHE STORIES by a man too mean to be me!

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Full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/19/the-best-horror-of-the-year-volume-fourteen/