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     des |
Anyone with a website interested in helping with the re-publication of Weirdmonger's 1500 stories here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ as I anticipate the various blogs becoming overloaded? Here below is appropriate extract from my own site at: http://www.nemonymous.com ALL ON PLAIN WHITE - WITH NOTHING ADDED Pleased to announce electronically republished stories and collaborations by Weirdmonger HERE and elsewhere - plus an overall CONTENTS list HERE All these free sites will eventually culminate in a massive electronic collection. The stories will be selected from Weirdmonger's 1500 stories published in print between 1986-99. No stories from the 'Weirdmonger' book will be selected. Anyone got any freespace for showing Weirdmonger work - so as to take the strain off these clogged blogs and thus be linked into the contents list: and forming the list's first section entitled Weirdmonger Wheel? | ||
| Weirdmonger |
Two short-short stories below linked to my massive project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ I do not intend to post these here too often, but I thought I would start with two. Please feel free to interpolate your own comments - but I don't expect anyone necessarily to read this huge overall exercise in story posting or pay it any attention at all. It's more a 'happening' from the Sixties (during which era of time my artistic leanings were formed)! ;-) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ BEDROOM EYES by Weirdmonger Published ‘After Hours’ 1995 They would have been together twenty odd years. Ruth’s husband maintained that couples like them grew alike, physically as well as mentally. They debated the subject like a pair of screeching puppets. But eventually, in the long drawn-out nights, when neither could sleep, she accepted his point: that the rising of the same words, the same mutually confessed thoughts masquerading as the most odd coincidences between them, were merely ingredients in the inevitably bland stew of existence. That said, she manufactured squabbles for seasoning such a stew. She refused to believe their faces and bodies were also, bit by bit, coming together in full-blown skin to skin, socket to socket contact like grafted plants; this she could not countenance, let alone the remote possibility they could be taken as siblings: husband and wife twins. Her mind’s inevitable crumbling away, however, fetched flinching spasms to parts of the very carcass wherein Ruth lived and which she had tried to defend against all marauders, summoning the appalling visions of a single tiny peppercorn lost in the coldly insipid slime of Hell. In a quiet corner of the city, to which she fled in a fruitless attempt to escape herself, Ruth felt the street lights were dimmer now than when she was a house-bound child. Hunters of the small hours, with no more than the dark slots of summer to tour the up-market estates of the city’s outcrops, the shadow-shaped dossers hoped against hope for imperfections in the suburban mansions where Ruth used to live: a catflap or pigeon hole or rabbit hutch . . . but returned with worthless swag. Ruth couldn’t make ends meet, if the cull was just a darts trophy or a clapped out video machine that nobody even bothered to clean out come morning or a toaster with a plug that didn’t fit the sockets in the city pavements or an astrologer’s almanac that contained the wrong positions of the planets for the inner city or a gold-framed wedding photograph showing the drunken faces of two rival families beaming on either side of a bride and groom. She shrugged. It was about time she had a go - no point in dossing round here much longer, beneath the houselights that flickered on and off from the high-rise windows. One day, she thought, the families would leave this forest of towers, their queer belongings like growths on their backs, for the relative safety of the tube station platforms: like a reenactment of an era of joy and privation a war had once brought. Ruth and her adopted kind lived off the scum slowly sliding along the gutters of the street or off the more sluggish birds having inadvertently spiked themselves on park railings: and, when the towers were abandoned, the older dossers would be able to uproot their feet and bottoms from between the gently hissing office heat-vents and enter, en masse, the tall buildings that even now were busy disguising their brick and mortar as mocking scrawled abstractions of art. As she thought over the various repercussions of evolution without selection, Ruth wandered into the outer suburbs where trees still grew, nourished crap and root; but they did not conceal, even from her blurred eyes, the detachments ranged like armoured troops with wide bedroom eyes. Their front doors were raised like drawbridges and, sure, she felt, their owners were literally trapped inside, like costly characters in an organic soap opera that still had an eternity and a half to unhatch its multiple Chinese-box dreams. She later told the story to the creeping, mumbling shadows on her return from the outer parts. Her education had been nurtured by a lore more articulate, if shallower, than that of the streets, so she found the words: “There was an ancient air-raid shelter in one garden, with a secret cubby, a nun’s-hole, where the bones still stuck out of the ground like spring saplings. I followed the smuggler’s route, at first, but no whiff of seaweed nor tang of salt surf, only the sound of TV channels, filtering along these underground inlets, like babblings of water along pipes to the boxes they fed - a twittering aviary in my head. I made entry shortly and stared at them through a tightly hatched square grill. In real colour they were - evidently a married couple, with hands joined. They stared glassily at me, and I was amazed to see that their two hearts pumped as one, outside their chests, in unison with the love-making which went on behind their backs, in a stretched sausage sort of way. They soon grew bored with me making ludicrous faces through the hatch, which I had done to scare them off to other parts of the house - to allow my itchy fingers to scuttle like spiders among their keepsakes. But they got up, as one, and without even a glance of communication between them, prodded one finger downwards in the most obscene gesture imaginable and pressed something just below the hatch. And all went blank . . .” Her story tailed off, since she could not exactly recall her comeuppance, though she vaguely remembered meeting various other people along the tunnel systems, including those two-dimensional cutouts masquerading as chat show hosts. She had returned to her confreres, with jagged shards of glass sticking out of the top of her head, like a prison wall. All she had for her trouble was a flask of deodorant in one hand and a sauce bottle in the other . . . both of which dissolved into wafted motes of thin air when she reached reality amid the towers. Her husband was there, listening to her story. Having tracked her down to this innermost pit of the city’s soul, he kissed her. They had grown closer by means of separation and, later that night, he lovingly prized out the splinters from her scalp, before they became embedded deeper towards the brain. And then they prepared themselves for an eternal rest in a vertical punch-and-judy coffin. The slots of darkness were thankfully lengthening. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ APPLIED MADNESS by Weirdmonger Published ‘Inflated Graveworm’ 1997 My daughter once played in the garden below my bedroom window, a fact which makes it even lonelier - with the evenings drawing inward and her gone. I often hear her shrill voice; then crooning over the spinning-top she once released; finally, singing songs without words into the surrendering twilight. If ghosts sing, I doubt that the living can hear the songs at all. Voices break with death - one remove from a choirboy sacrificed upon the vocal tree bark of adolescence. I suspect these thoughts of mine are quite mad, but I cannot be certain since madness breeds more madness when re-applied. So, I raise myself from a prone to a seated position, the yielding mattress only allowing me to see under the shrunk curtains into the gathering stained light of the garden. A shape squats in the flower plot, digging with extensions of its arms. Calling out, I hope it's my daughter returned to reclaim her birthright from her father. The shape looks up with empty face and croaks. # I lie back in my bed. I should love my father for the life he once gave me. I smooth down my silk nightie with a free hand. But to know that one's father is the grubby critter eating dirt at the bedroom window is not something I'm glad I was born to know. So, indeed, I should hate him with all my guts for granting me existence during a single moment of unbridled passion, a passion which he clumsily fashioned with an unknown woman whom he now croaks about so pointedly from the garden. But then again, I cannot be bothered - and simply croak back from my pillowhead of flowers. # "Mourning the cat, eh?" I asked, looking meaningfully at the black new moons of my daughter's fingernails. "What cat?" she asked, absently. "Only an expression ... for them!" This time I pointed with my own nurtured nail to indicate her slovenliness. # My father possessed the air of being an old man forever, an antiquity stretching back into the past, overtaking her boyhood - and now so very old, he'd never die. "Didn't you ever have dirt under your nails, Daddy?" I asked in a moment of innocence, not as an excuse, but a diversionary tactic. The worst possibility was his fierce anger. "How dare you even think to ask such a thing!" My father seemed half serious, tongue flickering like a lizard's, eyes reflecting the open fire. # As a boy, I squatted before a similar fire, if not the very same fire that had never been extinguished, during one of those days when there was very little to entertain indoors people - other than the dancing flames, the act of refuelling them, the sparks dying as they marched up the sooty chimney ... only to return to the pop-up picture-book abandoned on the armchair and desultorily resume leafing through the stiff familiar pages. # I examine the downward pleats of my skirt whence my knobbly knees do poke. My ankle socks seem to get further away, every time I consider the matter, to the extent that I try to convince myself that my feet are not fleeing my jurisdiction. How can they, joined as they are to my shins? The sound at the parlour door was so quiet, I wonder if it is not intended to be a subterfuge rather than a call to attention. Words come easy to my mind, despite my age. One day I'll be given proper books worthy of my intellect. One day, too, perhaps I'll be so very old I'll be able to scold my own daughter about dirty nails. But, equally, perhaps, I'll look back at these days of coal fires and pop-up pictures with more appreciation, despite the lack of grown-up things to do. The sound from the direction of the door has become a full-blooded noise, interrupting my nostalgia from the future - or is it a feeling for the past whilst still part of that very past? Nostalgia has so much more clarity when it is a primary source. I shrug at such strange thoughts. # Mr Hickbrood is the tutor I have employed to brush up my daughter's Latin. # I heard my father's voice from behind Mr Hickbrood as he was ushered into the nursery. I wondered if I ought to divulge some of Mr Hickbrood's habits to my father - things I hardly noticed, when he was first my tutor, but when viewed in the context of retrospective accumulation, these things assumed a sinister slant. Although I was very old for a child, I was not old enough to judge the true depth of Mr Hickbrood's darkness. # Now, as I sit leaning against her wickery legs, my aged daughter looks down at me as if she wants to tell me more about her childhood but doesn't want to frighten me. I'm winkling garden dirt from under my nails with a darning-needle, a task fraught with danger - as demonstrated by the need to suck off the blood-drops which well from the little finger on the left. "Have you heard the word 'Yesterfang'?" my daughter asks me mysteriously. I nod, not wishing to show my ignorance and tempt her anger; it was all part of my game of pretending to be a little boy, if pretending it were. "It's from Latin, you know," she maintains, in a dark undertone, knowing that I know that Hinkbrood must have taught her such words. I advise her to stop bothering her pretty little head with such matters and go back to the book with pop-up pictures. # Only much later in life, when I was as older than anybody else I knew or had known, did I regain the knowledge generated by a retrospective accumulation of previously unconsidered factors. And the day before, I looked up 'Yesterfang' in an ancient Lloyd's Encyclopaedic Dictionary, the definition of which word I learned by heart: "That which was taken, captured or caught on the day preceding." There was a quote showing the word in modern use: 'That nothing shall be missing of the yesterfang' - Holinshed: DESCRIPT OF SCOTLAND Ch. ix. Much to my anger, its derivation wasn't shown to be Latin at all. I righteously scribbled over the entry signing it with my name: Amy Hinkbrood. # Mr Hinkbrood will want her to stroke his cat, before long. She doesn't like to do that after it has just been digging in the flower-bed for remains of a dead frog or to cover over its own business. It even had dirt under the skin at the end of its pop-up tail. Re-applied dirt. | ||
| Weirdmonger |
A third short fiction linked to and from this massive project HERE. FITZWORTH'S FUNERAL by Weirdmonger Published ‘Stygian Articles’ 1996 The city - or was it just a single street? - seemed forever to have a succession of funerals... Nearly every day or, at least, on alternate days, a fleet of long black cars driven by men in long black coats, emerged, decked in dark flowery wreaths, from the open end of Rackham Road, moving at walking pace into the busy High Crescent. People wondered whence all the corpses came - because, death by death, the number of mourners never changed. I was a stickler for old-fashioned ways and often stood to attention at the edge of the pavement, doffing my hat as an act of respect to the newly dead. Yet, when the older dead actually started emerging in even older hearses - such hearses being horse-drawn with top-hatted capemen striding proudly alongside - even my well-seasoned values became insufficiently respectful. I needed to burnish my shoes every day or, at least, on alternate days, or, perhaps, the left one day, the right the next, so that not only my own face but also God's in Heaven could be reflected in their uppers. My grief was deep felt. My hat, too. # One pair of would-be deaths plodded up Heaven Hill. The last anyone saw of them. The hill incredibly appeared thickly wooded and everybody forgot properly to warn them that it wasn't a hill to Heaven at all. "It goes on forever, that so-called slope," said an ancient bucket-mender who lived in the last house at Heaven Hill's bottom edge. "Surely not," was the reply from someone else, but he had taken the words straight from another's mouth. "Maps can lie, you know. The further you go up, the further you've got to go," the pale oldster continued. I, whose mouth had been earlier raided for its words, stared up towards the trees and, certainly, the distance stretched as far as any eye could possibly see. And trees in the city were usually far and few between. "They probably only went up there for a spot of cuddling and kissing," proffered a scandalmonger. "They'll more likely come back to haunt us with the remains of their bodies," wheedled a scaredy-cat from the corner of a reluctant mouth. "We can grind their bones to pepper our meals," gloated a scavenger with a turned down smile. The people round Rackham Road, High Crescent and Heaven Hill were generally set hard against couples coupling, being in fear of dangerous in-breeding. So, the scandalmonger's hypothesis as to simple slap-and-tickle-me-pink, if worrying, made the most comfortable sense. A little old lady, wrapped in becoming wrinkles, shrugged. She obviously knew more than at which she was willing to even hint. "How about forming a search party?" another suggested, a nondescript man in mackintosh and yawn. "A bring-a-bottle party?" shrilled the village idiotess, tightening the bow of her bonnet meaningfully. "Not that sort of party, silly," sneered the straight man from the jug pub. I took matters in hand and strode purposefully towards the Heaven Hill. One of the absconding pair in question was my sweetheart, I seemed to recall. The village idiotess followed in my wake, the long full skirt hiding the motion of her legs - as if I were watching a ghost glide. Arm in arm, the idiotess and I entered upon the woodland slope ... ignoring the shouts of discouragement, shouts that echoed to a silence behind us after the scandalmonger had shouted: "I told you so!" But I had never been any good with needle and thread. I suddenly felt that my head had become an empty vessel, the thoughts being expended long before I had thought them, falling off the non-stick brain like dead flies. Or like unknitted stitches. As we struck the clearing at the so-called slope's top, we could see that a well-shaft stretched like a wall-less chimney of golden light into the sky, with what looked like a lavatory chain hanging down, as if God wanted rescuing by means of it. "Dob dob dob!" the idiotess urged through a stitched smile. She wormed like a concertina up the chain. "OK," I answered, pretending to follow her. But I fell back to the ground, watching her legs fast disappear. I was soon smashed out on the spray from the hip-flask inside the open funnel of her vanishing skirt. But it tasted too much like vinegar and looked too much like something else. It did not seem to matter, since I was no longer myself, but simply a crazy-paved skull, with sensible thoughts seeping from every crack and different ones creeping back in ... as if my mind were a sponge and my body its holes. Something trailed from the stump of my neck with the tidal motion of flesh - till the scavenger came along and wrapped it in wrinkly brown paper. And all these words were taken from my mouth, after I died. # My sorrow, indeed, as well as my hat, was deep felt. However, I tried to harden my heart. Even my own death should not be sad. I had no children, after all. Even my sweetheart was imaginary, as was my cat's meat business at Rackham Market. Endless days of such sadness, I knew, attracted wet rot towards my joints. And there seemed no end - indeed there was no end - to the increasingly tragic aftermaths of death. I sensed that everybody was dying and, if I failed to mourn their passing, I would effectively be guilty of their murder. Not paranoia, but more a feeling of fate working through me. Even worse than the old dead were the toddlers in tiny coffins - being carried by the capemen without recourse to any wheeled vehicle, each with his own personal casket to wield ... a treasure trail, where the treasure was already undug. I doffed my hat once too often, however. Being a particularly dark day, it was even darker than the night which had preceded it - and I felt as if I were encased in a would-be home that had been condensed from that very darkness. The hearses were drawn by plumed horses: so many, they kept on and on, turning out of Rackham Road into the High Crescent, with a relentless residue of clopping cobbles to fill out the silence that the darkness otherwise embodied. I tried to peer through the shadow-stained glass in each of the carriages, but all I could manage to see were shapes that were too shapeless to be simple coffins. It must have been the vibration of the horses eventually heaving the hearses up Heaven Hill that caused such indiscernible passengers seemingly to start jumping at my curious gazes - or so I at first assumed. But then, sickenly slow, I sensed something like a soul being hooked from the fast hardening nightsoil of my bowels... But, if the truth were eventually known, the jumpstart corpses yearned for a fatherhood I had not been able to give them ... as God tugged up the leaden kite of my deep-felt heart upon a long chain. A chap called Fitzworth, wasn't it? A name which, in burnished boots, I proudly called myself, before God took possession of the empty property that was me. Somewhere, an idiot woman, in odd shoes, sobbed. END | ||
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If anyone was wondering, Weirdmonger is really me. | ||
| Weirdmonger |
The fourth story linked to and from this massive project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ HIDE AND SEEK by Weirdmonger Published ‘Overspace’ 1990 and ‘Year’s Best Horror Stories’ (Daw) 1991 There were five kids in the gang. The oldest, being twice the age of the youngest, assumed command as soon as he was able to talk; a short-shinned lad with horizontally striped tie of far longer narrowtongue than wide kipper front. His name was Idle White. Just a year back in the queue for death was Treff, a drop-arse lad in shabby dungarees and a lolly stick ever between his thin lips (and, when he got old, people wondered if he’d got his pipe the wrong way round), and eyes of smoky gray... ...followed by three urchin girls, Loosey, Dolly and Daff, with metal gray, unpleated skirts run up decades ago by their grannies on treadle sewing-machines, the frayed hems hanging below their knobbly knees . . . red-blackened socks circumcised to their ankles . . . pinched faces patched with drain sludge, so disfiguringly similar, they were called the Terrible Twins (terrible, ‘cos there were three of them). They went to school together through the backward alleys of the town, the journey being so long and convoluted that they didn’t ever get there even for playtime. The kids’ parents were foundlings, anyway, after having lost themselves in drunkening love-hate relationships and husband swapping and kid-napping (snoozing as they baby-sat) . . . lucky our five escaped the ploys of child abuse by pretending to walk to school every day . . . THEIR spirits were not squashed . . . they played Hide And Seek to while away the endless days of childhood. Idle White was the only one who could count properly. For summers on end, if you wandered into that part of town, into those interlocking mazes of poverty-stricken shanty homes on stilts (where droppings are the only weather to fear), you would hear him riff-me-ticking off numbers in a voice so ghostly, it even haunted people who never heard it. “One . . . two . . . three . . . fifty-five . . . seventy I’m coming . . . I’m gonna hunt yer out . . . if you’re not ready, I’ll sure cunt yer mouth!” He always found the others. Invariably, Treff would be squatting under a gourmand’s house, hoping that the shadow of smells would conceal his own lengthening and strengthening. The urchin girls would ever huddle together in full view of the distant stacked chimneys, desperately seeking to blend in with the choking sky like three cannibal witches crouching round the cauldrons of their skirts. The game eventually became so boring that Idle White was forced to invent new characters from whom to hide. They needed frights upon the stage of their games. Otherwise, all was too tame, too reminiscent of what death had in store for them. Firstly, Idle White whispered of the Dinner Man, who sold baked potatoes with bones in ‘em, for vegetarians. The three girls shuddered, flinched and made as if to flee from the mere words, let alone from the Dinner Man himself. How would they recognize him, if he found them? His face was like a plate of school dinner . . . that was enough. Enough! The listeners cringed as deep as cringe could go. Then, Idle White whispered even lower of the Scaremonger, and of one called Padgett Weggs . . . Others, too . . . Blasphemy Fitzworth, Impious Foote, Billy Belly. One by one, these characters would take their turns at being Seeker. Treff was strangely silent. The three girls shrieked - a cross between terror and amusement. All four ran off to take cover, relishing (but, at the same time, dreading) the repercussions of White’s idle attempts to soup up their customary game of Hide and Seek. How Daff got separated is not exactly clear. Suffice it to say that Loosey and Dolly broke hands with her somewhere near that part of the undertown, where houses actually perched on top of other houses for several stories above . . . chimneys feeding off cellars... Daff’s wrist audibly cracked as the other two skirmished with a pack of dogs that snuffled amid the shitgutters. The last Daff saw of them was the white of their thigh-tops as they cartwheeled away . . . as if losing contact with her had set a wild electric charge surging through their muscles. Daff was drained. She looked up at the iron grid above her, as an unrecognizable substance slowly drooled through it toward her, hanging precariously in liquid balloons of snot consistency. A fine hiding place this. Not even the Dinner Man would dare find her here. Not the Dinner Man, certainly, but what about Billy Belly or the Scaremonger . . . ? She knew even less about those others than she did about the Dinner Man. She suspected that Idle White himself had not appreciated what he had set in motion with his mere words. Eventually, after gnawing hunger had got the better of her, she pushed the grate aside and clambered out. Night was already threatening. The other kids had presumably gone home, having given up finding her. She’d spent the whole afternoon counting to herself, as if rehearsing for the day when she would be allowed to become Seeker. But now, she only had enough time to dodge the moving shadows of the houses and find her own front door with the right number on it. But she lost count . As Dolly and Loosey huddled together in a bed that was suddenly too big for them (knowing not that they were ever more than just twins), they squashed fists in their ears to block out those Street costers who desperately called their unsold wares at the close of market day. Treff lay UNDER his bed, mouth open wide as he snored loudly (his way of fending off the noises of the night). Idle White slept peacefully in the bunk above his mother. He did not even feel the guilt of having created the monsters which would haunt countless childhoods to come. The costers’ calls echoed on:- “Knives and forks! Carvers and spikes! Bright-edged as Dinner Man likes! Spoons for stew a-turning bad; To bed, childer, for I hear yer Dad!” Others called in cross-rhythm:- “You can not hide, you know it’s true; We are Seekers, Seekers seeking you!” Daff, smiling, walked hand in hand with a slouching pot-bellied one... | ||
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For Small Press historians! Just posted my first 'TENTACLES ACROSS THE ATLANTIC' article from DEATHREALM here: http://guestbooks.pathfinder.gr/read/Weirdmonger Is this a glimpse of the UK Small Press in those days? What, no TTA? ;-) | ||
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Just posetd my Best New Horror story from 1990 called Mort Au Monde. This is the story where I had to change the title from 'Death To The World' as Allen A already had a story out called that! Contents list: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ | ||
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Oops! Sorry. Allen's title was 'Dead To The World', not 'Death To The World' ! des | ||
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In the mid-nineties I wrote a regular brief article for TTA's ZENE (ZENE being forerunner of THE FIX) entitled LAST WORD. These articles are now dated and merely of curiosity value but I intend gradually to reprint them on this thread, which is linked to the contents of my project here (comments welcome): http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ Here is the first one from 'Zene' Winter 95/96: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I suppose I get more than most people: rejections, that is. So I am writing in order to give a brief view on the way editors handle this sensitive matter. It is said that rejections should be shrugged off or allowed to act as a spur towards pursuing that goal of being ‘a successful writer’. But rejections do weigh heavy and never get any easier however many acceptances one may previously have had. Since rejections figure such a lot in many writers’ lives, they deserve some consideration as an art form in their own right. The most boring rejections are things like ‘Just not for us’, ‘Incorrect manuscript format’, ‘We’ve seen this kind of story before’, ‘Do not be discouraged’, ‘This came close! Please try again!’ etc. Such mumblings behind the hand often appear on checklists where the editor ticks the appropriate boxes applicable to that rejection. In fact, there is one American magazine that has over a hundred possible standard boxes! Better than a bland preprinted rejection letter, though. Some checklists have some very funny standard boxes, such as ‘Listen carefully. Please, PLEASE leave us alone’, ‘Not enough uses of the word nubile’, ‘You watch Star Trek a lot, don’t you?’, ‘You’d do better as a plumber’, etc. My favourite rejections, however, are personalised letters, with some sense of humour, for example these I received very recently: ‘No Dutch jokes; no Danish pastries, just sorry, its edge didn’t slice my bacon!’, ‘Well, you managed to confuse the hell out of my new assistant editor. She didn’t know what to tell you and asked me to write this to you. I think your story made her wonder what she had gotten herself into’, and an editor who rejected my submission after wrestling with whether it was ‘cleverly surreal or just plain bollox’. A type of rejection I loathe (worse than a standard slip or a rude insult) is one that tells you how marvellous the piece was but at the end of the day it just didn’t grab the editor sufficiently. Then there are inferred rejections (no reply), the very worst of all. Whatever the mode of rejection, they’re to be relished as part of life… much like death. Yet, surely, all editors can afford the time to write at least something non-standard when rejecting writers’ pride-and-joys. | ||
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Here is the second of the regular brief articles entitled LAST WORD that I wrote for TTA's ZENE (the forerunner of THE FIX) ... republished to be linked to the contents of my project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ Caveat: I do not now necessarily believe all my own views from those times, as they (like most people's views) develop and change... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I’m never unduly sacrilegious or controversial but this personal view is a plea for fiction magazines to be stripped of their illustrations and artwork. Let the words do all the work — there is nothing more vivid, original and satisfying than the one-off images conjured in the individual reading mind. No longer should there be skulls, spaceships or other paraphernalia decorating the page with their temptation towards a single interpretation of the text. In some magazines, illustrations even infiltrate the print itself, often making it difficult to read. Also, unlinked artwork and text are not always mutually user-friendly. Nevertheless, some brilliant jobs have been done in the past by visual artists in independent fiction magazines. I’m just trying to make a general point, that can have some exceptions. For example, the original illustrations for Dickens and ‘Just William’ books were decidedly enhancing. But to return to magazines, the artwork (especially that on the cover) — whether amateurishly perpetrated or wonderfully evocative with excellent craftsmanship — often deter potential readers from the contents. Readers who have a prejudice against a certain category of fiction as represented by the cover will not discover how ill-founded their prejudice actually is. Visual art is a wonderful phenomenon and has its rightful place in galleries, films, television etc, but please believe me it can also disfiguringly stifle, dilute or hype up the written words which it’s intended to complement. Over-egging the textual cake rather than allowing the pure meaning of words to work alone can and often does destroy our pictorial privacy. I know this plea of mine is tied up with other issues, relating to the marketing of books with garish covers, for example, or to the rights of the writer — AND my artist friends may now no longer be such! Meanwhile, I hope what I have written above provokes some constructive thoughts. Published 'Zene' Spring 1996 | ||
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Here is the third of the regular brief articles (now dated!) entitled LAST WORD that I wrote for TTA's ZENE (the forerunner of THE FIX) ... republished here and linked to/from the contents of my project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ *************** Snail mail! That’s how us old-fashioned folk are now written off in some quarters because we ain’t got Internet or E-mail or whatever it is called. I’m not a luddite, nor am I someone who cringes at modernity, nor do I make whining excuses as to technology’s affordability. If it’s vital to our culture, get it, whatever the cost, I say. You only live once…I think. No, what I have against worldwide immediacy of communication is the eventual ephemerality or, another pretentious word meaning the same thing, transience, whose drawback is prevalent whatever best will in the world remembers to save on the system. Who will collect your letters for future publication? Who will be able to fondle and sniff the wondrously aesthetic second-hand book containing your creative work? Can you lounge in the bath reading a screen? Well, I suppose so, at a push. There’s something very pleasantly human and fallible about books or magazines. Personality oozes from written correspondence: the type of stamp and envelope used, the perfume, the green ink looniness, etc... When I was at university, nobody seemed to have phones and I always had to write to my parents, saving them the bother of my impulsive problems ‘cos I’d always sorted them out by the time I got to writing a letter — unlike my own grown-up children who pick up the phone at the slightest whim of distemper. (Nice to hear from you, though, kids.) Goodness knows what I’d be getting on the screen, if I had E-mail. I get enough off-the-cuff insults in writing, as it is! But it seems I’ll no longer be able to submit stories to pukka magazines for much longer. Words’ll be all flying round a hyperspace which has no room for an old fogey like me. Then, there is that other hyperspace called death. You only die once. Well, at a push. Of the abandon-edit button. Published 'Zene' Autumn 1996 | ||
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Here is the fourth of the regular brief articles (now dated!) entitled LAST WORD that I wrote for TTA's ZENE (the forerunner of THE FIX) ... republished here and linked to/from the contents of my project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ *************** Well, how many times have you come across an independent fiction magazine advertising subscriptions and future highlights as if not only its own life but life in general is eternal? Yes, I know, even the most professional organs can go bellybutton-up. But, does this excuse the way many literary outfits seem to come and go with no bye or leave? A precious few have folded (do they fold like deck-chairs when the sea reclaims the beach?) in a civilised and upright manner - whilst too many others just fade away as if their god-given right is to exist or not to exist at whim. No thought seems to be given to pale breathless writers who, in some cases, are eagerly waiting for their first publication to unfold - nor recompense to their subscribers. My suggestion is that if you cannot afford a professional accountant, then do not offer subscriptions. Contracts and payments to writers is quite another issue which I currently have no space to cover. So, don your cloaks of cynicism, when wondrous schemes of future publications are advertised in such organs as Zene and Scavenger’s Newsletter ... no blame. naturally, to this excellent pair acting as conduits, of course - because, indeed, where would we be without such communication of potential avenues of creative exposure or of literary delight? But a pinch of salt is no more than is needed to sting the weeping wounds for a bloated vampire whose only shade of doubt is whether to suck from a ready-made opening in the beer-paunch or simply collapse into a sunbed of unwatered flowers. In short, as with some fiction, I suggest you do not believe what you read. Published 'Zene' Winter 1997 | ||
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Another free story by Weirdonymous - linked to and from: Numinous Megazanthus POGROM PANJANDRUM First published ‘The Night Side’ 1991 The music was a backing track: the sound of the military brass band in the park nearby. Johnny liked the library for its quietness, broken only by the odd bluebottle or by some other reader’s fingers flicking pages for a moving image. Today, however, Johnny was on his own. Even the lady with the stern expression, who usually sat at the front of the reading-room in a high desk, had outstared herself into a state of ever-increasing nothingness. Johnny enjoyed browsing through old photographs of the town, particularly brown ones of the Market Square during wartime and of Temperance Street when the school was for infants only. Any old photographs, come to that, were appealing. They conjured up past eras better than the eras themselves. Better than words, he mused. Definitely better than any words. He often brought in his own family albums, since the ambience of the ancient library lent a tantalizing dimension to the memories that the photographs contained. Not all the snapshots in the albums were real memories of his, however. Johnny had been born long after, for instance, the time of that yellowed oval of his great grandmother, in stiff wide skirts and a look too stern for the passage of time to diminish. One showed his parents sitting at opposite ends of a large family gathering. In later albums, he saw his mother, big with himself, sitting proudly beside the father he was never to know, she in the frilly clothes of her period and her husband in what appeared to be a religious get-up. The library was hot today. Being a bank holiday, he had been surprised it was open at all. It was a pleasant refuge from the people in frolicsome mood outside. He turned the pages of the albums quickly, so as to allow the pages to breathe, seasoning the stipply grain of the images whilst they flashed by cinematically. He knew them by heart as well as eyes, so there was no real need to study the detailed backgrounds to the main subjects. All were pictures of people, formulating a dynastic flow of faces, amid a panoply of weddings, christenings, first communions, confirmations, Christmases and, last but not least, funerals. Johnny finally arrived at a little nipper, bringing him to a halt. He never liked to stare at this photograph, there being something deliciously unhealthy in delving behind the tiny eyes, seeking the creature that twitched within, all the time knowing this was but a younger extension of himself Johnny by another name -- perhaps a realer Johnny. Tinged with sadness, this child’s soul he once owned was just outside his grasp. As the brass band struck up their rendition of Oklahoma! he abruptly decided to return to the library book which had taken his fancy before resorting to the familiar albums. This contained a photographic history of the Falklands War, where Johnny’s brother had been killed. In fact, one of the professional shots showed his brother in a group of other smiling marines only a few days before they were all burnt to death. Johnny wondered why he did not cry upon looking at this. It must be something to do with being the younger twin, he supposed, if only just. He eased his club foot further under the trestle table, striking up chords along his ratchetted spine, which made him flinch. He shouldn’t be here at all today. The lights were off and he had not seen anybody, except perhaps the shadow of the stern lady. He concentrated back on the snapshot of himself as an infant. He was shocked to see a detail in the faded background which he had not noticed before. This was unbelievable, in view of literally hours upon hours of scrutinizing its every angle and facet. He was standing there with seaside bucket and spade clamped within a tiny hand. His sharp-creased white shorts showed no sign of blemish nor underlying manhood. His large-for-its-age face was poised in unassuming manner within what he then thought to be the all-encompassing innocence and safety of the world. The lips that formed the mouth pursed quaintly.... But the sign of the shop in the parade across the road from him, which he had always seen as CHINA AND CUT GLASS, actually said POGROM PANJANDRUM. Johnny put his nose nearer to the colourless surface and managed to discern a faint image in the shop window of a puppet on strings, rather like Muffin the Mule, but with bigger ears and a distended udder of tubes dangling from the belly-bottom. A spider crawled across the library table, looking from side to side as if it were crossing a busy road with only the rudiments of kerb drill. Johnny could no longer hear the brass band and, with the growing darkness, he could hardly make out the only door from the reading room. Things crawled and slithered across the photographs, some even seeming to emerge from the frozen images themselves, things which should have stayed in the wings: thumb-sized monsters with hairy-ended backs, never photographed for posterity since they were ever beyond the range of the widest-panning cameras: living toy soldiers with red bubbly skin from over-exposure, twitching in the darkness like half-crushed insects: dollish women stuck halfway in giving birth, finger-holing eyes in the babies’ beads, which reared from their red nests: creatures of every conceivable sex, in coitus interruptus, squeezed out from between other album pages, with sticky corners. And real children, who would never have lived at all if it were not for Johnny, pushing wormcasts before them in the shifting egg-sands of existence. And one who was Johnny now, or maybe his double, fleeing with flailing limbs but caught inextricably in its body’s own knitting. The brass band struck up the opening chords of Rule Britannia, while, unknown to those who would never know until too late, Johnny froze into black and white images little better than words on a printed page. | ||
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Any comments on the above stories or on the whole project at: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ should go here if possible: http://www.ttapress.com/discus/messages/570/721.ht ml?1093362830 des | ||
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Next item to appear on this thread as part of the increasingly massive project linked to and from http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ The hits, pleasingly, increase in a geometrical progression day by day: THE LADY OPPOSITE by Wordonymous First published ‘Flickers ‘n’ Frames’ 1994 Dear lady opposite, you may live in the large house across the road, but I seem to know you better than if you lived over here with me. On the other hand, it is strange how little I do know. There is of course the timing of your curtain drawing, the people who visit, the various delivery men, your doctor, tbe rare trips you make (both on your own and arm in arm with lady friends) and, of course, the smoke curling from your chimney, at times, grey, thin and uninteresting, but at others tantalisingly black and so very thick with the fuel on which you must feed it. Only yesterday, you had a visitor whom I was extremely shocked to see was a man. Your normal callers are of course people of the female persuasion, most with wide-brimmed hats and walking tall on fashionable heels. But this visitor was a sooty-faced man and, what was more, your curtains were closed before it was dark. I felt strangely worried on your behalf. None of my business, I know, but since I spend so much time watching over you, as it were, I sense invisible bonds across the street by which God meant us to be linked. Don't you feel them? Thus, it was indeed my business, you see. No other way about it. He left about six p.m., which gave me opportunity to prepare my own tea. Just a quick toasted cheese sandwich, an iced bun and a cup of Bovril. Then, I was right back at the window, hoping I hadn't missed his return, but secretly praying that I'd never be faced with knowing for certain whether he spent the whole night with you. He may have only popped out, you see, for cigarettes or matches - or both. I cannot imagine you smoking, of course. Well, I must come clean. I stayed up all night, staring at the angular blackness which was I knew was your house opposite. I doused all my lights, so you wouldn't suspect. The aura of starry mist upon your rooftop became the only clue that I wasn't totally blind. Then, suddenly, just before dawn, when the world was darker and more silent than I had ever known it, smoke could be discerned billowing from your house. Could this, I asked myself, really be blood in the form of a black gas? Needless to say, strange thoughts strike one at the dead of night. I awoke with the arrival of the milkman. I must have dozed off. But what worried me was whether the smoke had been in my dream or in real life. Blinking bleary eyes, I bent my cricked neck upwards and peered through the early morning mist. Your house, dear lady opposite, looked as if it had become simply waste ground! The milkman did not even attempt to deliver your usual one and a half pints. He ignored your house, as if he really believed there was nothing there. He waved at me as he placed the gold tops on my doorstep. Then, as the milk cart trundled out of sight round the end of the road, I spotted a dark shape sweeping something up, so indistinct I later couldn't make out whether it was a person or even if your house still appeared to be waste ground and, indeed, if that shape in its vicinity was still sweeping. Smartly, I closed my curtains. Us ladies cannot trust folk these days, especially strangers and people like that. Why do I worry about matters that don't really concern me. But I can't help cringing when I hear the door knocker go. And as I catch painstaking noises descending the chimney, I've decided to chop up lots of wood from my meagre sticks of furniture and lay them in the disused fireplace. But not a match in the house! It's a pity I don't smoke, either, dear lady. The sticks are jagged, though, and I've laid them pointing upwards. I won't post this letter, since the postman now probably ignores your house as much as he has always done mine. Yours sincerely, the lady opposite. http://www.weirdmonger.com | ||
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Here is the fifth of the regular brief (&, in hindsight, pretentious!) articles entitled LAST WORD that I wrote for TTA's ZENE (the forerunner of THE FIX) ... republished here and linked to/from the contents of the increasingly massive and seemingly popular project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ (Incidentally, I seem to be predicting 'Interstitiality' below with: "Why should potential readers not enjoy the miasmic blurred territories between so-called genres?" !!) *************** LAST WORD first published 'Zene' 1997 I’m not the sort of person who always needs to have the last word. I much prefer the true word, whether it’s at the beginning, middle or end. ‘Last Word’ implies that nobody can get back at you – an implication disproved by the letters of complaint in Zene (and, yes, of agreement which I received personally) about my suggestion that independent fiction magazines should be stripped of all their artwork. (By the way, I do love artwork in its own right, including pukka paintings throughout the centuries together with the small press work of Alan Casey, Chad Savage, Margaret B. Simon and Roddy Williams, inter alios.) Anyway, back to the matter in hand, today I shall brook no comeback. This is the last word. Fiction genres should not exist. What point do they serve? This question is generated by one of the considerations that formed part of my ‘ban artwork’ ‘Last Word’ - the evil of presumption, bigotry, pride and prejudice. (Incidentally, Jane Austen has always been a passion with me, and not just lately with all her media fixes.) Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and, for want of a better word, Mainstream are all facets of imaginary fiction. For example, Peter Ackroyd writes excellent horror within his Booker Prize nominated novels, Iain Banks and Iain M Banks are the same person. Why should potential readers not enjoy the miasmic blurred territories between so-called genres? Perhaps that’s why someone thought of the term Slipstream. But even that has become a genre in its own right, attracting some and not others, because of the way it’s packaged. I know some think they need pointers as to the books of likely enjoyment according to one’s taste, bearing in mind the massive bulk available. But I suggest you rely on serendipity of choice not simply on reviews or on dust wrappers or on the fact that a particular book has been banned to a particular shelf. In the beginning, there was only the Word. Logos. | ||
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Next item to appear on this thread as part of the increasingly massive project linked to and from http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ The hits, pleasingly, increase in a geometrical progression day by day: DEAD-ENDS First published 'XIB' 1993 Pete kept meeting dead-ends. Yet, the city was easy to negotiate during the day which he had in fact accomplished more or less regularly before tonight. However, with the hours of daytime drawing shorter these days, he was almost certain to be caught out sooner or later. He had been delayed on the telephone, by an ugly customer - though Pete couldn't be sure just how ugly. The others in the office had turned off almost all the overhead strips before heading for home. They had then filled all the lifts and staircases with clambering bodies - like crabs in a fisherman's basket. Pete's desk-lamp, gleaming waxily across his yet untidied papers, spotlit his hallowe'en mask of a mask of a face, while he tried to put paid to the hard-buy customer at the other end of the telephone. What cheek! What brass neck, giving Pete an earful, trying to be a paying customer at this time of day, when even the clock had clocked off! After all, the salesman's always right... But Pete was not really a proper salesman. He possessed the soul of a backroom-johnny, a jerk-of-an-erk, one who felt out of his depth when trying to persuade (or, even, dissuade) someone to buy something. At the moment, he didn't mind which it was, as long as he, Pete, could go home and put up his feet with a nice cup of his wife's freshly brewed tea. It then dawned on him that he couldn't separate his ear from the phone - as if the customer's voice was really an audible glue. Pete realised that he must slam the phone down rudely - the only way to close the sale. But, there he was, struggling horrifically with the handset: yanking at his fleshy lug as he would a cheesy pizza from its pan. He glanced in desperation at the sepia photograph in an ancient gold frame of his dear wife on the desk, winking in the flickering desk-lamp, with his two kiddywinks either side - usually a comfort to him during normal office hours, since his work was for them, after all, wasn't it? Whenever a particularly ingratiating client came on the line to chat him up - well, his family's images were a godsend, a heart-warming consolation. Damn! Every sale meant extra paperwork for poor Pete and, indeed, commission thus earned would simply encourage his wife to want another extension of the family or desire better accommodation or, even, BOTH! Still, she did make a comforting cup of tea. Slamming the phone down was normally the only answer... # He wandered the darkness of narrowing city streets, dazed and lost. The buses seemed to have stopped running - or merely turned over their engines somewhere out of sight, always around the next corner. The underground stations padlocked. Black cabs blacker than night itself. Every thoroughfare identical or so similar it was hardly worth walking from one to the other - leading round and round the oblong city squares. For a while, he sat on a park bench, feeling the side of his head. Thankfully the ear was still more or less intact... But the voice inside it droned on. # The parlour was quiet, except for the woman's relentless clacking needles. She didn't know what she was making or, indeed, from what it was made, but the flowing grey matter, which the candlelight made to seem as if it were extruding from her revolving ear, had knitted together, spreading over her lap to the carpet - and back again. "Mummy, what are you making?" asked a attractive little girl with a disfiguring lisp. "Mummy, why don't you ever say anything?" asked an even littler boy smelling of the Vick spread across his chest to ease the breathing. They saw her glance at the oval gold-framed photograph of her husband on the writing-bureau, where a candle guttered. Pete was late. They hoped she'd put the kettle on for a pot of tea - that always did the trick. They'd hear the garden gate go - and then... The phone rang. The little girl scampered to answer it, delighted to be sufficiently grown up for this duty. "Hello, theven, four, thix, thix, three..." # Pete discovered one of those old-fashioned red telephone boxes tucked away in a back-double. It should have been a welcoming sight, a throwback to the days before portable car-phones - but, in the circumstances, it was strangely off-putting. He felt the side of his head again and found something slimy drooling from an ear-hole. Mind slipping sideways, he tried to poke it back. He managed to tug the heavy door open and squeezed himself in before it shut again. Damn! The phone was a left-ear one, and that happened to be the ear in trouble. Nevertheless, Pete picked up the handset from its cradle. But even before he had the chance to poke his digit in the various numbered holes in the dial, he heard a series of ratchets slipping home at the Telephone Exchange. Then, a babble of strangers' voices: the whole city talking to itself. At one point, he heard his own disguised voice. He wept bitterly when, in the distance, he made out the faint lisping of a little girl he knew he once loved - fading in and quickly fading out amid the aural mush. Soon, all he could hear were the quick buck deals that everyone ripped each other off with... # "...five, thix, thix ... Mummy, Mummy, this phone's getting wet and thticky." The little girl held out the handset for inspection. The woman looked up from her knitting and smiled knowingly, her ticking needles weaving a cat's cradle of crossed-lines around her little boy's sleepy snorting head. After all, Pete had worked for an insurance company and knew all the best life assurance policies to sell - and buy. As far as customers went, Mummy had been Pete's best, and decidedly not ugly in any shape or form. The one for the pot could be hers. But it was bound to end up with dead ants at the bottom of the cup, as she had lost the tea-strainer years ago. The garden gate didn't go. She saw there was a single silver tealeaf of a tear under of the little girl's eyes, but nobody said anything, particularly the mother. | ||
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Next story of mine to appear on this thread as part of the increasingly massive project linked to and from http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ The hits, pleasingly, increase in a geometrical progression day by day: For PFJ LIII (rewritten) First Published 'Sheer Filth' 1989 During those wonderful days when all lavatories were non-flushable & the stink cart came to collect all the doings once a week from the creaking oaken tank where it was all deposited pro tem... One morning I remember in particular, I had a bit of a problem. I suddenly realised that the garden wall that surrounded my house, at the level of a full grown giraffe, badly needed priming with broken bits of glass (in case of burglars). And during breakfast that morning I remembered that the day before I had inadvertently swallowed a piece of jagged glass (about as large as a half-a-crown) that had been hidden in with the frosted flakes. I had already evacuated my bowels twice (or was it three times?) since then so, as you can imagine, I had no option but to search the tank for it. There was a hatch at the top & one at the side towards the bottom for the lavatory man to shovel it all out into his shit pans. I thought the best way was to climb to the top & gently lower myself through the hatch up there, into the soft consistency. The tank had not been cleared for over a week (because the lavatory man had been on sick leave) so it was all pretty stiffened together, but I managed to wedge myself down until, with a sort of breast-stroke manoeuvre, I forced myself down, examining each turd as I went. Some were conjoined & some had taken a turn past the mush-by date, but nevertheless I was pleased to see that they were all mine or my wife’s - pretty sure, anyway. But, then, imagine my shock to discover a whole clutch of them, like bad bananas - a dead giveaway that my mother-in-law had been using my lavatory! I had forbidden her to do so - I’d told her the canal at the end of the road was good enough for the likes of her. She’d promised to squat down there with the rest of the village. But here they were, foreign turds in my tank. I was quickly pacified though for, nearby, I discovered the shard I’d shat. I wormed back to the top & raised it into the air where the sunlight caught it a real treat. I felt good, as if the world was OK, after all. All God’s creatures were in their rightful place. I got down from the top of the tank - a bit of a relief really, for the stench was becoming a trifle heady - & I quickly found a ladder, leant it against the garden wall at its most vunerable point, climbed it & placed the broken glass proudly at the top. The first of many, I hoped. Then, I happened to look towards the canal at the end of the road. I was irritated to see a hippopotamus wallowing in it, as if it didn’t have a care in the world. I immediately got down, without preventing a slight abrasion on my left shin, ran to the house & telephoned the local zoo. They couldn’t understand it, as none of their mother-in-laws were missing. | ||
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Sorry to Marion re her 'spewing' comment on another thread here. More than one person has indeed commented to me off-list about the 'Sheer Filth' story above. To put it in context - it is one of my Swiftian fables. Another is 'Always In Dim Shadow' in Weirdmonger. | ||
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Here is the sixth of the regular brief (&, in hindsight, pretentious!) articles entitled LAST WORD that I wrote for TTA's ZENE (the forerunner of THE FIX) ... republished here and linked to/from the contents of the increasingly massive and seemingly popular project here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/ where many of the fiction collaborations (spoken about below) are now being republished: *************** LAST WORD First published 'Zene' 1997 More positive this time, I hope, since I wish to speak on the subject of fiction collaborations. In the last year or three, much of my need to unblock has been helped by doing it with others. I have been very lucky in being able to do it with... Hold on, I ought not to taint their names with their perhaps rash decision to share a creative intimacy with the likes of me. Suffice it to say that I’ve done it with many stars of the Independent (and not so Independent) Press. It has been, without exception, a glorious experience. The method I have favoured (and none have so far complained) is for one of the two of us to write a beginning (with no forward plan), then for the other to continue, and to take it in turns until one party says it is finished. All this is piecemeal by post, each story being typed in full by the one who started, the latter being responsible for final welding together, brushing up and subsequent marketing. Most have come back for more. There is nothing greater than this adventure of the imagination. It beats going solo hands down. The results can be amazingly good. Breathtaking. But it is fair to say, sometimes the method merely works. Often, though, it works beyond the wildest dreams. Try it. | ||
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WEIRDITIES by Wordonymous First Published in USA - 'Atsatrohn' 1993 When ATSATROHN requested commentary from someone called DFL in England, I wondered if they meant me. There was my address on the tear-open airmail letter, OK. But is DFL me or someone masquerading as me, or vice versa? Whichever the case, the thought is more horrifying than anything I can invent - which brings me to the place I give my days to, a waystation of time to wrap my space in, called Great Britain. This is the only place with which I am familiar (other than a couple of trips to France in 1967 and 1988). Stitched with headtotail motorways, the delightful patchwork quilt of Old England can thankfully still be vaguely discerned shimmering beyond the gloomy flesh-corrupted gossamers of recession. In the hob, from which I was made redundant on 30 November 1992, I was able to regularly travel the length and breadth of England in my trusty white Vauxhall Cavalier - arriving early on purpose so I could write my next story in another assignable ambiance before attending the sales meeting or whatever. I don’t know what days fill in the USA - the only fact I think I really know is that it’s a bigger place for space than here. But how much bigger? Well, perhaps we’re the moon to your earth. Come in earth. Have you invented immortality yet? Are all your presidents ex-Hollywood stars with stripes of anti-entrophy running through them? Indeed, no joke, Britain’s a place where people die. But, at least, that’ll help with the dilution of Thatcher’s legacy. I suppose humanity (individuals as well as its collective conscious) is basically selfish. And American politics does not escape such accusation, as viewed from here. John Major is Bill Clinton’s shadow. But, as shown in The Charwoman’s Shadow by Lord Dunsany (an excellent fantasy novel), shadows can cast people. Have you heard of Di, Charles, Fergie &c? Well, they’re dying, too. Despite the rumors, the British royals have no more immortality than anybody else here. Even DFL. Don’t believe what’s said about the royals - if only because the act of belief takes time and space. Why waste time? Why waste space? My mentioning people by name evokes the fear that this column may be past its spontaneous combustion date by the time you burn your eyes reading it. John Major may not even be our Prime Minister by tomorrow. You live a day a day to put life in. Meanwhile the Atlantic weir flows both ways. Till the next time. Plough the space. | ||
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WHOFAGE by Wordonymous first published in USA - 'Atsatrohn' 1993 and then in UK - 'Midnight in Hell'(which once did a DFL special with only 20 published copies!) 1995 When I corresponded with Peter (now Petal) Jeffery back in the 60’s and 70’s, a convenient acronym cropped up for the type of literature we both enjoyed: WHOFAGE (Weird, Horror, Occult, Fantasy, Avernal, Ghost, Egnis). You will have to read the mighty Tome that we conspired to write at Lancaster University in 1967 (THE EGNISOMICON) to understand Avernal and Egnis. Only two copies exist. Petal’s and mine. One a photocopy, which we consider to be the pukka one. As you may know, in the 80’s, Petal was to become the Red Brain in the now late lamented Lovecraft fanzine DAGON. But my first introduction to whofage started even earlier when I was at Colchester Royal Grammer School - and who was in the same Sixth Form class as me? None other that Michel Parry. And it is that fact which reminds me that Anthologies were my real spur toward whofage. In Great Britain, there was a good many horror anthologies edited by Michel during the early 70’s, mostly in Mayflower, Corgi and Panther paperbacks, such as The Supernatural Solution (spook sleuths), Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories (six volumes), Strange Ecstasies (drug fantasy), Rivals of King Kong, Rivals Of Dracula, The Hounds Of Hell (doggy horror - and aren’t all dogs horrible?), Beware the Cat &c. &c. There were also two Devil’s kisses anthologies edited by Linda Lovecraft (who was Michel Parry in disguise!), one of which was banned because the early 70’s were too early for this brand of erotic horror. So, if you have the Devil’s Kisses anthologies (as I do), they’re probably valuable. But, no, of course, the early seventies were too late to have influenced me in my most impressionable years. My first real taste of WHOFAGE (even though the acronym hadn’t been invented at that stage) was when I accidentally met Michel Parry in the Colchester WH Smiths bookshop in 1964(?) where he picked the Panther edition of HPL’s Haunter Of The Dark off the shelf and recommended it to me. He scored his nail under a few tales (the Dunwich Horror being one, I recall) as particular favorites of his. Despite still being at school, Michel had a flat of his own where he later showed me an amazing Arkham House collection. And that was strange in those days, I guess. Whofage only really came home to me a year or so later with August Derleth’s anthologies. You must have seen these. Or perhaps you haven’t. In the late sixties, one could often find English paperback editions of these American classic anthologies in secondhand bookshops. I always recall travelling round Peter Jeffery’s home town of Southend, picking a goodly trawl of Derleths from market stalls &c. Not now, I’m afraid. Derleth, to my mind, was not a good writer, but he did assemble some pretty amazing whofage tales by motley crews under single roofs. Among the best of these are Who Knocks? and When Evil Wakes. Herein I furthered my love of HPL and people like John Metcalfs, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, J. Ramsey Campbell, C.M. Eddy Jr., Arthur Machen, and Seabury Quinn. Oh, the list is gloriously endless. These anthologies are Required Reading. Or they certainly were when whofage was sparse on the shelves. Now there’s too much of it. All those wide black spines. Ramsey Campbell (yes, the J. Ramsey Campbell mentioned above) and Stephen King are the only two worth reading to my mind. But who am I to say? Peter Haining’s anthologies of the sixties and seventies also inspired me: there are literally scores of these, so I imagine you still may be able to obtain them secondhand. Robert Aickman’s and later, R. Chetwynd -Hayes’ Fontana Ghost Story volumes that they edited were amazingly good, too. Robert Aickman...Aaah! Well, that’s another story. Perhaps next time. I’ve just returned from a holiday in Sark, Channel Islands. It is an island 3.5 miles by 1 mile, ringed by back-breaking craggy bays to get down to. Its only transport horses, bikes or the odd tractor. Definitely no cars. Well, this was an ideal spot to renew ancient acquaintances. And some of these anthologies have been better friends than most people. Sitting in a cave, I listened to the waves gently whofage, whofage, whofage on the pebbles outside - the only way for a sea to gurgle or ripple or softly sough. | ||
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Three last Last Words below. And, also, the end of this particular TTA thread amidst the many threads and blogs of the vast Numinous Megazanthus project. These last three represent the 7th, 8th and 9th editions of the regular brief (&, in hindsight, pretentious!) articles entitled LAST WORD that I wrote for TTA's ZENE (the forerunner of THE FIX) ... Any comments on this thread or on Numinous Megazanthus to: http://www.ttapress.com/discus/messages/570/721.ht ml?1093362830 I might start a new Numinous Megazanthus thread here in due course linked to and from the contents page, as this one is. **************** Last Word 7 Published Zene #13 1997 In the ‘Last Word’ before last I said it was the very last word on genres. I would brook no comeback. Well, of course, I exclude myself from this dictum. Indeed, I am now proposing an exception to the logic of what I then said: fiction and non-fiction, I assume, are separate genres and should always remain so. But, on second thoughts, who says? I’m an idiot in so assuming. Everyone has their own slant on reality. Their own style of describing or exploring it. And, doubtless, their own hidden agenda. Take the reviews in this very ‘Zene’. All written by different souls. But to obtain a neutrally pure review on anyone work of art, I feel that one must gather as many individual angles of ‘attack’ as possible upon it and then merge as one general trend. That’s the optimum. A single review is simply another fiction. Every time I start writing nonfiction (such as this billet-doux), my fiction hat slowly resumes its wearing of my head. The language creeps into a more surrealistic mode. And any hope of sense escapes through my fingertips. Fiction and non-fiction, like music, are just shades of colour in the world painting. When I was young in the 1950s, most books in public libraries had similar marbly covers, few illustrations (if any) and carelessly categorised. I merely judged by the potentiality of future nostalgia in the book’s smell. Finally, does anyone suffer like me? When an anthology or suchlike (in which one of my ‘fictions’ appears) is advertised or reviewed, it is often the case that no mention (bad or good) is made of DF Lewis, sometimes even in the case when every other writer is mentioned. I’m beginning to believe I’m not a selling-point. Or am I being paranoiac? Mental disturbance, thankfully, is just the stuff of that ring-fenced genre called dream. *********** Last Word 8 Published Zene #14 1998 With the coming of central heating, much challenge and pleasure has left the art of reading. When a child in the 5Os, there was nothing but a tin bath which, once a week, we dragged in front of the coal fire, filling it by kettles for family sudsies (residual stink for other six days? Well, I didn’t notice) and a wooden hut of an outside toilet at the end of a long backyard path - a phenomenon that no doubt helped the stink stakes! Also, reading in bed for most of the year was an artful interchange of one hand out of the bed until it got too numb with cold, then using the other to prop up the latest Enid Blyton (and, later, Charles Dickens), till you had to give up and abandon both hands to the body warmth of the inner bed. This cut back on the reading time before dozing off during those evenings when parents put kids to bed extremely early (no doubt something to do with a lack of telly). But, believe me, the reading experience was enhanced. Fiction worlds conjured up against the odds seemed more real, somehow. No insults intended, but much of the independent press provides challenging odds in the cold winters of folding, delay, unfulfilled promises etc, thus, for me, making the writing experience more positive and thus valuable when, despite everything, you’re finally published. I once compared the American independent press to surfing. With mixed success, riding the multitudinous waves of uncertainty and of lurking simultaneity across a vast ocean of Opportunity. Bit different from a tin bath. ************** Last Word 9 Published Zene #15 1998 This is my last ‘Last Word’. I am grateful to Team Zene for allowing me to sound off for the last year or so, but I have decided that I cannot justify the valuable space in such a fine magazine for anything other than what I passionately need to say. I’ve used up this column’s most meaningful words and now those that remain are residual empty ones. The art of life is to appreciate beginnings and endings for what they are; do not try to fight them. So, to summarize what I tried to say about creative writing in past columns: the undecorated word is all important in literature; rejections are hand-brakes on the steep slope to God’s acceptance; the unsnailing emails store up infinite trouble and lose an awful lot of concentration; never promise to go beyond the event horizon; unring-fence the genres and gambol in the free spaces; collaborating with others helps you unbend and paradoxically unblend; uniformity of the medium can distil differentiations from within the medium’s message; tin baths and outside toilets: well, they were where I first came in. Not surfing the net, but scooping off the effluence. See you in my next story. |
