Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales

EGAEUS PRESS MMXX

Work by Damian Murphy, Jonathan Wood, Rose Biggin, Timothy J. Jarvis, Rosanne Rabinowitz, Ron Weighell, Nina Antonia, Lisa L. Hannett, George Berguño, Sheryl Humphrey, Kathleen Jennings, Louis Marvick, Stephen J. Clark, Joseph Dawson, Yarrow Paisley, Jason E. Rolfe, Alison Littlewood, Carina Bissett.

Edited by Mark Beech

My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/egaeus-press/

When I read this book, I may add my thoughts on it in the comment stream below…

5 thoughts on “Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales”

  1. CEB1DBA5-4CDA-4C0F-BDF4-4DBF2E35CDC6A luxurious physical book, artistically designed and illustrated, with 320 pages.

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    A NIGHT AT THE MINISTRY by Damian Murphy 

    The story of a regular ritual poison for one of the Ministry’s visiting Damian envoys, a poison as a result of which “the victim falls increasingly prey to an insidious symmetry of context and meaning”, a symmetry I know well, with past and future as a serpentine ouroboros. A circle matching, too, this work’s earlier eyepiece into other rooms, and various co-vividities, and an oracle’s recorded reels spooling towards today’s “bond of suffering” and, again, the “allure of a luxurious dream.”
    A classic Damian work that enfolds itself within its own Damian heritage of context and meaning, and one that also serendipitously complements my momentous experience yesterday as if it is today’s experience — e.g. my then finishing of XX here — with this Damian work’s own renewed envoyage of message: “The signal embodied the perfection of an empire — immaculate, unchanging, and absolute.”

    My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/damian-murphy/

  3. THE BLISSFUL TINCTURES by Jonathan Wood

    Blown away by this novelette. I would need to quote it all to prove that this is the best ever textured Wood, dense and evocative, a tour de force about a family in a terraced house and a tincture shop nearby – a husband and wife, their son soon to be a soldier in the Great War, and we follow him there, and also about the family’s helpmate woman….. dense and evocative, yet it is Wood flowing easily and obsessively in guilty sips as with the tinctures and wondrous near-poisons or in gulps from the house’s gas valves till becoming REAL poisons in some blissfully masochistic, arguably co-vivid, fusion with the war’s trenches and its own gas gulps, too. Coughs, and all. The family’s sporadic rituals of hedonistic consumption are almost or even actually concupiscent. Nothing I can say here will convey to you what a genuine classic of sublime awfulness this Wood work is! I am still hypnotised by its near-endless flow of rich syntax, its word-look and meaning. It is so special, I am at a loss.

    My previous reviews of Jonathan Wood: here & here.

    • Thanks so much, Jonathan, for suggesting that I copy and paste your message below where you originally intended to post it, had your Google account allowed!
      I am most grateful for your words…

      Dear Des,

      I just wanted to say ‘hello’, but much more importantly, I want to express my great thanks for your review of The Blissful Tinctures and also my two pieces in Chiaroscuro Void (the second one as Jean du Bois). I am hugely grateful for the cerebral depth of your insights and for the intimate commitment that you apply when entering the stories and seeking out their light and shade and glimmering shadows. Your contribution to literature and letters is exceptionally significant and for writers, it is a veritable ‘White Road’ companionship in the composition and illumination and development of the art of writing. The Blissful Tinctures contains so many elements and motifs picked up over years of experience, listening at the walls of turmoil and heartfelt observation and above all, the distillation of breath and struggle from within. The vapours of this story were drawn from very deep valves and trenches.

      I thank you very humbly. My very best wishes for the new year.

      Jonathan Wood

  4. Again in tune with the Panglossian themes of ‘Our Lady of Hate’ here and the rehabilitation of scoundrels, we now have below the following hilariously magical story of a croquet party, alongside a sense of mutual synergy, a compliment to both authors, but the Biggin story also containing wonderful talkative Lewis-Carrollian buffet comestibles, a story that also has the ‘scoundrel’ opening —

    “…the diamond on his silver ring and tipped a small amount of the white powder over the tart.” …

    THE TARTEST OF FLAVOURS by Rose Biggin

    “Once a scoundrel, always a scoundrel.”

    A social open-airy party captivatingly described involving undercurrents of petty plots and romantic jealousies as Jack Heart, the potentially reformed scoundrel, talks convincingly of “sympathetic poisoning” and “sympathetic medicine” and the mutual synergy of victims and culprits…
    And arguably echoes of my own gestalt real-time reviewing!

    “…founded on the principle that there are invisible connections between things that share a key affinity.”