Vastarien Vol.3 Issue 2
A LITERARY JOURNAL – GRIMSCRIBE PRESS (Fall 2020)
My previous reviews of this journal: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/vastarien/
Work by Romana Lockwood, Alex Jennings, Sam Hicks, Kurt Fawver, LC von Hessen, Rhonda Pressley Veit, Rae White, Michael Griffin, Cody Goodfellow, Nina Shepardson, Casilda Ferrante, Alicia Hilton, Carson Winter, Joshua Plack, Alex Skopic, Sarah L. Johnson, Eddie Generous, Korbin Jones, Sonya Taaffe, J.A.W. McCarthy, Timothy G. Huguenin, Mike Thorn, T. M. Morgan, Lora Gray, Tiffany Morris, David Stevens, Tim Major, Roberta Gould, Ivy Grimes, John Claude Smith, Jessica Ann York, Dmitry Blizniuk, Timothy G. Huguenin, Matthew M. Bartlett, John Palisano, Miguel Fliguer, Chelsea Davis, Denise Robbins.
When I read these works, I hope my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
I hope to commence reading this when I have finished: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/vastarien-vol-3-issue-1/
Co-Editor-in-Chiefs: Matt Cardin & Jon Padgett; Associate Editor: Michael Cisco
TENEBROUS RAMBLINGS by Romana Lockwood
Editorial column.
followed by
Poem by Alex Jennings: ‘YEAR IN WHITE’
Above are timely and chillingly engaging reminders that today is 18 January, my 73rd Birthday (with my having now just escaped the Midsommar age!), and that this specific date has always been the true psychological Midwinter, especially where I live in UK. This year, particularly so!
HEATH CRAWLER by Sam Hicks
“We anthropomorphize our pets and read all kinds into their expressions, but here, peering through this animal mask, was the most uncanny, the most unnerving and subtle, human parody I had ever seen.”
This is a mighty work of literature, no mistake, and I was immediately captured by this man called Simon who wandered through the various intense atmospheres of the psychological areas of the Heath, with his trusty Jack Russell dog, and he couldn’t help meeting with another man, a somehow threatening-type man with a knotted walking-stick and with his own dog as quoted about above — and Simon meeting, too, this stranger’s sometime woman guardian — a guardian or his help-catcher, assuming the bait was right? Leading eventually to an unforgettable Ligottian township where Simon’s Jack Russell is advertised as missing…
One of those landmark reads.
I myself left my red scarf there as a future aide-memoire.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/sam-hicks/
HOMEOWNERSHIP AND YOU by Kurt Fawver
“Dim orange light perpetually seeps from the cracks between the closet’s door and its frame, and these fiery slivers glow most ominous and most alluring when they’re wrapped up in the thick of night.”
Ominous as well as alluring, this tellingly bathetic fable of ‘you’ depicts your purpose built house you had built and the pride involved in a poor person made good. Yet a new house should not have a mysterious closet door nor the “grand insanity” that lies behind it and mainly below like a House of Leaves, should it? “Ignorance may not be bliss but it does possess the advantage of clarity.” Anything else is just “faux heroism”, I guess. Any personal drones of an untranslatable voice’s words behind that closet door, notwithstanding. Even your own mother’s erstwhile lack of hope.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/kurt-fawver/
nullimmortalis Edit
ROSCOE’S MALEFIC DELIGHTS by LC von Hessen
A few months ago, I remember suggesting this writer is the modern age’s New Ligotti, and I did then wonder if I had bitten off more from my ever-smoking cigar than I could chew. This writer seemed to fit perfectly my very first Goodreads review in 2015 that happened to be of the Ligotti Penguin Classics book (linked here).
This story has now convinced me that I was dead right. Seriously.
The work is certain to become one of my favourite stories of 2021, if not of all time. A scatologolical eschatology in apotheosis.
A story about a pretentiously named restaurant created from an old theatre. But that description of the story can give you no idea about the narrator’s part-time cellist lover, the “Delights” of the four medieval humours served by the restaurant, all the “trendy food nonsense”, scat fetishist swallowers, the Petri dish nature of the narrator’s mouldy apartment, the trepanning by ‘water torture’, the tapeworm diet, the ‘living tongue’, the Rug Man, and much more.
And what happens when the restaurant turns back into a theatre? The muffled, limp and deadened applause that welcomes how the narrator “enjoys” whatever the narrator enjoys?
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/lc-von-hessen/