CERN ZOO

CONTINUED FROM HERE


Dognahnyi (1991)

This is scatology as an incantatory and deeply-textured language of religion OR a blueprint for one of humanity’s sewer systems to work via the innards of various giant birds...

Internals and externals in symbiosis.

A tripartite war between life and death and the insidious state that is not really either.

Effervescent (1995)

“It was as if the truest reality was within herself, which it was her duty to release, for the benefit of others. In return, they gave her the sweet distillations of themselves.”

That seems to bear out my first attempt at a leit-motif for the hindsight of this book so far.

This story, too, seems to be far better than I remember it to be. A commune with some participants lacking sense as well as senses. The Dinner Man... A police raid. There seem to be inner truths here galore. A story that needs to be worn ... and visualised, too, as if you were in the story yourself as a blind person.

“Raspberryade was a euphemism...”

“Twilight often summoned stragglers from their late-lyings, who subsisted simply because they’d forgotten to die.”

“The law didn’t like late-risers.”

“...her tongue was almost a second soul. She even could taste with the ends of her teeth.”  (24 May 09 - 2 hours later)

Egnis (1995)

Just for the record, this was the one story I wrote a number of years before I started seriously writing and submitting stories in 1986 in which year I had my first story published (‘Padgett Weggs’ – that also appears later in this ‘Weirdmonger’ book).

‘Egnis’ is a strange story, to say the least. About John Egnis staying with his two aunts by a lake resort, his family of wife and children elsewhere, some loose connections with Pepys’ diary, drug smugglers, and guilt – and some really passionate prose that I recall (self-intentionally!) was painfully carved out in the raw old days before I got into my writing rhythm. 

Re-reading it coldly today, I sense it is about the ‘internals’ and ‘externals’ of character within a Trojan Horse as part and parcel in a quest for a ‘literary’ meaning more meaningful than the reality it reflects.

“...in an unsubtle little girl way, as she tried to sleep, as she tried to recall the face of her father, as she finally succumbed to the same sleep her father slept, without dream or hope of waking.” (24 May 09 - another 2 hours later)





Encounters With Terror (1995)

A man’s rite of passage from childhood, denoting his various encounters with Terror, ever drawn back to a ‘present moment’ of being caught short in bed during the Nursery Night. Yearning for a Proustian mother’s kiss ...plus a crush on a servant girl. Paralleled by his toy clock-work train going in circles ... a tripartite war of life and death and something that is neither - as echoed beyond and within this book’s context. Many of these stories suffer from their shortness of the writer’s breath... A question of taste.

“The corpse of the soldier Francis had just killed groaned in death as if it were a fitful nightmare he sleeped. The belly gaped upon wriggling innards as if these were new sexual organs the corpse wanted to be fondled and loved.” (25 May 09)

Find Mine (1998)

A letter to ‘you’ disguised as a story so that when it’s published its intended yet unknown recipient can read it. The ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ certainly come into play here. And a tripartite war between love and hate and something that is a combination of both.

As an aside, did you know that when you wake up tired and drained even after an apparently good night’s sleep that’s when you’ve been visited by a vampire who’s just had a party in your soul...

SPOILER: “So as to avoid readers of this letter skipping to its end, before reading it as a whole, I’ve decided to conceal my epistle’s valedictory in this particular paragraph.”  (25 May 09 - 2 hours later)

A flash fiction of a wink. An eye-patch, when hanging up, looks like a spider with all its legs running into one. Eyelid wing. And someone subsumed by self-harming upon discovering the nature of one’s identity as narrator.

“He revolved like a clown’s head on a seaside pier with a two-way neck...” (25 May 09 - another hour later)