The singular and psykick writer-reviewer Des Lewis has recently been revisiting and reassessing strands and sequences in his Gestalt Real-Time Reviews in dialogue with a persona he calls the Brainwright. This has led him to look again at his pieces on five of my stories and caused us to walk again through an unreal city’s outer constituency only we know as the Coulsdon-Carshalton-Clocktower Triangle, not quite together but always the third who walks beside.
It is always an amazing experience to be reviewed by Des, as the Gestalt Real-Time approach is to record what it is to have lived in the story under consideration, rendering it an experience more like an immersive art installation or a private view of an underground film (exactly the weird effect I am hamfistedly trying to conjure when I write a story).
I am not the first writer to report that Des often finds parallels and developments that I did not realise were there, here the animal skeletons in the wax museum in The Validations and the creature-bones exhumed in Cretaceous. There is always a lot going on in these reviews, more than just buy-or-don’t buy. They are instead a call to open your eyes wider and widest.
The emphasis on a shared history or crossover in Southernest London interests me (I grew up in Carshalton and Des used to live in nearby Coulsdon). We could have crossed paths. We did once, for example, discuss Carshalton’s now-lost Croydon Bookshop, a secondhand emporium where I first encountered Blackwood and Borges. We could have brushed shoulders among the shelves and the dust. We still could when the light takes a certain turn …
However, I have not lived in Carshalton since 1992 and none of the stories discussed are set in Southernest London, one being set in Florence, another in London east of Liverpool Street, two in the fictitious East Anglian town of Gyddon and another in the made-up eastern resort of White Ness. Of course, I have written about Southernest London before, in Gigantic, obviously, but also in A Short Story about a Short Film, in which everywhere is renamed to resemble some idealised Eastern European backdrop, and I Remember Nothing, where the area is seen, by another suburban fantasist, as ‘a Third Reich Protectorate separated from the Fatherland by geographic and temporal accident’ (both these stories are in The Syllabus of Errors).
Anyway, now I am beginning to think that however hard I tried to leave, I never left, or it never let me, that I still walk there and walk alone (maybe not quite alone).
Less of the psycho-geography and on to the psychogeography.
For Des Lewis’ essay, which I hope is a good introduction to my Underkin stories, click here.
There’s more background to the Underkin project in the piece I wrote on Orange Slab.
Orange Slab comes after The Validations but before Things Break Down and the other stories. The exception is The Volkhova Perplex, which is not an Underkin story. There are, however, spurs and isthmuses that connect the worlds visible at low tide. I hope this is confusing in the better sense of the word.
Cretaceous, another Underkin story is mentioned in Des’ reassessment of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction
Des Lewis’ original review of Cretaceous in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 72
“If this is what four stories do, I can only imagine what a whole Stokes collection would provoke – a whole architecture of disorder in which every ‘you’ is a mirrored door.”
I am still optimistic that the stories I’ve sequenced as The Underkin and Other Stories (fourteen of which have been published with two held back) are realised and readable, that I did transmit, make art. Hopefully one day, the stories will find a publisher and can be read as a piece, a continuum, a new English mythological cycle, what happened when things broke down.
A big thank you and much respect to Des.
