The British Fantasy Society Forum

[DFL]

I dreamt last night of 'Twilight' by constructively comparing it to 'To Let' in the 2008 anthology 'Cone Zero' - and of Wagner who was really the most famous exponent of the 'leitmotif'.

And of 'Eocene' and 'diatryma', and the carbon-dating of words (see "Oh Four")...

Today I hope to finish this incredible book and round up my thoughts on it.

[DFL]

Harmonic Excursions
“Life on the surface sometimes seems staid by comparison."
They keep on coming. I’m gob-smacked. I enjoyed this story not only because it’s a good story in itself but because it’s so fitting to my earlier thoughts about Allen Ashley’s book ... [and about a sense of of my own creative development. I wrote THIS three weeks ago...and cf: the ‘song-lines’ in my own ‘From The Hearth’ included in Joel Lane’s ‘Beneath The Ground’ anthology].
A harmonic “symbiotic balance” as the story says itself.
The carbon-dating of words (words here extrapolated into musical notation as man-made stalagmites and stalactites in a cave system that our protagonists explore to destroy such notation!) is extended as a metaphor together with a sense of archaeological angst, the eocene and ‘surface’ philistinisms. 
Plus another apocryphal “grapevine”. And believable human relationships within High Metaphor.
[This story for me, with its deceptively divertimento-ish ‘’Cabinet of Caligari’ cinematic images and its cavernous reverberative echoes of previous stories in this book, was very disturbing.]
“Often I wonder if the old gods are still powerful enough to toy with us mere mortals.”

[DFL]

Matthew Saint
I will not give away the ingenious plot of this very brief piece (but longer than ‘Oh Four’!)...suffice it to say it’s another example of the apocryphal wind-up from the grapevine that is this book.
It is the “Pumpkin Coach” of Biblical exegesis as well as of what used to be the religion of ‘submitting stories to the Small Press’.  :|
[I learnt another new word from this story: “Baksheesh” is, according to Wikipedia, a term used to describe tipping, charitable giving, and certain forms of political corruption and bribery in the Middle East and South Asia.]
“...he decided to try to come to terms with the words that would hurt more surely than mere sticks and stones.”

[DFL]

State of the Ark
From an earlier reference in this book to Noah’s Raven as a capsule for future incarnation and this story of a ‘state of the art’ cruise ship, we are faced here with a true meltdown (described human-physically in the plot as well as figuratively), a meltdown of images and themes, new and already explored by this book.  In many ways it made me yearn for the purity and simplicity of ‘twilight’.  But, equally, I have ‘grown up’ with this book over the last few days and this meant the experience of this wild-firework display of a story (as opposed to merely the ‘reading’ of it) has been enhanced and justified.  Not only a meltdown but a blending of ‘under water’ (“flooded London” and dynastic caves made of water instead of stone), ‘sleep-walking’ (as a dream?), somme-nambulatng ‘mimes’ of the ‘opening of the mouth’ .... cross-fertilization between wrought words and styles, between archaeological eras (sexual as well as intellectual), and between geographical (geomantic) ‘spirits of place’ (genii loci) ... and much more that I could factor in from this particular story to the props proper and props improper of the book as a whole. “A whirl of cartouches.”  In slow motion.
My own TV screen has given up the ghost.  But just one sentence that adds a further magic and mightiness to this book, astrological as well as financial crunch-wise: “This was last year’s nightmare, a perturbation in the world’s precession (sic) that we’d somehow scraped through.”

It is fitting to end with Allen Ashley's own words from the book’s “In Lieu of a Dedication”: “All The way around the world, up the down side and down the up side of the seesaw through the millennium, away and home again just to give up the avant-garde for songs with singable choruses.”

I don’t think I would have ever made a good goal-keeper.

END OF COMMENTS ON ‘SOMNAMBULISTS’

--------------------------------------------

During a quiet moment of literary ‘post-coital’ repose, here is my review of another Allen Ashley story, one close to my heart, published in 2001 in the very first issue of ‘Nemonymous’:

The Quiet House
This is a beautifully inscrutable tale told from the viewpoint of one of two twin girls.  Having just ‘experienced’ ‘Somnambulists’, I think I may have 'grasped' it for the very first time. It’s probably untypical Ashley, judging from today’s assessment.  More Katherine Mansfield. More Proust.  More something I can’t quite define.   There are “twinkling ivories” and “Nordic Thunder”.
Now sadly I face the end of this journey of book reviews for at least a while, as I prepare the ninth ‘Nemonymous’ (Cern Zoo) – submissions close 31 March.
I face the end but, as in ‘The Quiet House’:
“I approach it slowly, walking not as through quicksand but dry bubbles and carpeted clouds.”

[Andrew Hook]

Great reading this Des! Of course, the book is long out of print with us, but I'd urge anyone to track it down and hope your comments lead to a stampede of Ebay bidders

[DFL]

Great reading this Des! Of course, the book is long out of print with us, but I'd urge anyone to track it down and hope your comments lead to a stampede of Ebay bidders

Thanks, Andrew.
Perhaps copies of the book will go for hundreds of pounds eventually.

I have formalised my review here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/somnambulists__by_allen_ashley.htm
des

PS: I have recently reviiewed two other Elastic books here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_ephemera__by_neil_williamson.htm
and
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/unbecoming_and_other_tales_of_horror__by_mike_odriscoll.htm