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Weirdmonger: The Nemonicon: Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction
Collects sixty-seven short, weird stories, all written and published between 1987-1999.
DF Lewis is a legend among readers of fantasy and horror fiction. These days he devotes his creative energies to editing his annual magazine Nemonymous, in which authors identities are revealed only in the subsequent issue. Now Lewis has a big collection of his own heteromorphic short fiction in print: Weirdmonger is a substantial volume of often insubstantial pieces. Insubstantial only in terms of length, that is. Lewis writes some of the shortest short stories around and still makes them work. The long ones work, too. Its possible to detect the influence of English horror writer Ramsey Campbell, especially in the puns and wordplay, while the spirit of the American short story writer H P Lovecraft infuses every paragraph. The Scar Museum finds the curator of that establishment arriving in a seaside spa town where he is confronted with more cicatrices than he can handle. He is enjoying a drink in a hotel bar when he notices a young woman sat opposite, her scars like tug-of-war teams competing for the bridge of her nose. The consequences of the ensuing meeting, as ever with Lewis, are both horrible and wonderful.
DF Lewis is a legend among readers of fantasy and horror fiction. These days he devotes his creative energies to editing his annual magazine Nemonymous, in which authors identities are revealed only in the subsequent issue. Now Lewis has a big collection of his own heteromorphic short fiction in print: Weirdmonger is a substantial volume of often insubstantial pieces. Insubstantial only in terms of length, that is. Lewis writes some of the shortest short stories around and still makes them work. The long ones work, too. Its possible to detect the influence of English horror writer Ramsey Campbell, especially in the puns and wordplay, while the spirit of the American short story writer H P Lovecraft infuses every paragraph. The Scar Museum finds the curator of that establishment arriving in a seaside spa town where he is confronted with more cicatrices than he can handle. He is enjoying a drink in a hotel bar when he notices a young woman sat opposite, her scars like tug-of-war teams competing for the bridge of her nose. The consequences of the ensuing meeting, as ever with Lewis, are both horrible and wonderful.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
D.F. Lewis
73 books24 followersWriter, editor and publisher, active in the small press. Winner of the British Fantasy Society Special Award (the Karl Edward Wagner Award) in 1998.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 26, 2007
absolute weirdness kind of similiar to cut up Burroughs, Atrocity Exhibition Ballard,Rhys Hughes, and then Bruno Shultz and Thomas Ligotti thrown in the blender. Good in small doses..
July 17, 2025
This is a book for jaded readers seeking unfamiliar sensations. 67 vignettes and stories averaging only seven pages in length, most of them previously published in fanzines between 1987 and 2001. The book is not suitable for rushing through in a few concentrated sessions: better to make it a project of several months. Because these stories are strange, disjointed, surreal, often bordering on the nonsensical.
They were published in the literary context of the Weird Tale in the H.P. Lovecraft sense, but most of them are actually just tales that are really weird. There is a lot of childish humour and wordplay in them. The ones that I find less effective are so obscure that you sometimes can’t quite see how one sentence really goes together with the preceding or following ones. I don’t know what to compare this to, and that is a rare pleasure at this time in my reading life.
They were published in the literary context of the Weird Tale in the H.P. Lovecraft sense, but most of them are actually just tales that are really weird. There is a lot of childish humour and wordplay in them. The ones that I find less effective are so obscure that you sometimes can’t quite see how one sentence really goes together with the preceding or following ones. I don’t know what to compare this to, and that is a rare pleasure at this time in my reading life.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews