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Remembering the Dead and Other Stories
An unhappy soldier guards the barracks gate in Brisbane and wishes for freedom...a recovering addict in Fremantle learns about life, death and friendship while trying to get his life together in NA...an Adelaide man's recently deceased uncle teaches him about the meaning of life...and a girl vanishes somewhere near Alice Springs, never to be seen again.
These are just some of the characters in Lewis Woolston's new story collection Remembering the Dead and Other Stories.
In these snapshots from the fringes of Australian society, the past is never entirely done, the dead are not forgotten, and life takes turns both funny and tragic.
These are just some of the characters in Lewis Woolston's new story collection Remembering the Dead and Other Stories.
In these snapshots from the fringes of Australian society, the past is never entirely done, the dead are not forgotten, and life takes turns both funny and tragic.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
117 pages, Paperback
First published January 12, 2022
About the author
Lewis Woolston
3 books75 followersLewis Woolston grew up in small towns in country Western Australia. He left for the city as soon as he could to seek fame and fortune. He found neither but had some experiences. He misspent his youth in Perth and Adelaide, did a short and miserable stint in the Australian Army before living in the NT for a few years and working in some very remote places.
His first book The Last Free Man and Other Stories was published by Truth Serum Press in 2019 and was shortlisted for the 2020 Chief Minister's NT Book Awards.
His second book Remembering the Dead and Other Stories was published by Truth Serum Press in January 2022.
He Currently Lives in Port Lincoln, South Australia, with his Wife and Daughter.
His first book The Last Free Man and Other Stories was published by Truth Serum Press in 2019 and was shortlisted for the 2020 Chief Minister's NT Book Awards.
His second book Remembering the Dead and Other Stories was published by Truth Serum Press in January 2022.
He Currently Lives in Port Lincoln, South Australia, with his Wife and Daughter.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 26, 2023
I began to read this on Christmas Eve and finished on Boxing Day. Read amidst the sound of my wife and her father bickering over how to cook a chook, through to watching the cricket get rained on. Amongst a couple of beers I mused that I read sitting in air-conditioned comfort, but the reality is that in north Queensland there are devastating floods and north of Perth bush fires destroy all in their path. Not far from me 160,000 odd people of the Gold Coast have no power after a massive storm. Some in these events have not only caused the loss of possessions but also lives.
Then outside the mainstream news of these natural events that affect the many there are the homeless, the drug addicts, the victims of domestic breakdown and many more loners and outsiders that drift amongst us. All have left a small trace. Remembering the Dead indeed. Some of the alive are Dead to many of us. Are these vignettes of Australiana more realistic than my present comfort? They have left a trace. We all do I suppose, but then we never write about those that leave images on our lives. Those writers of the more literary style will tell their stories with more ornate flourishes that may not give those outsiders the dialectal stories they warrant. The outsiders are justified these stories of the traces they leave.
These stories give the Dead the traces of memory that we all want, but don’t know it.
The Triffids wrote a soundtrack for my read.
Property is Condemned.
Alcohol, Heroin
It's all water under the bridge
Left to your own devices
I know you're going to sink like a ship
Property, property, property is condemned
You tell a lie for long enough
And you believe it yourself
Now there's spittle running down your chin
Dozen murders under your belt
Property, property, property is condemned
Men and women on their knees
Nothing in their heads
I don't want to hear no tall stories
About what they doing in bed
I don't want a talk, I don't want a chat
I don't want to share a joke with a fink
I don't want a novel or a movie show
Just a pissing in the sink
Property, property, property is condemned
It was written all over your face now junior
You wanted chicken and turkey
Then that then this
The very next minute your bowels went slack
Now it hurts so bad you can't even piss
Then outside the mainstream news of these natural events that affect the many there are the homeless, the drug addicts, the victims of domestic breakdown and many more loners and outsiders that drift amongst us. All have left a small trace. Remembering the Dead indeed. Some of the alive are Dead to many of us. Are these vignettes of Australiana more realistic than my present comfort? They have left a trace. We all do I suppose, but then we never write about those that leave images on our lives. Those writers of the more literary style will tell their stories with more ornate flourishes that may not give those outsiders the dialectal stories they warrant. The outsiders are justified these stories of the traces they leave.
These stories give the Dead the traces of memory that we all want, but don’t know it.
The Triffids wrote a soundtrack for my read.
Property is Condemned.
Alcohol, Heroin
It's all water under the bridge
Left to your own devices
I know you're going to sink like a ship
Property, property, property is condemned
You tell a lie for long enough
And you believe it yourself
Now there's spittle running down your chin
Dozen murders under your belt
Property, property, property is condemned
Men and women on their knees
Nothing in their heads
I don't want to hear no tall stories
About what they doing in bed
I don't want a talk, I don't want a chat
I don't want to share a joke with a fink
I don't want a novel or a movie show
Just a pissing in the sink
Property, property, property is condemned
It was written all over your face now junior
You wanted chicken and turkey
Then that then this
The very next minute your bowels went slack
Now it hurts so bad you can't even piss
November 13, 2022
It's not easy to write like you are sharing confidences over a beer in the corner of a pub in rural Australia. Lewis has mastered this art. 'Remembering the Dead' is raw and gentle and true. I look forward to reading more of his tales. Highly recommend!
July 26, 2023
Collections and anthologies are inevitably patchy; and so, rather than liked more/less, the key take-out from Lewis Woolston's 'Remembering The Dead' is the unifying voice. Across the 19 vignettes in this slender volume there is a bruised melancholy, a declinist regret, as though something precious has been lost or over-written. The narrator and his characters exist on a social and psychological fringe. They live with with addiction, disappointment, and a deterrmination to find something better. If they are sometimes angry and confused, they are also grateful. They are survivors. Woolston unfurls all this without writerly affectation. His prose is more yarn than lit. Plain, unadorned. Left rough at the edges. Yet, for all the dirt and toughness, the stoicism and front-bar humour, what rings loudest is a core vulnerability. If this is unintentional, it is all the more affecting for its accidental reveal.
March 19, 2022
I'm a bit biased but i think it's good.
January 17, 2023
Lewis Woolston's books have been on my radar since I started reviewing /lit/ books, mainly because Woolston's work was published by an independent outfit, Truth Serum Press, which effectively placed Woolston as one of the few bridges between independents like Boswell, Bulkington, Cinder, Gardner, Nesmer, Weedman, and the prestige of industry publishing. To Woolston's credit, he has stayed true to his co-conspirators on /wg/.
I was reluctant to read the book at first as I expected it to blow away the rest of /wg/ in terms of content and maturity. It fared quite well. Woolston's book is exactly what I expected in a lot of ways from reading the back cover, but in other ways it surprised me.
Remembering the Dead and Other Stores is a collection of shorts that doesn't warrant much discussion in terms of narrative. I'm uncertain exactly how much of the text is fiction—if any—but what's there are a series of pleasantly raw vignettes that invoke the desolation of small town Australia. A man with a deep resentment for a number of officiated structures coming into his own twenty years ago. The work contains a great breadth to it as roughly twenty shorts span the hundred and twenty pages. If you don't like something, keep reading, and you may find some other note of amusement or depth to your liking. Structurally and in terms of content, I am reminded of Dubliners, though the vignettes are much shorter, they tend to take on the character of Australia as I feebly imagine it. I'm also reminded of Thompson's later books, Generation of Swine and Kingdom of Fear, where the stories blend the truth with invention.
The shorts range from anecdotes about army service, time spent meeting burnouts in AA programs, explosive little shorts about volatile situations, a man who inherits his uncle’s house and a teary note left behind, and of course the book’s namesake, a trilogy of stories about three addicts who had their lives cut short.
Woolston, a perpetual outsider, makes known his discontent with governance, work, drug abuse and step programs and the military in the narration. Very little escapes his scrutiny.
The styles run a gamut, from first-person conversational monologues to third person omniscient. It works reasonably well for the variety of stories on display. Prose oscillates between slick and gritty and usually feels appropriate for the story, as if Woolston himself was spinning yarn over a beer, and plenty of stories feel like second hand accounts. These are the more slickly written ones. These I’m almost curious about.
Woolston's prose is fine. It is on-par with the best of /lit/, but where it arguably outpaces /lit/'s pedigree is the notable lack of quality drops that plagued my other reads. Even at my most scrutinizing, there was very little to take from Woolston's immediate work aside from its lack of ambition and moments of unevenness which can almost feel in service of a collection like this. It is meant to feel both worn in and shifting between the ordinary and miserable, and it mostly does these things slickly. The book is emotionally at its best when feelings of immense isolation creep into the text. Woolston consistently shows an incredible emotional depth. There are a few occasional cracks that land, including a great short about army instructions on penis washing.
There is very little cobbled together junkiness and what little roughness there is isn't much worth mentioning. A few rank-and-file grammar errors pop up, something which I'll attribute to whoever oversaw the project at Truth Serum. Small change. Again, multiple punctuation once appeared in the text. Just seeing this was confirmation Woolston was a /wg/ acolyte and Remembering the Dead was a /wg/ product, even if it's Australian-branded. I waited patiently for Plato's name to drop, but it never did.
How does Woolston stack up against his peers? He is published for a reason and this review is short for a reason. I think I'd like to see Lou take a stab at something more daring in the future. Four stars.
I was reluctant to read the book at first as I expected it to blow away the rest of /wg/ in terms of content and maturity. It fared quite well. Woolston's book is exactly what I expected in a lot of ways from reading the back cover, but in other ways it surprised me.
Remembering the Dead and Other Stores is a collection of shorts that doesn't warrant much discussion in terms of narrative. I'm uncertain exactly how much of the text is fiction—if any—but what's there are a series of pleasantly raw vignettes that invoke the desolation of small town Australia. A man with a deep resentment for a number of officiated structures coming into his own twenty years ago. The work contains a great breadth to it as roughly twenty shorts span the hundred and twenty pages. If you don't like something, keep reading, and you may find some other note of amusement or depth to your liking. Structurally and in terms of content, I am reminded of Dubliners, though the vignettes are much shorter, they tend to take on the character of Australia as I feebly imagine it. I'm also reminded of Thompson's later books, Generation of Swine and Kingdom of Fear, where the stories blend the truth with invention.
The shorts range from anecdotes about army service, time spent meeting burnouts in AA programs, explosive little shorts about volatile situations, a man who inherits his uncle’s house and a teary note left behind, and of course the book’s namesake, a trilogy of stories about three addicts who had their lives cut short.
Woolston, a perpetual outsider, makes known his discontent with governance, work, drug abuse and step programs and the military in the narration. Very little escapes his scrutiny.
The styles run a gamut, from first-person conversational monologues to third person omniscient. It works reasonably well for the variety of stories on display. Prose oscillates between slick and gritty and usually feels appropriate for the story, as if Woolston himself was spinning yarn over a beer, and plenty of stories feel like second hand accounts. These are the more slickly written ones. These I’m almost curious about.
Woolston's prose is fine. It is on-par with the best of /lit/, but where it arguably outpaces /lit/'s pedigree is the notable lack of quality drops that plagued my other reads. Even at my most scrutinizing, there was very little to take from Woolston's immediate work aside from its lack of ambition and moments of unevenness which can almost feel in service of a collection like this. It is meant to feel both worn in and shifting between the ordinary and miserable, and it mostly does these things slickly. The book is emotionally at its best when feelings of immense isolation creep into the text. Woolston consistently shows an incredible emotional depth. There are a few occasional cracks that land, including a great short about army instructions on penis washing.
There is very little cobbled together junkiness and what little roughness there is isn't much worth mentioning. A few rank-and-file grammar errors pop up, something which I'll attribute to whoever oversaw the project at Truth Serum. Small change. Again, multiple punctuation once appeared in the text. Just seeing this was confirmation Woolston was a /wg/ acolyte and Remembering the Dead was a /wg/ product, even if it's Australian-branded. I waited patiently for Plato's name to drop, but it never did.
How does Woolston stack up against his peers? He is published for a reason and this review is short for a reason. I think I'd like to see Lou take a stab at something more daring in the future. Four stars.
April 11, 2022
Lewis was kind enough to send me an ARC of this book. This is my unbiased review.
I enjoyed Lewis' first outing, The Last Free Man etc and also this one. I read the entire collection in one sitting.
In hindsight, I might have enjoyed this collection more if I'd given myself more time for reflection between the stories. I was strapped for time, however, but I did enjoy them all, regardless.
Lewis has a happy knack of telling a story in a way that gives the feeling of sitting in a bar or around a campfire while he recounts his, or others', adventures. (or misadventures) I think I said something similar when I wrote a review of his debut collection.
Some stories in this book are hard to read. That's not a detraction on Woolston's writing; merely a reflection of the subject matter. Many of the stories deal with death, drug addiction, domestic violence and other subjects some may not wish to read about. They are a part of life, though. A couple of them brought back dark memories for me.
If you like reading sweet romance or sugar-coated cosy mysteries, you'd probably be better off leaving this off your reading list. However, if you like reading dinkum Aussie tales, full of dinkum Aussie characters, told with feeling and sometimes humour, I recommend this book.
I enjoyed Lewis' first outing, The Last Free Man etc and also this one. I read the entire collection in one sitting.
In hindsight, I might have enjoyed this collection more if I'd given myself more time for reflection between the stories. I was strapped for time, however, but I did enjoy them all, regardless.
Lewis has a happy knack of telling a story in a way that gives the feeling of sitting in a bar or around a campfire while he recounts his, or others', adventures. (or misadventures) I think I said something similar when I wrote a review of his debut collection.
Some stories in this book are hard to read. That's not a detraction on Woolston's writing; merely a reflection of the subject matter. Many of the stories deal with death, drug addiction, domestic violence and other subjects some may not wish to read about. They are a part of life, though. A couple of them brought back dark memories for me.
If you like reading sweet romance or sugar-coated cosy mysteries, you'd probably be better off leaving this off your reading list. However, if you like reading dinkum Aussie tales, full of dinkum Aussie characters, told with feeling and sometimes humour, I recommend this book.
January 17, 2025
An interesting collection of stories (one wonders how much they are fiction and how much they are autobiographical—if at all), vignettes of working class and underclass lives.
The title of the collection refers to several of the stories which tell the tale of someone the author knew through his time as a heroin addict or later from attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings—interestingly Woolston seeks to memorialise people who otherwise would be unlikely to be remembered even by their own family, giving effect in a way to the idea that someone only truly dies when there is no one left on the physical world who remembers you—these stories seek to give some ongoing life to some of these characters.
Even in the happy stories the there is an undertone of melancholy—but infused with optimism that there can be happier times or that life is good if you just let yourself enjoy the small pleasures.
Overall I enjoyed reading the collection of stories. It’s a slender volume and most of the stories do not take long to read individually—but there is still a lot packed in.
Overall: recommended. I will be interested to read more of Woolston’s work in future.
The title of the collection refers to several of the stories which tell the tale of someone the author knew through his time as a heroin addict or later from attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings—interestingly Woolston seeks to memorialise people who otherwise would be unlikely to be remembered even by their own family, giving effect in a way to the idea that someone only truly dies when there is no one left on the physical world who remembers you—these stories seek to give some ongoing life to some of these characters.
Even in the happy stories the there is an undertone of melancholy—but infused with optimism that there can be happier times or that life is good if you just let yourself enjoy the small pleasures.
Overall I enjoyed reading the collection of stories. It’s a slender volume and most of the stories do not take long to read individually—but there is still a lot packed in.
Overall: recommended. I will be interested to read more of Woolston’s work in future.
October 18, 2022
Another great short story collection from Woolston. In comparison to "the Last Free Man and Other Stories", this collection is more domestic in scope. There are stories from the military (no combat, mind you), lots of recovering drug addicts, and people trying to be or not to be parents. The title of the collection comes from three stories which are essentially eulogies to people that probably never got one. But those are not the only grim stories. Some tales are reminiscent to shameful things I've caught wind of in my own country. The verisimilitude is great, has good range of emotions capturing embarrassment, anger, regret, satisfaction and hope. The author's voice is consistent and from this collection I feel he has shared stories far more personal to him than before.
February 11, 2022
For the record, I was fortunate enough to have been sent a copy by Lewis himself, and yet in no way did this influence my opinion of this book. My favourite parts of his previous release were the quiet moments of contemplation, in which you can feel the red dust heat rolling in off the page, and Woolston has only upped his game. There is a passionate, still tenderness to the stories within these pages, blurring the lines between fiction and fact, and all are imbued with this gorgeous sense of truthfulness. So come in, gather around, disconnect from the busy digital age we are cursed with, and let Woolston spin a story or two in the meantime.
December 31, 2023
A thoroughly readable and engagingly contemplative collection of short stories. None overstay their welcome and their cumulative portrait of life at the periphery of Australian society - like the lives of Woolston's remembered dead - balance the tragedy, comedy and hope of life in general. What shines through above all is a complicated but deep humanism.
"Fucking thing belonged in a museum; a dead party, dead ideals, and a dead man." / "Life is for living and as long as you are alive there is always something that can be made of it."
"Fucking thing belonged in a museum; a dead party, dead ideals, and a dead man." / "Life is for living and as long as you are alive there is always something that can be made of it."
November 21, 2025
Great character studies I know some of these people or at least their American counter parts. The author knows more addict or former addicts than I do but the ones I know are spot on. I have a very good friend who is a form addict and works with jail ministries, the homeless, and half way houses . . he will really appreciate and relate to these stories. The only problem I had with the book is Aussie slang. , I could eventually figure out American equivalents but sometimes it slowed me down
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 17, 2024
I really liked the variety of stories that was presented here from army tales, to people from rehab, and sweet, touching ones about fatherhood. A lot of these stories are about transitional people coming and going from the outskirts of society and while most of these stories aren't very long they do paint a nice picture or leave you with something. I'd say my favorite was Far from your father's country.
February 23, 2026
"The staff at Kulgera Roadhouse weren't too put out, really. Most of them were backpackers or other transient types and this was all part of the adventure of roadhouse life. They drank beer and took photos of the water rising dangerously close to the front door of the roadhouse. Then at night they continued on with the absorbing game of roadhouse romance, staff quietly sneaking into each other's rooms to cuddle and copulate. Sometimes life-long bonds were formed, sometimes hearts were broken, sometimes children were conceived or diseases spread. They were young and alive; what did it matter if flood waters cut the highway?"
August 25, 2023
This is a collection of 19 short stories based in each of the cities that Mr Woolston has admitted to living. I was asked by Mr Woolston reached out to me while I was on holidays in the US to ask if I'd be willing to review his book. After some thought I told him I would if he could wait until after I returned to Australia. Some of the stories I'd rate 5 stars especially "Those Pine Trees Across the Street" "The Girl In the Green Paisley Dress", the 3 "Remembering The Dead" stories and "The Never Married Uncle" which was my favourite of all. A couple of them I'd rate 3 and most in the middle. Some of the stories are set in the Army and were quite humourous. Those set in Fremantle and Alice Springs seem were a bit more sombre and dealt with time in rehab and recovery or the slipping out of same.
"Stuck In Kulgera" with travelers stuck in that road house town due to heavy rains and flooding rang especially true from my time of living in Alice Springs and having driven through that town a number of times. Overall I'd say well done Mr Woolston. I read this over two days. One could read it in one, but I would suggest it is better to digest only a few stories at a sitting and then come back for more.
"Stuck In Kulgera" with travelers stuck in that road house town due to heavy rains and flooding rang especially true from my time of living in Alice Springs and having driven through that town a number of times. Overall I'd say well done Mr Woolston. I read this over two days. One could read it in one, but I would suggest it is better to digest only a few stories at a sitting and then come back for more.
September 17, 2023
Best work yet by the internet famous Lewis Woolston. He writes like no hellboar I've ever hunted!
August 30, 2025
We're getting out of the /lit/ hood with this one, dawgs.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews