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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.170.223
Posted on Monday, April 20, 2009 - 03:37 pm:   

mindful

Just received in the post this book I've bought. Mindful of Phantoms by Gary Fry. Looks as if it's full of ghost (or supernatural) stories by one of my favourite Horror writers. May take it on holiday with me in next few days.
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Simon Strantzas (Nomis)
Username: Nomis

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 38.113.181.169
Posted on Monday, April 20, 2009 - 06:52 pm:   

Looks good. Gary, you know this isn't on your website, right?
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 03:13 pm:   

I read an enthusiastic review of it last week, but the site has since disappeared.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.170.223
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 04:51 pm:   

I fibbed about it coming in the post, because I didn't want to tip off others about the shop I unexpectedly discovered in my area where I bought it yesterday and where there were hundreds of other Ghost Story collections I'd never heard of before! But the shop today seems to have vanished! I only bought 'Mindful of Phantoms' with the only cash I had on me when there yesterday, because the shopkeeper would not take cheques or cards, and I went back today with more cash. But, I'll go back tomorrow, in the hope I may find the right road the shop was in. The shop also had a lot of purple carbon paper. But that doesn't help.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 05:04 pm:   

Who's the publisher? An online search reveals nowt.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.170.223
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 05:11 pm:   

There's nothing on the spine.
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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 05:29 pm:   

just one remaining tendon and a piece of rotting muscle...
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Matt_cowan (Matt_cowan)
Username: Matt_cowan

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 68.79.169.219
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 06:05 pm:   

I love that cover art! Looks like a great book!
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.170.223
Posted on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 09:43 am:   

Still can't find it! At least I managed to salvage 'Mindful of Phantoms' from the now presumably dream-attenuated cache of book gems in a back-street emporium near the sea one purple twilight.
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Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin)
Username: Richard_gavin

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 65.110.174.71
Posted on Monday, April 27, 2009 - 02:59 am:   

A volume of ghost stories by the honourable Prof. Fry. With no publisher listed on its spine. A tastily mad cover. Discovered by none other than Des Lewis in some skewed, twilit shop of supernatural tomes...

Ye gods, I love it when the outer world conforms to my most cherished nightmares.

I'm suddenly uncertain as to whether I'm typing these words or merely dreaming them...
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.208.112.230
Posted on Monday, April 27, 2009 - 10:05 pm:   

The owner of the emporium looked suspiciously like Peter Cushing...
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 62.171.194.42
Posted on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - 02:12 pm:   

I'm in Sarum at the mooment. Read the first five stories so far. All haunting and memorable. 'School of Fought' is particularly striking. I happened to read 'The Head' by Reggie Oliver the same evening. Both great disconnected stories.
des
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 218.168.184.207
Posted on Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 07:50 am:   

Gary, just wanted to let you know that Mindful of Phantoms came in the mail today (only 5 days since I paid for it - that was pretty damn quick!). It's a lovely looking book, and I look forward to reading it.
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Gcw (Gcw)
Username: Gcw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.151.125.173
Posted on Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 06:22 pm:   

Same here!- Cheers dude.

gcw
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.208.112.230
Posted on Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 09:25 pm:   

And here.

By heck, I wasn't expecting a hardcover. Looks smashing.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.165.43
Posted on Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 09:37 pm:   

(only read half a dozen stories so far but already troubling my dreams):

Head-brace housing? Dog-muzzles? 'King Lear'-ments? Renactments and 'May Sinclair'-like 'screwing of ghosts', a Ligottian jester and working man's humour as a back-stop 'gainst despair or 'gainst Winston Churchill's Black Dog:

winston
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.167.242
Posted on Tuesday, May 05, 2009 - 03:37 pm:   

Well, I read the first six stories of this book when on holiday and below are the barely decipherable aide-memoire notes I wrote on each one at the time - without further comment now or alteration or reconcilng by hindsight today:

School of Fought
Head -- strait-jacket
Contents of Skull
Freedom of Expression
King Lear?

Man's Best Freind
Dogs - Master
Kay - Kelly
Old man next door
Doberman
Dogs = heads?
(strait-jacket?!)

Black Dogs
Two brothers (one a writer)
Fireworks
Two Black Dogs - life?
Churchill

Figure of Fun
Work & Play implications
Builders -
Academia vs. Working
King Lear
Humour / Tragedy
Ligotti

Going Back
Duplicate House
"Bleak nostalgia"
Larger mother. Sister. Father.
Re-enactment of abuse
"My head hurts...." P.76

Wafts
Doubles
-- Me + I
Girl narrator
-- screwing with ghosts.

===========================
Since coming back from holiday, not had much time for more DFLish 'real-time' reviewing of other writers' books. But I read the next story in this book today:

Index of an Enigma
And I though this was a good story with which to resume...
"...some of us read what isn't there."
"...human beings project personal readings onto an ambiguous reality."
A creepy meta-philosophy of real ghosts.

I'm looking forward to reading the next story and sharpening my Reality-Tv antennae because, according to the contents page, it is called:
Big Brother
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Tuesday, May 05, 2009 - 04:24 pm:   

>>>Academia vs. Working

I just love this bipolar construct of yours, D.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.167.242
Posted on Tuesday, May 05, 2009 - 09:35 pm:   

Big Brother

A neat hilarious tale of subterfuge and subterfuge's come-uppance by another subterfuge via an axolotl. With Fritz-Leiberesque distancing by image - crossed with Picasso. Loved it.
But where was Davina? (And it wasn't a ghost story either!)
PS: The head-cases, dog-muzzles etc. have here become cars wih their sense of invulnerability as a metal exterior.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.167.242
Posted on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 - 12:59 pm:   

In Nature's Arms
This is a ghost story. Atmospheric and original, but a bit contrived for my taste. A bit too logical in wringing a story gestalt forom its own knots and crannies of illogicality, if you see what I mean. I love the 'Ex-Emma' conceit and many other descriptive aspects - including the head in the tree bark. A bit like a strait-jacket outer-casing for a brazil nut?
But one would need peer-judgements to make a final evaluation of this homeopathic story.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.167.242
Posted on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 - 01:07 pm:   

I suspect 'peer-judgements' will be thin on the ground - as 'In Nature's Arms' seems to be only published in this book!
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.167.242
Posted on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 - 08:37 pm:   

The Price To Pay
I thought this was heading into a standard supernatural retribution story (well, we all want to get back at Estate Agents!) - but then I was transfused into a vacuum by a smiling zombie...
Not sure if this one works. If it does work, it is as a Tate Modern or Dada exhibit of High Description - which somehow reminded me of the description and theme of one of my top favourite Fry stories (Bodying Forth) .... so, yes, it did work on a certain level. Fry can often be completely off-the-wall despite the steely intelligence and sensible outlook and philosophical logic that his work often displays. His head certainly chews the pen good and proper, when it wants to (or doesn't want to)...
[Btw - 'latts'? I thought that is what my Mother drinks when I take her to the Marks & Spencer's cafe.]
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Thursday, May 07, 2009 - 02:32 pm:   

It Sounds A Bit Like...
A brilliantly haunting/disturbing story that is generated by a Fry-works running theme of families, dysfunctional and endeavouring to strip free the inter-generational impurities of (for example) the discommoding Dad and the trials and tribulations of Social Care and other poignant lack of syncromeshing - here from a family's daughter's standpoint, rather than the more usual (in Fry's works) standpoint of the son. It's as if Cancer and childbirth run in tandem ... and all becomes even more dysfunctional intrinsically by generations returning as ghosts of themselves at their worst (the person behaving badly if not (knowingly) maliciously but body now behaving maliciously against the person for whom it acts as vehicle in life and now as a ghost).
A very clever play on words with 'banana'. But I won't give more away. It's a story that makes me flounder somewhat - with my critical focus now become as dysfunctional as some of the characters!
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Thursday, May 07, 2009 - 08:50 pm:   

On The Wings
An extension of a Fry theme (the artistic lad from a dysfunctional working-class background) which one expects to follow a David Almond or 'Billy Elliott' or Blackwood's 'Jimbo' trajectory...
But his passion to 'fly' creates a frightening winged creature for real that will be the protagonist's means to fight his corner, often (as is necessary in his perceived vicious world around him) to fight viciously. A bully forced to be a bully by other bullies? That's the big question I feel this story poses.
Perhaps writing stories is another means to continue fighting corners.
Falconry came to mind - head-covering masks, with just the beaks showing...
Loved it. How good can a writer be before someone notices?
Or hears the wings unfurling...
Stories with peripheral glances and things that become artistic-off-the-page (abstract and representational and cubist) simply by being half-noticed as a horror trope struggling to uncloy itself from the ink that once stuck it to the paper.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Friday, May 08, 2009 - 03:44 pm:   

Unfriendly Fire
A slightly ludicrous Hitchcockian mystery story with a theme of supernatural retribution and (Google-induced) coincidence - mixed with ontological and telelogical concerns. I thought I was in for a Fry sspecial when I found the plot centred on a North Sea coast town (I live on a part of this coast and recognise the ambiance) but, other than the gate and the thing's passge through the gate, I found this a bit run-of-the-mill and tortuous. Not the reader-friendliest Fry I've read.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Friday, May 08, 2009 - 03:45 pm:   

teleological
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Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch)
Username: Mark_lynch

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.171.129.71
Posted on Friday, May 08, 2009 - 05:27 pm:   

I just read 'Wafts' from the collection. Been rereading the earlier pieces but think this is the first in the collection that I've not previously read in draft form at least. Enjoyed it very much, and felt within it was the optimism and calmness my girlfriend and I detected in Gary and his partner when we visited them in Whitby a few weeks back. Good stuff.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Friday, May 08, 2009 - 07:46 pm:   

Die hard
Gary Fry has set such high standards for me with many wonderful stories that I've read over recent months, it is difficult to evaluate just ordinary tales that would otherwise be simply entertaining. This is one such. An honest ghost story with a memorable vision of the ghost. Also a workmanlike treatment of football and its relationship with big business or the fans.
I did enjoy it. And I wonder how many other playbacks in slo-mo of live action TV - if examined - would poduce hints of things that were not meant otherwise to be hinted at in real time...? Such as that the football being kicked aound was really a human head encased in leather. But that's another story.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 10:48 am:   

Taking on Life
Back to form, this is a genuine Fry classic. Just the right balance of his themes. In fact it seems to be the optimum treatment of Fry-as-I've read-him-so-far (and I guess I am currently the only independent reviewer of his works who has publicly reviewed Fry having read most of his published output). Essential Fry. Despite my distance from the era and age of the protagonists, I found this very moving and very personal. Anything else I say would spoil it for future readers. But, being e, I will say that gene-audit-trails can bear the most horrific afterbirths, nay, pre-births.
[The act of kissing (or tentatively approaching love-making) being akin to falconry was just another aspect that I 'improvised' within my reading of this story and the context of the whole book - but this observation of mine is highly off-the-wall critically - hence the brackets[]].
["fannying on the internet" = "bleeding a radiator"]
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 10:59 am:   

being me
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 12:36 pm:   

Closer Than That
I now look back at the six 'peripheral glances' that my thoughts on the first six stories in this book have now become, stories that were read whilst away on holiday and simply now denoted by the aide-memoires above. I also note a comment (above) that I made about 'School of Fought' (the excellent first story in the book) that I sent to this thread from a Salisbury Library computer:
"I'm in Sarum at the mooment. Read the first five stories so far. All haunting and memorable. 'School of Fought' is particularly striking. I happened to read 'The Head' by Reggie Oliver the same evening. Both great disconnected stories."
Today, a week or so later, this story ('Closer Than That') seems to be the culmination of this 'head' leit-motif, whereby a face at a window is first described here not as a face, but as a 'head' - leading to other momentous emanations in my mind (flesh as a strait-jacket fabric?) and becoming a dark-motif of 'heads' (in an otherwise (for me) somewhat contrived story of supernatural retribution and Gothic 'sisters').
So, despite its shortcomings of artificiality (for me), this is a tale (another Whitby one) that gains from its context in this book rather than from being intrinsically a special story in the same way that many of Fry's other stories are special in context and also when stood-alone.
[Loved the light-motif play on words 'what on earth was going on?' vis-a-vis an electrical fitting dismantlement!]
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 01:57 pm:   

The Older Man
After grappling (with eventual success) with the differentiation of the various characters in this ttory - I enjoyed the experience, in a sort of sick, old-man way. In its serious moments, it's a treatment of the interaction of gender and age and status in relationships. In its even more serious moments of horror, it becomes a disgusting gross-out that erects a theatrical display of old meat on old meat. Mating 'guys' on a dead bonfire as a mobile art-installation that I shall probably not forget, even though most of me wants to forget it - and quickly. Perhaps writing this will exorcise the memory. I hope so. But even if I don't, I have far less of my life yet to live than that I've already lived, so it doesn't matter so much to the likes of me as it does to the likes of you if you read this story at a younger age than I am now. Go figure.
[More builders in this story. Fry's 'working-class' are protagonists rather than victims. Even if at the end of the day, we all are victims. Builders box in. Bodies box in, too. Specially, when focussed on mind rather than body, boxed in by our heads. Perhaps we can never escape our boxes, given the possibility to become haunted or haunting]
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 03:14 pm:   

The Tree House
A 'Just William' story, with 'Just William' type mis-spellings etc and child-like imaginings of wars etc, morphing into a new early Eighties Fork-lands campaign - where the fork itself punctures the head-motif. Literally.
"ambitios dead mean"
And, aptly, too, imagination becomes real, as generation feeds into generation, and prejudies breached. But further (political) prejudices seeded.
"And which possessed a head that hardly seemed solid enough to support any organs of sense?"
"The tines tore directky into into and then out of the man's head ... [...] ...the fork, which bore a tangled residue of leather-like skn."
An excellent ending to my Journey into Fry. One I hope will not end here but will continue when new stuff is published. He's quite young, I understand. But not in the first blush of youth. ;)

The blush of youth. Hmmm. As I start brainstorming again, this and other new truths seem to occur to me. Truths from fiction, if not from intentionality. Peripheral glances and fixed stares as we wade through the war-torn intellectual deep-waters in the alien country of our own up-bringing. Half-noticed shapes - and heads in windows soon to become faces. Guy forks. Art-installation monsters that are realler than reality itself. Dreams that underpin themselves with something more than just themselves. Social concerns and glitches. Love in the bud. Death in an even deeper bud.
The protagonist was determined, this last story tells us, to defend the tree-house to the death. A tree-house is the book itself. And the author, I infer, sits with steely glances (peripheral or otherwise, blade-like or not) to defend his own work simliarly. Well, he won't need to defend it from the likes of me.

END
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 03:15 pm:   

ambitious dead men
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.173.4
Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 - 03:34 pm:   

A review written by the 'Figure of Fun'. :-)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.170.150
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - 09:51 am:   

Well, he won't need to defend it from the likes of me.
================
Sorry, just noticed - that should read:

"Well, he won't need to defend it against the likes of me."
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - 09:55 am:   

Thanks for the review, Des! I've been watching it, but my silence on this book must remain absolute.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.29.170.150
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - 10:15 am:   

my silence on this book must remain absolute.
==================

I honour that sentiment but can I quote this?.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - 10:23 am:   

[ . . . I offer consent . . . ]
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Alansjf (Alansjf)
Username: Alansjf

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 94.194.134.45
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - 12:49 pm:   

A copy arrived this morning via the good folks at Fantastic Literature - looking forward to it (it's next up after The Best of Michael Moorcock and China Mieville's The City & the City).

But how come it isn't available through the Gray Friar Press website?

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