Highly sophisticated and wonderfully nightmarish imagination, an expertly controlled and sardonic vision that reminds me as much of avant-gardists like William Burroughs as it does the best traditions of horror literature.
-- Thomas Ligotti on D. F. Lewis in DAGON DFL SPECIAL
In 2011, together with S. D. Tullis I was invited by the award-winning avant-garde author D. F. Lewis to help him choose stories for his collection The Last Balcony.
This was a very difficult choice as Des' oeuvres span over 2000 stories, most of which have been posted online in the so-called Weirdmonger Wheel - a web of websites, blogs and discussion forum posts where the stories are scattered.
Des' stories are real marvels. Concise text, often approaching prose poems or vignetters, full of ambiguous open endings and loose threads, non-seguitur dream-like logic, decorated with passages of beautiful Proustian prose. Sometimes approaching aickmanesque strange stories, sometimes weird fiction, sometimes classified as bizarro, these stories of acquired taste defy boundaries.
My choice for the contents this time over would probably be different, if I were to read the same stories again over the years, this being a proof for the stories' sheer power. By the time you read these texts again, they have morphed into something else, like a puzzling dream that leaves you with different feeling each time you try to remember it.
The result is a wonderful hardcover book of 334 pages with cover art by Tony Lovell.
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