FLASH IN THE PANTHEON by Rhys Hughes
Gloomy Seahorse Press 2014
MY REVIEW (CONTINUED FROM HERE) WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW AS AND WHEN I READ THE BOOK:-
ALL THE ‘NEMONYMOUS’ WEBSITES LINKED FROM ONE PAGE:
The InkerMen Press (2012):
The Last Balcony: Stories and Novellas - "The Last Balcony is one of the best author’s anthology ever."
DF Lewis
NULL IMMORTALIS · DF Lewis as editor, publisher, writer and reviewer of fiction, plus hawler and synchronist.
NULL IMMORTALIS 
Surface Tension
“I’m a one-liner comedian…”
And that’s left me with a durable, relevant image, of Rhys delivering some of these flash fictions and his fables as a stand-up. They’d work even more brilliantly that way than they do on the page. Even the sillier ones would no doubt become less silly, or even more silly, whichever is best for each of the audience. A stand-up on a cruise liner, with the sea bearing a flotsam of subjunctives. There are some really good one-liner obliquities in this story that resonate off the page as I imagine Rhys delivering them in person. It’s him now knocking on my door, as he can’t deliver them properly through the letter-box.
Thanks Des! This is one of my “language driven” stories in which the ‘plot’ is entirely driven by the logic of word association and has nothing to do with empirical causality… I enjoy writing these kinds of stories more than almost any kind, but there simply isn’t an audience for this kind of stuff. The last writer who used this technique and enthused a wide readership with it was Spike Milligan. The form is defunct…. but I love it anyway!
How about Professor Stanley Unwin who probably does this still in some far off place?
Ramblings of a Sea Dog seems an engagingly child-like (rather than childish) language-driven story, too. It is like entering a world I wished I inhabited every day. In fact, I do do this every day (smiley), by reading these flashes of far from, close to, exact with and not yet.
Midknight Express
“He raised his visor and blinked. Stale air rushed to greet the day.”
An amazing coincidence as stale air did thus greet me this morning as I took my above-titled regular tonic of these flash fictions, having just yesterday reviewed a Rhys story entitled ‘Stale Air’ here from another book, and in another place.
‘Midknight Express’ (one of this author’s titles with a slightly forced wordplay, I feel!) is about Rhys himself, or at least The Duel of Fame part of him, whereby he is a chivalrous force travelled to our modern world so as to hammer out, on a poetic anvil, his well-meant weapons of absurd and ironic fantasy, only to be met by an express train full of passengers who have heads bent reading other things and not looking out of the windows as they and the train pass through him.
A Corking Tale
A genuinely brilliant flash fiction, one that makes Rhys Hughes literature what it is. Even though it has an attempted twist ending that doesn’t come off.
Twentieth Century Chronoshock
I thought I had read all the Thornton Excelsior stories by Rhys (several of them in two editions of TQF and one such story in the HA of HA), but I was delighted to discover this new one here – unless I have read it before and it had already been blocked from my memory to obviate a developing phobia of 21st century small press publications. Rhys is certainly good on time conundrums and this story is no exception. The ‘no new taxis’ joke, however, made me cringe.
The Psychoanalyst
This is a brilliant flash fiction; it is another that deals with Time issues, a Socratic dialogue with a difference, dealing with an eschatology based on Zeno’s Paradox. Its title should have been changed retroactively by the story’s main conceit but the conceit could never reach that far back, although it’s still heading in that direction.
The Blanket Ban
“…but I loosened my duelling dagger in its sheath. A familiar face appeared: it belonged to you, the reader.”
A wide-rangingly Rhysian auto-extrapolation upon using one thing to obviate the same thing. Including, as I read it, hot coffee to obviate global warming. (It would have been too late to abide by this story’s last sentence – “Read this story in the morning for maximum effect.” – if I had not already abided by it.)
This one is another of my personal favourites. 🙂
Kharms Before The Storm
“(A story in the style of Daniil Kharms.)”
An educational footnote about Kharms ends this delightful tale of the sort of mischievous verbal trick I regularly play upon any relatives who visit me. None have yet thrown me out of the window, though.
Keep Kharms and be an Absurdist
“(Another story in the style of Daniil Kharms.)”
Wringing the changes… full of moebius section logic chopping, as two tetchy individuals ricochet into an accidental pact with death.
Doom Laden Haven
“A risotto of death.”
A compelling vision of the disasters expected to destroy the earth destroying each other first. Then there is a very weak joke at the end of this story that destroys an otherwise brilliant story.
The Metaphorical Marriage
This one is brilliant ALL THROUGH. Possibly my favourite so far. It seems to me to be the essence of what surrealism is meant to be. And a memorable first sentence to end all first sentences: “She was as open as turquoise, as smug as a crouton, as whipped as a hat, as judicious as bronze, as broken as an indoor wasp.”
The Casual Comment
“Did I crease you up?” casually asked the flash fiction.
“No, but I laughed out loud at your ending,” I replied.
Somewhere in ebookland, a crumpled smartphone frowned.
Flash in the Pantheon
This eponymous umbrella of a title is an onwardly urgent flash of a fiction that would have been ideal for my recent publication of an anthology of classical music horror stories – and ends with an outrageously great punch-line flourish of the maestro’s literary baton.
I see I am now halfway through the book by the number of pages if not yet by the number of flash fictions.
Last night I wrote this about RH’s ‘The Rook and the Jackdaw’ in my real-tale review of his Rhysop’s Fables. Serendipitously, I read the next flash fiction this morning, the one entitled The Moon and the Well. Exquisite and definitely my favourite so far.
When I started what turned out to be my dreamcatcher real-time reviews in 2008, I had no idea that they would serve me as well as I hope they serve the authors and readers of the books that I trawl for dreams and haunting memories. And, instead of novels and stories slipping in and out of my ageing mind as they used to do (however good they were), they are now caught in some net forever, I feel. I know ‘forever’ is a long time, but this flash fiction read this morning makes me feel somehow that ‘forever’ is at last attainable.
Christmas Overtime
“You have lost the chance to eat, drink and make Mary.”
Or did Mary make you? This is a wonderful bah humbug rhapsody against Christmas and its delusions, like (as I see it) undeluding writers about their legacies… But, beyond that, a seriously memorable flash fiction about an empty Christmas stocking.
The Googol Seasons
“What’s going on? This isn’t supposed to happen!”
Those in the know will be sure to know that this one is close to my heart, but it seems to have changed its title.
A googol is a higher number than a trillion, that’s why. 🙂
Very true. 🙂
But it loses the wordplay with ‘trilling’?
Funny Bone
“…Fiona went on holiday and got extremely drunk in the capital city of France.”
An amusing enough flash fiction, but it doesn’t work brilliantly well because of the perceived pre-planning or contrivance of naming the capital city of France ‘the capital city of France’ until naming it properly in the end punch-line. Or because the reader thought the capital city of France was Rome.
The Knees
A great horror story. With a great last line. Plain and simple. Needs to be read.
N+ Prime
“If I can’t have Jew, I won’t have tongue.”
This is a methodical means for poetic outcome. It’s brilliant. Read it. A story of a logical step-by-step irony already embedded in destiny, with randomness fighting back. A bit like the Toynbeean ‘challenge and response’ embedded in the latest Ukraine situation.
Jean Lescure of the OuLiPo movement invented the “N+7” technique and I note that there’s a generator on the internet that does the work for you…
http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/
Thanks, Rhys. And after that audit trail’s random-certain oxymoron, we now reach The Snail Path — certainly one of your greatest works, in my humble opinion. At once futile, poignant, frightening even…but hopeful, too, with another strange paradoxidant that feeds the mulch of much of your fiction growth, and when the irony or fantasy is peeled away one can discover the pithy or often perversely uplifting meaning.
This story was inspired by the fact that I once climbed inside a large wicker laundry basket and used pipe cleaners for antennae.
A snail with a Dalek inside it?
The Business Diary of a Madman
Read and reviewed by another madman. Does anyone agree with me this is a story about cannibalism? Prove me sane.
The Locksmith
“Animals came to Obo the Bonobo for a specific reason; and everybody knew it.”
This is a substantial flash fiction, if it is possible to have such a thing! Well, if there is, this is it. For me, it is about the labelling interaction between human and animals, and the philosophical theme will continue to resonate the more you think about what is essentially a fable, extrapolating upon the anthropomorphisms in Rhysop’s Fables that I am concurrently reviewing here. Also, serendipitously, yesterday, there was this interaction included in a discussion forum under the topic ‘Animals’:-
Someone said: “Therefore, to call people animals should not be an insult. This is what I would like to contend.”
I replied: “However, those animals anthropomorphised by people’s fables and cartoons may consider it to be an insult to be called people.”
On The Deck
“If only I could find a man strong enough to capture me and then let me go again, I would be happy. To be enticed and then rejected out of love…”
This wonderful fiction upon a destination-less cruise liner I rejected for any of its perceived authorially intended irony although I normally love ironic fantasy. But I enjoy poetic fiction as serious literature, too, and I found myself capturing this piece for its sheer literary joy as a modern story without any irony at all. And it worked.
A Rather Depressed Young Man
A thought-provoking ghost story taking place in the Middle England of Amateur Dramatics, vicars, poodles, cribbage etc., with a twist ending, or rather with a final tuck and backward pike. If this were a fable, though, I wondered at its moral? Especially in the context of this author’s well known view that depressed young men tend to read Lovecraft and healthy young men go mountain climbing.
The Figure of Speech
“She had a great figure of speech.
I metaphor a drink and tried to coax a simile.
She said, ‘I never cheat when I play on words.'”
And to pre-empt the end I kissed her ellipsis.
Eyelashes in my Nepenthe
“We’ve all got to go back home some time.”
This is now definitely my favourite flash fiction in this book so far. It is an exquisite prose poem, with syncopations of meaning that probably exceeds any controlled prose jamming by any other living writer, in my estimation. It is about controlled regret, still trying wildly to escape that authorial control. Everyone should read it and the author should re-read it and dwell on his own cavortings of autonomous words and ride them like a literary rodeo.
Postmodern Picnic
A rather hit and miss riff on the theme of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, with one line that was memorable: “And they both grew old in the search and the food they didn’t have went rotten and inedible.” The best line, however, wasn’t there at all so rather went to waste.
Quiet Flows the Don Juan
This demonstrates a child-like insistence – common to much of this author’s work I’ve read – on getting to the bottom of things, in detail (cf the story I have just read and reviewed by Alasdair Gray entitled ‘Time Travel’ where there is a similar logical ‘insistence’ to get to the bottom of how a piece of chewing gum managed to lodge itself between the toes of a bed-ridden old man) but here the Rhys Hughes extrapolation is upon the song ‘Cry Me A River’ and thus upon the nature of rivers and who could possibly cry them – reaching a rarefied and oblique child-like vision that flows from such an insistence, a vision that is beyond the ability of most grown-ups to grasp.
Pontoon Bridge
…across the same River Juan. A play on the rules of the Pontoon card game and featuring the VW Beetle from ‘Postmodern Picnic’, representing a riparian current between separate fictions.
The City That Was Itself
“When a man is lost in Itselfia he is always in his desired place,…”
This may not objectively be the greatest flash fiction in this book, but it is the most important and I find it hard to imagine any I have yet to read exceeding it on that basis. Never leave Itselfia, Rhys, in the way that the story’s protagonist does. It will come good in the end.
The Culture Shock
‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann (my favourite novel of all time) as a culture within a seedbed of pulmonary disease? Not exactly. But this is a hilarious envisioning of literature as a clogged and clotted dubiety with institutions set up in a 1984 fashion to safeguard such infections spreading. Cheered me up this morning.
Invisible Letters
I was led to believe that every ‘flash fiction’ in this book was no longer than 999 words. I have not counted the words in this story, but I would be very surprised if it wasn’t longer than 999 words.
Form and content are equally important to Rhys Hughes fiction as well as its literal meaning often outdoing any figurative meaning as I noted here yesterday. Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
This story is exactly 999 words long. 🙂
Making a Request
Hilarious vision of the whole of Wales (or the whale of Wholes – my conceit, not this flash fiction’s) using a giant megaphone metaphor for the whole peoples of Wales to speak to the sun through the covering cloud. Being only half-Welsh and living in England I was not asked to add my voice to this cloudy loud Welsh weather satire, despite my wearing an odd hat shaped like a coracle.
Eggs
The redolent sound of frying eggs, but more a dark threnody upon life’s implications stemming from such otherwise ordinary sounds of cooking and eating by ordinary people. A very effective horror story that all horror genre exponents should read. Much food for though crammed into the words made available from this pan of literature.
Volcano Zoo
A neat flush fiction with extinct volcanos where their cones are caged in a zoo for all to admire. Yet they are not really extinct, like the veils and piques, vales and peaks, the rugged range of crepitating cones that is Rhys Hughes. He has, until recently, kept captured some of his, for me, most powerful volcanoes ready to erupt again after 12 years of dormancy, and they have just erupted and are still erupting one by one. I spent most of yesterday experiencing and describing a newly released mind-blowing cluster of such cones. A journey now open to advice, my advice, its path from the cage’s gaping door for you to follow into the wilds of imagination: too long pent up, now gushing philosophical and visionary and absurdist lava into your brain.
In My Own Hands
Aptly I quoted this yesterday here from ‘The Herb-Garden of Earthly Delights’:
“(but if all the world’s a stage, where do the audience sit?)”
Daggers
A very clever flash fiction, but I’m not sure why. The best sort.
Did he suddenly resign himself to a possible figurative lesson (regarding his marital strife): “You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it!”?
Cosmic Bagatelle
‘Detected’ and then ‘deflected’, a story that resonated and ricocheted this morning.
A Post-Disaster Story
A second asteroid story in a row, or this one is described as a “mini-saga”, although this description ‘NOTE’, if part of the whole thing, turns it into something longer than a “mini-saga”. Another way to avoid cosmic disaster, delaying it with footnotes? As Tristram Shandy delayed his own birth (and thus his death) by a series of long digressions as well as things tantamount to footnotes.
A Pretty Face
Another 'mini-saga' (a short story in exactly 50 words with beginning, middle and end plus a title not exceeding 15 words) – this one being an imaginably gory transvestite horror story.
In Eclipseville
“…for a sweet melody might likewise be defined as a sequence of unrelated notes linked ‘only’ by a key signature.”
This is SUPERB. Really. It is the optimal Rhys Hughes flash fiction, even eclipsing the Moonville and Sunsetville flash fictions, combining, as it does, a theme and variations on the nature of shadows (as if composed by Scriabin) with a literary-imaginary exquisition that insists it’s real as well as dream-like. A fragile truce between solid and non-solid. For the hard-hearted as well as any readers with melting hearts. And please do not allow any perceived floweriness or over-enthusiasm in my review deter any hard-nosed Hemingway-lovers or Horror genre cutthroats from seeking out this genuinely indispensable work.
Owls Are a Hoot
A poignantly poetic play upon one’s belief that what one sees is what one sees and nothing can explain it other than what one sees and believes it to be. Meanwhile, the owls are not what they seem.
With this morning’s flush through the imaginarium of my mind — A Pony Tale: a flush so tiny, its ‘THE END’ is nearly as long as the whole tail itself — I reach the end of the second contents page of this book and thus now point the way to the continuation of this veritable Rapunzel of a real-time review in the comment stream –
HERE
– from tomorrow morning hopefully.