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The first time I encountered the Gruesome Guestroom was during my geeky, nerdy project in collecting Mansions Without Roofs. Not that I ever was exactly a nerd, nor a geek, not even an anorak. I think many - especially my parents - considered me an eccentric collector of things, something...

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The parlour was so sticky, its wallpaper seemed to be sliding off, even as I watched. But for what reason the woman had put me in the parlour I did not even question—since I had not seen the rest of the mansion. She had given the impression of being in charge — not as an owner, more as...

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Sleep had long been serialised as quagmires of broken sweat and lucid dreams. The opposite of spit is swallow. There’s an animal in the room that’s gnawing the legs of the bed. I woke with a start — with those two fleeting images: all that remained of my dream. Indeed, I usually...

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A separate story, but connected to the story here: https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=14213 The ghost hunter’s next assignment of a haunted mystery was one he thought he had once cracked earlier, as he already had a title for it. Déjà vu was not a luxury he would countenance, so...

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Following ‘Mansions Without Roofs’ here: https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=14207 The figure entered the hallway with a pure white head - the term ‘head’ including the whole face where the hair, mouth, nose and ears should have been, but on one side was a single large...

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The ghost hunter first visited this ancient set of mansions in the early part of the 1950s. Usually, one envisages a haunted mansion to be a solitary large building of some stateliness in the countryside, surrounded by woods and hills. Here, though, in the quieter quarters of a city centre were...

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SLEEP’S LOST LABOUR (revised version of a work first published in 2016) It is difficult to set the tone. I need to be mysterious, difficult even, yet my words, today, come out simpler than I want them to be. I need to bring old gods from the darker side into this relatively bright...

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There are so many dreams for us to dream, before one can hope to compile the one and only dream. Any person’s dreams are merely patchwork dreams towards such an aim of universal dream, a potential shared dream, a collaborative dream, a collusive dream, indeed a co-vivid dream woven from...

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He then said, Life’s a bitch! I had crept into his house - a large, unglamorous unsightly pile near the motorway - hoping that the sound of the endless traffic outside would conceal my arrival. He must have sensed I was present, however, because, although he said these words seemingly...

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https://dflewisreviews.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/a497b907-6f75-4638-a971-d2f20e0718f1.png Ken Tucky did not know whether he was Christened to complete the name of an American state, but being British with no family connection there, it was to be doubted. The Tucky family either...

DF Lewis

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Published 'AKLO' 1992

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When, today, the word ‘young’ met the word ‘old’, I knew their letters would dodge and weave, or play catch with each other whereby a mere touch meant those two letters thereafter were stuck together whoever was the one who touched first, and their order controlled by some strange hidden...

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Cake I’ve never been able to make cake. My father, however, was a dab hand at it. He always called it Welsh cake, with him being Welsh, I guess. He has passed on now to where cakes welcome new tenants onto Heaven’s hillside, cakes forever made, forever eaten, a constant cake, a cake cake,...

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Deirdre often had problems with her elbows, not both at once, but each separately, as if they took it in turns to irritate her. Not pain like arthritis but more a sense they were alive, separate thinking beings colluding to frustrate anything she wanted to do. Their thoughts hurt...

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A perpetual autumn before the red alert of winter, a forever amber of status quo that we hope will continue equally unchanging — yet somehow we retain a hope derived from a past awareness that winter is a temporary hibernation not a death at all, so why do some of us, at a certain age, pray...

DF Lewis

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When I awoke, my customary surroundings were slightly – even imperceptibly – changed from what I remembered them to be. Not so much an alternate world or a parallel dream disguised as awaking or an onset of mild mental illness on my part (but who can be certain of that!) but rather something...

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DOWRY I thought they said the title was to be LOWRY. L. S. Lowry. So that’s how I started these words off. All those matchstick people in…where? Up in north England somewhere, I guess. In the days when toilets were perhaps grimmer, grimier, less efficient, perhaps not even water...

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FONDUE The atlas lay open in front of me as I riffled through its pages, peering at the strange shapes of the land masses as created by Nature, and they were staring back at me with wiggly edges to their whites, blues, browns and veins of red in their eyes. Yet there was very little green....

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GIRL POWER When I met Abel Martin, I had no idea whom or exactly what I was meeting! He was difficult to describe, even then, so I won’t even attempt to do so now. A bit of a cop out, I guess. Suffice to say, I found him off-putting and I wondered why this meeting had been set up for...

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The wave was huge, a tsunami of humani, each with its hand raised and wavering in unison. They told me to watch out for any of the many wavering out of tune, so that each could then be picked out, taken out and dealt with. Kissing as the art of marking victims. That was my job. One of...