The White Road reprint!

[Nemonymous]

CARVEN OF ONYX

“They formed a kind of gateway, slots in the wall of Hell, and through them something had begun to seep.”

Something obseen seeping, with flesh and “trodden slush” interwoven. And a phallus uprearing from a nest of Christ. Maidenly yearnings unleashed? A sense something is seeping through the text of this story, something so insidious, I can only condone my reading it at all as a means to know my enemy, so that I can defend myself, as the Mediaeval abbot who takes confessions in the nearby nunnery also purports to do in this very worrying work, but is he also too near his enemy to count? The darkly rich language in extremis, the oblong or other shaped stones of some strange masonry that will haunt me following this reading experiences, stones as stains. And far more biblio-porous than I can hint here. The thread of attention broken by the creaking of a joist, an act of prayer, obedientaries. This story has remained hidden in plain sight, till now? The title is innocent enough. And why send that young man to the oak at the end? The dangerous journeys between abbey and nunnery like a painting I once saw – or was it a dream from an “elementarie” I once had?

“After all, what had he done? They had all come to him by not doing what the Prioress had asked him to do; quite literally by not doing anything.”

[Nemonymous]

CHINA ROSE by Ron Weighell

“For a while I did my best to keep track of this pendulum of opinion as it swung its crazy way between adulation and scorn, but, growing sick and dizzy with it all,…”

Surely a wayward supernatural classic of literature. I, surely, too, feel myself imbued with evil by this prose version of Swinburne baroqueness, despite the japes of decadence in those times, but japes leading to rites as a cure of one of the bright young girls with a “leaky aura”. You will not credit the ambiance of lushly wordy automatic-writing here but it is writing as if controlled by some dark force outside of its author’s knowledge, or otherwise he would not have let himself write this material. But it makes for a thrilling read, the following of devious decoy to Highgate cemetery and its Egyptian tombs. Only to find oneself inside the house when you hear of yourself ringing the bell to be then taken into that earlier déjà vu’s sodden night to the cemetery again, thus duped away from the fiendish rites upon a naked woman who is the friend you hoped to help. I want to be back at the original party at the start of this text, subsuming myself in drugs and other arrogant high-living of cognac and flappers made dead-faced, escaping FROM (or is it TO?) London’s Mysterious Kôr or Kû….