Yesterfang

by D F Lewis

94 pages

Yesterfang is a compact yet rich and haunting novella positioned between fantasy/dream and memory/reality. As with a lot of D F Lewis’s writing, it distils a very familiar British life and British experiences through a surreal lens, in this case resulting in one of his more fantastical stories – a tale that reaches deep into places and worlds of the imagination. Presented in the form of a journey – a life journey – this juxtaposition creates an exhilarating sense of psychological meaning and nostalgia that feels as close as, yet as deeply elusive as, a dream. Ambiguous, enigmatic, yet also down to earth and pragmatic, this book creates a unique and unforgettable atmosphere that lingers in the mind. Or maybe lingers in some place just below the mundane world around you.

Yesterfang is available here for the first time as a stand-alone novella.

An archaeological story, looking back through the remembered lifetime of the author himself. Down through the fifties, sixties and seventies, primarily, utilising the tools of fiction and the internet to do so. This is not a rose-tinted trip down memory lane, but a yellow-ish, sepia-toned, journey through a post-Apocalyptic, post-World War Two, British landscape. The main protagonist is born at the start and we follow him as he grows up and travels around England. A coming (and going) of age tale, vaguely reminiscent of David Copperfield or Pip or Oliver Twist. But this is an England surrounded by ice (a Cold War) and one with every city or town named after a writer, like London, Lovecraft, Lewis, Proust, Poe, Swift, Rider Haggard.These cities are all different in character, but do not directly represent the ideas of the writer they are named after. Rather, they reflect gestalt reactions to the writer, both positive and negative. So, this fractured, splintered, re-imagined, autobiography of D.F. Lewis tells us a lot; whilst telling us the past is slippery and untrustworthy, constantly mutating in our minds. - Arthur Straker   So I was expecting something similar with 'Yesterfang'. But I didn't get it. What I got (or have started to get) is something completely different. The tone is much darker, more 'Des Des', if you see what I mean. So a return to the ultra-dense Des? No, not exactly. It's sort of halfway between the open prose of 'The Apocryphan' and the dense closed prose of Des' short stories... The main thing being that it works. It works marvellously. The reason it works so well is probably (or undoubtedly) because it's a story. There's a story here; and it's a damn good one. I am reminded somehow of Harlan Ellison, that story he wrote with the shuffling Victorian figure scampering through the chrome city of the future; not because the imagery of this novella is remotely the same but because the contrast is: the contrast between the horror core and science-fiction setting of 'Yesterfang'. Yes, it's science-fiction, absolutely! - Rhys Hughes