TRIGGERED FROM ‘THE BRAINWRIGHT’ BY DF LEWIS PUBLISHED IN THE PRESTIGIOUS ‘STAND’ MAGAZINE IN 1990.

AETHER Index: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2025/10/14/initial-overview-by-aether-of-brainwright-for-my-old-age-as-conducted-by-this-different-entity-akin-to-the-now-erstwhile-brainwright/

Many Previous Brainwrighteries: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/the-erstwhile-brainwrights-two-alphabetical-listings-of-grtrd-authors/

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These stories highlight Lewis’s signature “weirdmonger” style: short, evocative pieces with unreliable narrators, bodily horrors, and dream-logic shifts. The collection as a whole evokes moods of isolation and the uncanny, often using motifs like orchards, swings, and scars. 

Summaries of 22 Stories in A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope

D.F. Lewis’s 2013 collection from Ex Occidente Press / Zagava contains 22 surreal, often grotesque vignettes and short stories, as listed in the contents. 

1.  Dutiful to the Dead: A young woman meets “Grin” at a dance and visits his bizarre apple orchard, where trees are composed of fruit. Their flirtation spirals into horror involving consumption and skeletal feasts, exploring chance, lost innocence, and filial duty to the deceased.

2.  Born Ancient: Broome obsesses over a giant abacus in a nostalgic toy shop, encountering a surly shopkeeper and mysterious Miss Stephens. Surreal counting rituals and bodily threading evoke themes of time, ancestry, and transformation into “foundry hardware.”

3.  The Public Bar: A man in a pub’s Lounge observes a one-eyed patron in the Public Bar, leading to a beckoning and grotesque encounter. Explores class divides, sanity, and love at first sight through winks, smiles, and hidden horrors.

4.  Warming Down: During a tense dinner party with footsteps overhead and skeletal discussions, guests debate priests, pork, and mysteries. Acoustic quirks and marionette imagery delve into commitment, identity, and unresolved tensions.

5.  Angels Die the Other Way: Childhood swings in an orchard shared with Robert turn surreal in adulthood, where death reunites them—Robert as a human swing. Themes of innocence, maternal loss, and inverted mortality, with angels “dying the other way.”

6.  The Merest Tilt: A diary recounts encounters with showgirl Polly, heavy rock gigs, and erased memories. Rubbed-out entries and tilted revelations explore lost love, coincidences, and identity through clothing and redacted Sundays.

7.  Angel of the Agony: A ghost-hunter enters a haunted house seeking a missing colleague, confronting fears in a wardrobe mirror. Sleight-of-hand illusions and shattered reflections probe disbelief, poetry of place, and vampiric mirrors.

8.  Bringing the Dead to Book: A king’s jester narrates dreams of urban pursuits, oriental icons, and doubled visions. Predictability, angels, and attic escapes intertwine in fragmented memories of rivers, attics, and royal splinters.

9.  Curled up like a Black Rose: Two women discuss a comatose husband/author whose horrific stories haunt reality. Empathy shifts and surreal sea awakenings explore grief, imagination, and empathizing with the vegetative.

10.  Fontanelle Fondue: A Christmas angel tumbles from a tree, leading to surreal dreams of rafts, see-saws, and battery-farm fairies. Holiday rituals, dreams, and fondue delicacies blend innocence with eldritch horrors.

11.  Go Back to Your Books, Old Man: A man bids farewell to a girl departing on a boat from a misty shore, recalling childhood pier adventures and electronic games. Nostalgia, swings, and forgotten loves evoke lost pasts and empty sleeves.

12.  A Cross to Bear: In a cold house with back-stokers tending fires, Arthur prepares for Santa amid fireguards and crosses. Themes of worry, romance, and holiday duties unfold in flickering flames and chimney descents.

13.  The Scar Museum: A curator hunts scars in a spa town, encountering afflicted people and horrific harvests. Obsession, dogs, and skull culls explore hidden wounds, morality, and vampiric displays.

14.  A Story after Its End: Journalist Richard Wiles investigates tomb desecrations in Emoss Crack, facing grotesque villagers and Mary Tudd. Surreal undressings and graveyard vigils probe dream-reality boundaries and unreliable endings.

15.  The Weed Hatch: A space pod lookout writes to his mother about isolation, aliens, and immortality discoveries. Weed-clogged hatches and devoured companions blend sci-fi horror with maternal longing.

16.  The Double Hook: A haunted house’s small room features ghosts, double hooks, and filtered dreams. Pronoun shifts and bladder weaknesses explore possession, pronouns, and unwelcome welcomes.

17.  Diamond Rain: A hiker enters a forgotten valley with gray-clad people hunting tree-creatures. Beatles music, violence, and lost love question monstrosity and unrequited escapes.

18.  Wild Honey: A guardian hikes for wild honey, leaving ward Lucy behind. Surreal meals, assignations, and embalmed horrors intertwine guardianship, innocence, and stinging apologies.

19.  The Tallest King: In a city of palaces, the tallest king ventures into a forest toward a tower. Expeditions and roars explore isolation, madness, and forgotten forests.

20.  A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope: A family reunion at Champling revives Uncle Salisbury’s quirks and Innsmouth walks. Forks, ghosts, and beacons delve into secrets, nostalgia, and ancient hopes.

21.  Uncle Absolutely: Young Idol recalls silent loves, sea mists, and his affirmative uncle’s death. Rhythmic affirmations and cod liver explore memory, disappointment, and elemental enemies.

22.  Back Doubles: Kit quests for St. Paul’s Cathedral through surreal London, encountering grotesques and forested churches. Domes, embalmed Christs, and gaps probe obsession, urban decay, and redemptive visions.

The collection’s overarching themes include distorted memories, bodily grotesqueries, and liminal realities, often with Lovecraftian undertones. 

Extended Gestalt Summary of A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope (2013)

D.F. Lewis’s A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope stands as a crystalline artifact in his vast, labyrinthine oeuvre—a limited-edition collection of 22 vignettes and short stories, published by the esoteric Les Éditions de L’Oubli (Ex Occidente Press forerunner of Mount Abraxas) in Bucharest and, with Zagava Press, evoking the artisanal, almost alchemical quality of his later works. Clocking in at around 128 pages in its hardcover form, this book is a microcosm of Lewis’s “weirdmonger” ethos: a term he coined to describe his peddling of the uncanny, where the mundane unravels into dreamlike grotesqueries, bodily horrors, and fragmented nostalgias. As a gestalt—a holistic entity greater than its parts—the collection coalesces into a sepulchral edifice, a “dead monument” to eroded memories, inverted aspirations, and the porous boundaries between life, death, and the ethereal. It whispers of ancient hopes fossilized in surreal amber, where characters dissolve into symbols, and narratives loop like Möbius strips, refusing linear resolution. Themes of isolation, transformation, and the unreliability of perception recur, often laced with Lovecraftian undertones of cosmic indifference and eldritch intrusions, yet tempered by Lewis’s signature whimsy—apples as sentient horrors, swings as portals to inverted heavens, scars as collectible artifacts.

In the broader context of Lewis’s bibliography—spanning over 1,500 published stories since the late 1980s, as cataloged in sources like the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB)  and Fantastic Fiction —this 2013 volume represents a mature distillation of his experimental style, echoing the anonymous, gestalt-driven ethos of his earlier “Nemonymous” anthologies (2001–2010), where stories appeared without bylines to emphasize collective weirdness over individual authorship. Like Weirdmonger (2003) , a seminal collection that solidified his reputation for “zeroist” fiction (narratives that erode their own foundations), A Dead Monument trades in vignettes that feel like excised dream-fragments, akin to those in The Last Balcony (2012)  or Busy Blood (2012) , where bodily fluids, forgotten artifacts, and temporal loops symbolize existential decay. Yet it leans more ethereal, “Aetherising” (as per your framing)—elevating the grotesque to a sublime, almost poetic plane, much like the symphonic horrors in Dabbling with Diabelli (2013?)  or the apocryphal visions in The Apocryphan series . This process of Aetherisation—distilling narratives into vaporous essences of memory and unreality—mirrors Lewis’s real-time reviews (a practice he pioneered on his blog, Gestalt Real-Time Reviews), where he “hawls” (his term for holistic analysis) texts into interconnected dream-webs, as seen in collections like Agra Aska (1998)  or his contributions to Year’s Best Horroranthologies (e.g., volumes 19–22) . And the BEST NEW HORROR series.

Holistically, the book forms a gestalt of eroded monuments: each story a weathered pillar in a cathedral of the absurd, where childhood innocence curdles into adult nightmare. Recurring motifs—orchards as fleshy traps (Dutiful to the Dead, Angels Die the Other Way), scars as existential trophies (The Scar Museum), swings and see-saws as liminal gateways (Angels Die the Other Way, Fontanelle Fondue)—weave a tapestry of bodily dissolution and temporal slippage, akin to the “nemonymous” anonymity in his edited series, where identities blur like rubbed-out diary entries (The Merest Tilt). Lovecraftian hints surface in coastal horrors and eldritch pursuits (A Story after Its End, A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope), but Lewis subverts them with domestic grotesques, echoing the familial unease in The Hawler or Nemonymous Night (2011) . The collection’s dream-logic peaks in space-isolation (The Weed Hatch) and urban labyrinths (Back Doubles), factoring in Lewis’s broader cosmic indifference from works like Die Earthman Die (2005) , where humanity’s hopes fossilize amid indifferent voids.

Aetherising this alongside Lewis’s other books reveals a continuum: from the anonymous experiments of Nemonymous (2001–2002)  to the bodily symphonies in The First Book of Classical Horror Stories(2012) , A Dead Monument etherealizes his “zeroism” into a poignant elegy for lost potentials. It’s less aggressive than early horrors like The Weirdmonger’s Tales (1991)  but more refined, like the lost Stravinsky and the Dark Feast (1990) , vaporizing narratives into gestalts of forgotten hopes—much like his prolific output (over 1,200 stories, per Infinity Plus profile)  distills weird fiction into an eternal, aetheric monument. If his canon is a forest of surreal trees, this book is the ancient, whispering clearing at its heart.

Comparison: A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope (2013) vs. The Nemonymous Series (2001–2010)

D.F. Lewis’s A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope—a solo collection of 22 surreal vignettes—shares a philosophical and stylistic kinship with his earlier Nemonymous series, a groundbreaking run of 10 “megazanthuses” (a portmanteau of magazine and anthology) that he edited and published from 2001 to 2010.    Yet, as a gestalt comparison reveals, the two works diverge in form, intent, and execution: Nemonymous as a collaborative experiment in anonymity and “zeroism” (Lewis’s term for narratives that erode their own foundations), and A Dead Monument as a more introspective, author-attributed monument to personal obsessions. Aetherising both—distilling them into ethereal essences—highlights Lewis’s evolution from communal weirdness to solitary dream-webs, where forgotten hopes vaporize into cosmic indifference. Below, I break down key similarities, differences, and interconnections, factoring in Lewis’s broader oeuvre (e.g., his real-time reviews and “Nemonymous Night” novel as a coda).  

Overview of Each Work

•  Nemonymous Series: Launched in 2001 with the inaugural issue (subtitled A Journal of Parthenogenetic Fiction and Late Labelling), this was a revolutionary anthology series emphasizing “nemonymity”—stories published without bylines, with authors revealed later (often in the next issue or online).   Issues had thematic titles like Zencore! (2003), Cone Zero (2008), and Cern Zoo(2009), blending speculative fiction, horror, and the absurd. It ran for 10 volumes (one now lost), ending with Null Immortalis (2010), and embodied Lewis’s “zeroist” manifesto: stripping ego from fiction to let stories gestalt into pure, unanchored weirdness.  The series culminated in Lewis’s novel Nemonymous Night (2011), a surreal odyssey of identity and dreams, serving as a thematic bridge to his later solo works.   

•  A Dead Monument to Once Ancient Hope: This 2013 solo collection (limited to 122 copies) is a tightly woven set of 22 pieces, evoking eroded memories and grotesque transformations through vignettes like apple orchards of flesh, scar harvests, and inverted angels. Published post-Nemonymous, it helps to reflect Lewis’s shift to personal, attributed fiction, with a dreamlike, “Aetherised” quality—narratives dissolving into vaporous essences of loss and the uncanny.

Key Similarities

•  Surreal, Fragmented Style and Themes: Both embody Lewis’s “weirdmonger” aesthetic—peddling the bizarre through dream-logic, bodily horrors, and temporal loops. Nemonymous stories are often said to feature anonymous protagonists unraveling in absurd scenarios (e.g., identity-eroding hives in Nemonymous Night), mirroring A Dead Monument‘s vstories of dissolving selves (e.g., scar curators, human swings, or space-isolated lookouts). Motifs like forgotten hopes, grotesque anatomy (scars, threading beads through bodies), and eldritch intrusions (Lovecraftian coastal horrors) recur, Aetherising into gestalts of existential vapor: humanity as fleeting, fossilized dreams.   This echoes Lewis’s broader canon, like the symphonic grotesques in Dabbling with Diabelli or urban loops in The Last Balcony.

•  Anonymity and Gestalt Focus: Nemonymous’s core gimmick—late labelling—forces readers to engage with stories as pure entities, fostering a collective “gestalt” where narratives interconnect without authorial ego.  A Dead Monument subtly echoes this: unreliable narrators blur identities (e.g., pronoun shifts in “The Double Hook,” rubbed-out diaries in “The Merest Tilt”), creating a nemonymous haze where characters feel like anonymous archetypes. Both Aetherise fiction into ethereal wholes—Nemonymous as a multi-voice choir, A Dead Monument as a solo requiem—aligning with Lewis’s real-time reviews, where he “hawls” texts into interconnected dream-webs.

•  Experimental Ethos and Limited Appeal: Both are niche, artisanal projects. Nemonymous’s small-press runs (e.g., 300–500 copies per issue) and thematic constraints parallel A Dead Monument‘s 122-copy limitation, appealing to weird fiction connoisseurs.  They factor into Lewis’s “zeroist” legacy: eroding boundaries between author, story, and reader, as in his edited The First Book of Classical Horror Stories (2012).

Key Differences

•  Form and Authorship: Nemonymous is multi-author, collaborative—Lewis as editor curating anonymous tales from diverse voices, emphasizing communal weirdness.  A Dead Monument is purely Lewis: introspective vignettes unified by his voice, shifting from Nemonymous’s egalitarian “late labelling” to attributed authorship. This marks Lewis’s post-2010 pivot to solo collections (Busy Blood, Weirdtongue), where personal obsessions (e.g., childhood nostalgias) dominate over collective experiments.

•  Tone and Scope: Nemonymous often veers playful-absurd (e.g., zero-themed puns in Cone Zero), blending humor with horror in broader speculative scopes.  A Dead Monument is elegiac, sepulchral—focusing on decayed hopes and grotesque intimacies (e.g., fontanelle fondue, scar museums), with a narrower, vignette-driven scope evoking fossilized memories. Aetherised, Nemonymous vaporizes egos into collective ether; A Dead Monument distills solitary vapors of loss, closer to the meditative horrors in The Apocryphan.

•  Evolution in Lewis’s Oeuvre: Nemonymous ended an era of anonymity experiments, birthing Lewis’s real-time reviewing (2008 onward), where he gestalts others’ works.  A Dead Monument, post-series, Aetherises this into self-reflection, bridging to later books like The Big-Headed People (2017), where bodily motifs persist but hopes erode further.

In gestalt terms, Nemonymous is a choral symphony of nameless voices; A Dead Monument a solo dirge to ancient echoes. Aetherising them reveals Lewis’s arc: from communal dissolution to personal vapor, where fiction becomes an eternal, haunting mist.

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INDEX of these numbered pages: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/05/15/chosen-for-ai-facebook-groups-index/

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