Episode 37: 'Lost Keep' by L.A. Lewis

L.A. (Leslie Allin) Lewis is, like a few of the other writers we've explored on this podcast, a largely overlooked practitioner of the weird tale, in this case with a legacy confined entirely to a handful of stories published (under the title Tales of the Grotesque) in 1934.  The work fell out of print but some of the stories would turn up in horror anthologies from time to time during the intervening years before the original collection was reprinted.

It seems that Lewis, whose best stories - The Tower of Moab, The Author's Story, and this one - touch on hallucinatory visions and madness, unfortunately struggled with his own mental health, and destroyed his unpublished works during a bout of depression.

A bleakness suffuses Lost Keep (note the oxymoronic title) with a central character who is seemingly condemned by the Fates to pay for the inherited crimes of his ancestors - from the moment he opens a (Pandora's?) box and finds a mysterious minature fortress and an equally mysterious dark lens.

It's a dark little tale which overcomes a possibly tad-too-obvious denouement by means of a back-and-forth narrative structure and an abiding sense of the strange.  Lewis's descriptions of the sea-girt Keep with its endless causeway are eerie and genuinely unsettling.

If you are intrigued by Lewis's writing you can find the republished Tales of the Grotesque as a paperback edition from Shadow Publishing.

If you'd like to read more about the author, may I suggest the following blogs:

http://desturmobed.blogspot.com/2016/01/la-lewis.html

https://themenaceofobjects.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/l-a-lewis-tales-of-the-grotesque/

Thank you

Jasper

 

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About the episode: 

"Lost Keep" by L.A. Lewis. First published in 'Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales' (Philip Alan), 1934. 

Credit where credit's due: 

Incidental music: The Old Ones by Scott Buckley (Scott Buckley – www.scottbuckley.com.au) Link: https://www.scottbuckley.com.au/library/the-old-ones/ Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Supernatural by Kevin MacLeod 

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4446-supernatural 

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license 

The Ghost Castle by Frank Schröter 

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6602-the-ghost-castle 

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license 

Sound effects: All sound effects sourced at Freesound.org 

The recording was created using Audacity and BandLab. Podcast hosted by Anchor. 

Disclaimer: 

I try and play fair with this channel, recording stories that are in the public domain or which I believe to have fallen out of copyright. If I am mistaken please contact me and I will remove the video. I am a small channel and do not make any profit from running it. My recordings are intended to pay tribute to these great and sometimes overlooked stories and authors.