Fishboy

Rating:
Summary: Fishboy's a ghost you can bond over!
Review: Fishboy became part of our multi-coastal family in ways we could not of imagined! The story of Fishboy worms into your brain right from the beginning, and each chapter stays with you, like the taste of the ship cooks' soup! We love Fishboy and his shipmates;even the "weeping man who says ----". I challenge readers to see how long they can go before they peek at this story a second time.

Rating:
Summary: Imagery and mythical synthesis in "Fishboy"
Review: Mark Richard's novel "Fishboy" is a remarkable blend of imagery and a blatant disregard for any kind of cohesion regarding the mythology from which he draws his inspiration. Richard's dark fantasy is complimented by his intense, albeit rather hallucinagenic, style of writing, the result of which is a story examining the grim shadow-world rarely seen beyond our own. The main characters of "Fishboy" are all self-described freaks, and yet, despite some of their bizarre physiological conditions, they are not unframiliar to the world of the reader. Somehow we manage to relate to the world of the Richard's freaks better than to our own more mundane reality. "Fishboy" is driven by a surreal stream of consciousness which may prove awkward for some readers, but the tremendous success of its synthesis of mythical archetypes with our own world makes it well worth the effort

Rating:
Summary: "Stir the soup -- don't let it burn"
Review: The above advice is given to our humble narrator, Fishboy, from the mouth of a 'rumored cook' on board a ship at sea. Fishboy has seen the cook's predecessor cleaved in two with an axe by a sailor who was angry about the food he and his shipmates had been served. Fishboy decides that he most likely doesn't want to become a cook.

Author Mark Richard has definitely stirred the literary soup in FISHBOY, his debut novel. There's a quote on the back cover from a review in ESQUIRE: "An eloquent fever dream, a tale told headlong in the language of incantation" -- and that 'fever dream' description fits this work to a 't'.

As I read my way through this ghost story, a fable replete with inner fables, I felt like I had been dunked into a boiling pot of Herman Melville and William S. Burroughs, illustrated by S. Clay Wilson (those of you who remember his 'perverted pirates' underground comix of the 60s will cringe at this reference), with the film directed by David Lynch. Richard's story bubbles and seethes -- he evidently relishes giving the reader the feeling of being unstuck in both time and place, for there are characters and images in this novel that are plucked from sundry eras and locations, stirred up into an intelligent, interesting, albeit not always appetizing stew. This is a world turned topsy-turvy, reflecting 'reality' like a cracked mirror.

Richard's metaphors are sometimes staggeringly beautiful and captivating -- the sea turned to shorebound landscape with mountains of waves, the land turned to ocean by the rolling tide of subterranean upheavals. Consider this short sample from p.163: 'A loose timber from the sun's sunken wreckage floated up and was dawn on the water. In its cool red light you could see how the waters around us were disturbed from beneath. Globes of old air rose to the surface and shattered, spritzing blooms of kicked-up mud. Mobs of waves rushed crowded swells, slapping faces and knocking caps off to the wind.' Whew.

The narrator of the story -- we know him only as Fishboy -- starts his tale by telling us (from p.1): 'I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy who fled to sea, a boy with a whistling lisp and the silken-tipped fingers of another class. A boy with put-away memories of bedclothes bound tight about the head, knocked by a hammering fist; the smell of cigar and show leather and the weighted burlap bag, thrown from a car into a side-road swamp.' The odyssey he undertakes is a fantastic, circular one -- and he views it with an extremely limited perspective, realting the events that occur with both sheltered naivitee and blinding insight.

The novel is sub-titled 'a ghost story' -- and that it is, although it is unlike any ghost story you are likely to have come across. Richard has imbued this work with a 'graspable' surreality -- and I'm not sure if it's the reader or the story who is doing the grasping. This is an unusual, highly unsettling read.

Rating:
Summary: "Stir the soup -- don't let it burn"
Review: The above advice is given to our humble narrator, Fishboy, from the mouth of a 'rumored cook' on board a ship at sea. Fishboy has seen the cook's predecessor cleaved in two with an axe by a sailor who was angry about the food he and his shipmates had been served. Fishboy decides that he most likely doesn't want to become a cook.

Author Mark Richard has definitely stirred the literary soup in FISHBOY, his debut novel. There's a quote on the back cover from a review in ESQUIRE: "An eloquent fever dream, a tale told headlong in the language of incantation" -- and that 'fever dream' description fits this work to a 't'.

As I read my way through this ghost story, a fable replete with inner fables, I felt like I had been dunked into a boiling pot of Herman Melville and William S. Burroughs, illustrated by S. Clay Wilson (those of you who remember his 'perverted pirates' underground comix of the 60s will cringe at this reference), with the film directed by David Lynch. Richard's story bubbles and seethes -- he evidently relishes giving the reader the feeling of being unstuck in both time and place, for there are characters and images in this novel that are plucked from sundry eras and locations, stirred up into an intelligent, interesting, albeit not always appetizing stew. This is a world turned topsy-turvy, reflecting 'reality' like a cracked mirror.

Richard's metaphors are sometimes staggeringly beautiful and captivating -- the sea turned to shorebound landscape with mountains of waves, the land turned to ocean by the rolling tide of subterranean upheavals. Consider this short sample from p.163: 'A loose timber from the sun's sunken wreckage floated up and was dawn on the water. In its cool red light you could see how the waters around us were disturbed from beneath. Globes of old air rose to the surface and shattered, spritzing blooms of kicked-up mud. Mobs of waves rushed crowded swells, slapping faces and knocking caps off to the wind.' Whew.

The narrator of the story -- we know him only as Fishboy -- starts his tale by telling us (from p.1): 'I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy who fled to sea, a boy with a whistling lisp and the silken-tipped fingers of another class. A boy with put-away memories of bedclothes bound tight about the head, knocked by a hammering fist; the smell of cigar and show leather and the weighted burlap bag, thrown from a car into a side-road swamp.' The odyssey he undertakes is a fantastic, circular one -- and he views it with an extremely limited perspective, realting the events that occur with both sheltered naivitee and blinding insight.

The novel is sub-titled 'a ghost story' -- and that it is, although it is unlike any ghost story you are likely to have come across. Richard has imbued this work with a 'graspable' surreality -- and I'm not sure if it's the reader or the story who is doing the grasping. This is an unusual, highly unsettling read.

Rating:
Summary: Surreal tail of a dead boy on the high seas of truth.
Review: This book carried me into a merky afterworld that I normally would have been afraid to go- but was compelled to travel with Fishboy as his invisble witness. Its hypnotic pros drew me into the novel as the journey of a soul is never an easy one - but incredibley rewarding. Richard's voice is similar to Angela Carter and Mikial Bulgakov but with a smokey southern drawl. This book reads like a beautiful and terrible painting. If you enjoy well crafted pros and are unhibited about exploring the darker psychological side of human nature, I highly recommend Fishboy.

Rating:
Summary: If you like Neil Gaiman, if you liked Riddley Walker ...
Review: This book catches you from the first sentence/ paragraph and doesn't let go. All rules are off in this book from grammar to linear plot. This is not at all irritating. It's refreshing that Richard assumes that the reader is clever enough to keep up. This is easily one of the best books I've read in years. It has been 3-4 years since I last read it, but I still have lucid memories of passages. Too bad Richard doesn't publish more.

Rating:
Summary: A trip worth taking
Review: This book serves as a parable and fable. It is a strange world which Fishboy lives in, and the beautiful way the book is written will no doubt lead to strange dreams, as it did with me.

Rating:
Summary: Fishboy: A Ghost's Story
Review: This book was recomended to me by a friend.
It made such an impression on me that when I recall chapters from the book it's as if I'm remembering an old familiar dream in washed out cepiatone colors.
To me, this book reads like David Lynch's film Eraserhead.
Dark, beautiful, ugliness!
Brilliant!

Rating:
Summary: Laborious prose for a laborious read
Review: Two stars may not be a fair rating of this book. I myself couldn't get beyond the first few pages. The author's first concern seemed to be to flaunt his showy "poetic" prose style in sentence after sentence like this one: "I waited for the purple bus to travel through these places edging the round cratered lake where something large from the sky struck long ago, places where the blacktop road sinks through soft-bottomed bogs and erupts flat and dry farther on, a serpentine plumbing of the earth's thin surface, the purple bus leaning on the quicksand curves, slipped tires spinning, the exhaust pipes gurgling, the white-eyed driver mostly blind and dreaming them along the road he drove, steering the bus to where I always slept in wait." Phew. Purple indeed. If this is the kind of writing that turns you on, you'll find plenty of it here.

Rating:
Summary: Fishboy
Review: Whoa! Like a cross between William Burroughs' "The Western Lands" and Amos Tutuola's "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts." Surely Mark Richard's "Fishboy" is on that level of mastery.
It took me about two months of casual reading to get through this short (227 pages) book but it was worth it. Getting lost in this book is part of the journey, as you'll soon discover. Eloquent chaos and heart wrenching beauty. But not for linear readers!