(Fiction; Doubleday, 1993; repr., Anchor Books, 1994)
I promise I won’t spoil anything by revealing that at the end of Richard’s first and so far only novel, the title character, Fishboy, now a ghost, addresses the reader directly: “I mist inside your house,” he tells us. “I linger in your curtains. I wait until you are asleep so that I can speak to you in your dreams.” And that’s exactly what Richard’s novel accomplishes: for better or worse, you can’t escape Fishboy’s voice, the whispering lisp that fixes itself permanently in your ears with the “ease of escaping steam.”
