Books like Fishboy: A Ghost's Story

Wow. What a great ending, one you wouldn't think could be pulled off in first-person narration. Surely this trick has been done before, but I've never seen it.Anyway, this is a pleasingly strange tale of an abandoned boy who lives in a swamp and joins the misfit crew of an enigmatic fishing boat. At first it is only the language of the narration that is grotesque and phantasmal, but eventually the events themselves become so. This is not a fantasy novel, but nor do I readily want to call it 'magical realism'. It's its own thing, I guess (as most works labelled 'magical realism' are anyway). The book keeps you off balance in a good way. The freakish cast and almost comedic gore puts me in mind of one of Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee novels, such as Child of God. The 'Southern Gothic' prose style (another lazy and potentially misleading label) is perhaps somewhere between McCarthy and Toni Morrison, but not as truly great as either. It has its enthralling passages, but sometimes the ghostly quality can leave the reader a little too abstracted. A blurb from the back cover notes that Richard 'has folded a host of exquisitely rendered tales into a stunning novel'. As Fishboy's own narrative travels sequentially, the back-stories of the many other characters are 'folded' into it and most of them are weird and disturbing, both gross and engrossing. My favourites were the two poignantly tragic childhood reminiscences of Mr. Watt, the inside-out man (one of the craziest 'deformities' I've ever heard dreamt up, sickening but fascinating).There are any number of wonders and horrors rendered well right to the very end. The story may drag just a little at times (just as in the novel the fishing boat's giant net drags out behind it, occasionally catching an object that threatens to pull it backward). But it has a very rewarding conclusion. This is a great first novel (published 1993) and I wish the author would write more novels to bring his craft to its full flowering. Regardless, I'm looking forward to reading his two collections of short fiction and his memoir House of Prayer No. 2 (2011). As an envoy to this little review, here's a passage from early in the novel:‎'Across the creek the rising water shifted a run-aground wreck and bats by the thousands spun up through the smokestacks like the black fur of exhaust blown from boilers stoked by ghosts. The smudge of bats was split here and there by gulls and terns making whitecaps of flight to drier roosts, and from beyond the long dunes blew in a wet mist that my firelight lit like tiers of talcum sunsets.'