NO-MAN AND OTHER TALES by TONY RICHARDS
(Pendragon Press paperback, 340pp, £9.99)

This collection of four novellas will be reviewed in Black Static #3, due out later this month, but one of the novellas, Postcards From Terri, was previously reviewed in The Third Alternative #39 back in 2004, when it appeared as a hardback from Sarob Press. Rather than repeat myself, I’ve decided to post the original review of that novella on the website

Terri was the great unrequited love of Steve’s student days, the woman who always saw him as just a mate. She went off to travel the world, to find fame and fortune, while he settled down with the more reliable Steph. Every so often over the years postcards would arrive from Terri, sent from exotic locations and detailing fabulous adventures, opening up to Steve vistas of which he can only dream while his own life turns to ash. His job becomes simply a chore and Steph leaves him for another man, but then Terri is killed in an RTA, and in the wake of her passing Steve starts to dream of her obsessively, vivid dreams in which he visits all the places shown in those postcards and shares her adventures, only each morning he finds the relevant postcard blank, as proof that something remarkable and threatening has entered his life.

This novella is at heart a ghost story with a touch of voodoo; the familiar tale of spectral possession, here elevated above the ordinary by the unique method in which it is enacted and the depth of characterisation Richards brings to his people. Steve is in many ways the archetypal loser in life, continually bemoaning the one that got away and dreaming of the better life that slipped through his fingers, sacrificing what is for the sake of what might have been. At bottom he is haunted by his own dissatisfaction, and it is this that leaves him vulnerable to something far more terrible. For Terri too the past is a reproach; she had the lifestyle for which Steve yearns and yet it never truly made her happy, so that she ends in drugs and desperation. Part of Richards’ achievement here lies in making this femme fatale such a monster and yet also showing us why Steve falls under her spell (and it’s not just a matter of physical attraction). This is unashamedly a tale of the supernatural, one with a gradually mounting sense of menace and a carefully laid out plot line, but the strength of the story lies in the reality of the people, the motives and urges that drive them on to act as they do.

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Tags: Black Static • Book Reviews • No Man and Other Tales • novellas • Peter Tennant • Tony Richards