The Flesh Remembers, by Richard Wright. Review by Andrew Monge

I first stumbled upon Richard Wright’s fiction after the release of his novel entitled CUCKOO. After tearing through that book and loving it, I started tracking down more of his work. Unfortunately, there became less and less available, and eventually I stopped finding anything by Richard altogether.

Last year I heard that Richard had been publishing again for awhile, so I tracked down a copy of THE FLESH REMEMBERS to see if I could recapture some of that old magic. What I found was a bit of a mixed bag…

First, the bad. The book is self-published via Lulu (more on the reasoning later). As such, it has many of the pitfalls you would come to expect – a poorly laid out book with plenty of misspellings, missing words, capitalization/punctuation problems, etc. If you want a cleanly laid-out book, you won’t find it here.

But how was the story itself? I enjoyed it for what it was – a fun, pulpy read. It’s a hard book to describe because it throws together a number of genres. Mix in some conspiracy theories, add a dash of sci-fi and a hint of horror, and you’ve got THE FLESH REMEMBERS. Think F. Paul Wilson’s CONSPIRACIES minus Repairman Jack….

….and adding in Dexter Lomax, a “journalist” from The International Inquirer. Dexter makes his living selling stories about all of the old standbys – Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, and The Abominable Snowman, to name a few. When he gets word about mysterious craters appearing in England, he jumps at the chance to peddle yet another made-up story to his faithful readers. As he’s looking at one of the craters, a frail man approaches him and presses a videocassette into his hand, repeating “The flesh remembers” over and over before throwing himself off a bridge to his death. This sets off a series of events that throw Dexter into one unbelievable situation after another. The ending leaves some questions to be answered in future installments of what is being called The Lomax Chroinicles. While THE FLESH REMEMBERS wasn’t up to par with the other stuff I’ve read by Richard, I still had a good time with the book and think it’s worth a try.

The book closes with an Afterword from Richard, in which he states that he self-published the book because it had previously been available for free on his website and publishers were hesitant to reprint it; and a short story entitled “The Loch”, in which Dexter Lomax makes his first appearance. I found “The Loch” to be the better of the two stories and would definitely recommend checking it out.

The trade paperback is available at Lulu and Amazon for $10.99. Or, if you’d like to read the story free of charge and see if Richard’s writing is for you, it is available as a PDF on his website.

THE FLESH REMEMBERS – 6 out of 10

“The Loch” – 8 out of 10