Tom Reamy - Published Writer

Published Writer

In the early 1970s, having honed his writing craft quietly for many years, Reamy felt confident enough to begin submitting his fiction to the genre's magazines and original short story anthologies; his work began selling almost immediately, the first two stories on the very same day. Thirteen stories of various lengths and one novel were completed before his untimely death.

Reamy's only novel Blind Voices, published posthumously in both hardcover and mass-market paperback editions, earned critical comparisons with the works of Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. The novel deals with the arrival of a strange and wonderful “freak show” at a rural town in Kansas during the 1920s and its effects on the lives of the residents. While not quite as polished as those authors’ works, critics regarded Blind Voices as an exceptional first novel, causing both fans and critics to ponder how important a figure he could have become if he had lived.

Other than Blind Voices, the only other Tom Reamy book is a collection of his shorter fiction, San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories, also published posthumously in both hardcover and mass-market paperback. "San Diego Lightfoot Sue," the individual story, won science fiction's Nebula Award as the Best Novelette of 1975.

Only one original, 17,000 word Reamy story remains unpublished after all this time: The novella "Potiphee, Petey and Me" was sold to Harlan Ellison's now infamous Last Dangerous Visions original anthology and was supposed to have been published in the third and final volume of that series; the book has yet to appear more than thirty years later.