Safe Return Doubtful

Carribean Literature – Jamaica – Published 2025

Most of the best of these stories were published earlier in magazines and journals and stood alone. I expect that Spencer was aware of a loose connection between them, some characters and places recur, and subsequently decided (or his publisher did) to publish them as a novel told in stories by writing an almost novella length first chapter.

Spencer is Jamaican, a graduate of the University of the West Indies in Kingston, and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Hull. To complicate matters further, he is now based in Tokyo. I start with this introduction to him, as I think he is a writer with great potential whose next piece of work is greatly anticipated.

Some of these stories are exceptional, notably the two that follow the ‘introductory’ chapter; Bunka Bat and Sour Orange and Death Comes In Threes. These appeal to me because they loosely fit into the horror genre, but the rest aren’t so bad either.

Spencer’s work is heavily based around Caribbean folklore. His craft is to use Jamaican patois in dialogue in such a way that it can be understood easily, and provides an insight into Jamaican culture. His writing is imbued by humour that enables his characters to be sketched so well. The balance of humour with the darkness of his stories doesn’t always work, but the risk he takes in trying to achieve it is admirable.

His characters lead tough lives in harsh circumstances never far from ritual and superstition. He is careful to going down the line of the tropes of voodoo and sorcery, though he does write about Obeah, and its origins in the 1700s.

That the story ‘Bunka Bat’ concerns cricket is a reason to read the book in itself..

My GoodReads score 4 / 5