Going Home Again
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The words "inimitable" and "unique" are bandied about too often in artistic circles, so much so that critics seem to have forgotten those words were invented to describe Howard Waldrop's fiction.
Waldrop's mastery of arcane knowledge, his transcendent wit, and the way his stories explode like cheerty bombs inside a reader's mind have all made Howard Waldrop one of the most beloved writers of the past two decades. Readers who encounter his work never forget the experience, and this new collection compiles nine such experiences (heretofore uncollected), including:
"Flatfeet!", a madcap tour of this century's first decades, courtesy of the Keystone Kops.
"Ocean's Ducks," an homage to those brave black actors of the 1930s.
Remember those "Little Moron" jokes in the schoolyard, like "Why did the Little Moron throw the clock out the window?" "He wanted to see Time fly." Now ask yourself again "Why Did?"
And beware the masked Mexican wrestlers of "El Castillo de la Perserverancia"!
Howard Waldrop's unique and inimitable talents are on full display here. Read on, marvel, and rejoice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fantastic inventions and whimsical nostalgia in these nine stories suggest that Waldrop (Night of the Cooters) is either a pulp writer born out of his time or an autodidact from another world. Although many of these stories have appeared in science fiction publications like Amazing Stories and Omni, they are as close to Robert Coover as they are to Isaac Asimov. There's an alternate version of Dickens's A Christmas Carol and a Damon-Runyonized retelling of the fairy tale "The Brementown Musicians." Most of these stories revolve around curious what-if ideas tightly wrapped in oddball erudition and tied up with snappy dialogue. The best and subtlest of these is the opening "You Could Go Home Again," which takes place on a USA, Inc. Airship and slowly reveals its hero, a writer recovering from a near-fatal illness, to be Tom (not Thomas) Wolfe living in 1940. Elsewhere, one finds Peter Lorre, a refugee from a successful Nazi Reich, performing in a Brecht cabaret in "The Effects of Alienation" and Mexican masked wrestlers in an apocalyptic match with overtones of medieval mystery plays in "El Castillo de la Preserverancia." Only in the case of "Flatfeet!," in which a Keystone-Kops-meet-monsters scenario reflects Spengler's Decline of the West, do Waldrop's crazy-quilt themes wear too thin. To round out this collection and proclaim its roots, there is "Scientification," in which a tribe of intelligent insects lives on a dark, chilly earth in the distant future, a straight science fantasy out of H.G. Wells or Weird Tales.
