Howard Waldrop (1946–2024)

Getting a new Howard Waldrop collection is always a little bittersweet because it's been about seven years since the last one and it'll probably be another seven years or so until the next. I usually avoid reading Howard Waldrop stories until they're collected, just so I can have the whole fresh experience. This collection has the added poignancy of Waldrop's description of his rather serious and horrible medical misadventures from which I wish him a full and speedy recovery.

So, Howard show more Waldrop stories: they're not really like anything else out there. We have the waning days of an obscure B-movie actor, we have a, well, there's no point in paraphrasing it, a wolfman in Alacatraz, we have a secret history of vaudeville complete with a quest for the Holy Grail, a poignant tale of a boy whose sister catches polio, an account of the career of the actress from King Kong - no, not the actress who played the actress, the actress, Bob Howard and his best pal take a trip down south, pirates and pirates and other nautical legends, a Vancian tale set on the Vancian Dying Earth, and a trip to No Man's Land in any language. Each is a unique and subtle set of tastes and flavours for the mind, each is distinctly Waldropian. show less

The hardback edition of this book is one of my most treasured possessions (purchased, if I remember correctly, at my first Octocon.) Howard Waldrop's short stories blew me away, but this was my first head-wrecking, brain-buzzing encounter with a writer who bends fiction and time and space and history into equally gonzo shapes.

Them Bones has three separate strands of war, archaeology and adventures amongst the Amerindian Moundbuilders of the Mississipi as refugees from a dying world try to show more save their own future and instead doom another, while a team tries to save the past and preserve the truth against rising floodwaters. This is a slim book, and the prose is polished til it shines, but it still covers epic ground as the slow scale of the tragedy becomes clear. Not quite like anything else you'll ever read. Then find his stories, which are something else again. show less

There's a reason people call Waldrop a master. Not a single story out of the dozen in this collection failed to satisfy. They're the real deal, with imaginative plots and spot-on characterizations. Not to mention the risks he takes on theme and subject matter that pay off. When I finished the story "Horror, We Got" I thought to myself, Oh no, he didn't!. You'll either have to take my word, or check it out yourself.

Howard Waldrop's quirky and off-the-wall short stories have always been a great source of pleasure; 'Them Bones', one of his few novels, is obviously cut from the same cloth but the quirkiness is tempered - perhaps a bit too much - by the sense that Waldrop was setting out here to Write A Novel; and in the course of all the careful work needed to make a novel and to carry it off convincingly, it seems to me that some of the essence of his short stories got lost.

The premise is promising. We show more start with an archaeologist, working on a dig amongst the remains of the Mound Builder culture in Louisiana, in the 1920s. She comes across something that shouldn't be there; the remains of a horse, in an archaeological layer dating from a time when horses were not known on the North American continent. Then she finds what killed it - modern bullets.

We are then switched to the viewpoint of a time traveller, a pathfinder for a larger expeditionary force, stepping out of his portal into pre-Columbian America. Which comes as a bit of a shock, as he was expecting to land in the 1930s. The expedition he was pathfinding for never emerges from the portal. As the time portal is only one-way, he sets out to find civilisation. He meets, and builds a life with, indigenous peoples, and becomes a part of their community. He also finds that not only is he not in the time he expected, but there are other problems as well...

A third strand shows us what happened to the expedition, told through a diary and official documents. The three strands come together in not unexpected ways; but Waldrop manages the process perfectly well. Along the way, we begin to find out the motivation for the time expedition. Where this novel falls down is in the structure and pacing. I found myself fairly ripping through the story, because it gave me a lot of impetus to find out what was going to happen next; I'm certain there were things I missed in that process. And yet, I had the sense towards the end that, having carefully and meticulously planned the novel out, Waldrop painted himself somewhat into a corner. In the last third of the novel, one of our p.o.v. protagonists travels on foot to a neighbouring settlement; he makes his escape pursued by an angry (and armed) mob. He then has to get home; and that sequence becomes quite extended and a bit unbalanced. I got the feeling that Waldrop was a bit taken aback by how far he'd taken his protagonist and how much ground he'd have to cover to get him safely back to his village. Sadly, this dragged a little.

Characterisation, though, is excellent. In particular, there is one secondary character, who I got quite attached to, who sounds to me like Chief Dan George, the First Nation chief who became well known for playing wise but laconic native Americans in films, particularly 'Little Big Man' and Clint Eastwood's 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'. If this be so, his was a good model to emulate. Even the officer filling out the reports in the expeditionary force that is stranded in the past manages to come through as a real person rather than as a mere functionary.

I can recommend Waldrop's writing wholeheartedly; but this novel is likely to be met with indulgence by those who like his work.Those who know him not would be better advised to seek out his short stories. show less