Despite being a fan of Harry Turtledove’s alternate histories, especially of the fantasy versions, I was not impressed by this one. Too much baseball and travel, not enough of the fantasy. I thought the story was going to take off after Jack’s dream at Almagordo, but no, more baseball and travel ensued.

Not recommended unless baseball is your thing.

Harry Turtledove is one of the masters of the alternate history genre, no doubt about it. Among his alternate history titles are two long-running series known as The World War Saga and The Colonization Series, plus stand-alone titles like The Guns of the South, a weird rewriting of American Civil War history. All have been highly successful for Mr. Turtledove. This time around the author turns his attention to 1929, shortly after the “Big Bubble popped,” a time when jobs are so scarce that men find it difficult to feed their families, much less provide for any of life’s little extras. Times are so tough that some men are voluntarily becoming vampires or zombie-workers in an attempt to leave the harsh reality of their old lives behind forever.

Jack Spivey, the narrator of The House of Daniel, is the only son of Enid, Oklahoma’s, town drunk and, while he is not desperate enough yet to become a zombie or a vampire, he is not above taking jobs as an enforcer for Big Stu, the thug who pretty much runs Enid as his own little kingdom. Jack also picks up a few extra dollars playing semipro baseball for the Enid Eagles, a team that plays against similar teams located within a hundred or so miles of Enid. On one road trip to Ponca City Jack’s life would change forever.

When Jack knocks on the Ponca City boardinghouse door he’s been directed to, he expects a man called Mitch Carstairs to open it. Unfortunately for Mitch, his brother refuses to pay Big Stu the money he owes – and Big Stu believes that pounding on Mitch might encourage his brother to pay up. But when the door opens, Jack is looking into the eyes of one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen - and her name is Mitch Carstairs. Even though he knows that Big Stu will want his hide for not beating her, Jack warns the beautiful Mitch to flee Ponca City first thing in the morning. But now there is no way he can return to his life in Enid.

Jack’s luck, though, is soon to change. He stays behind when the rest of the Enid Eagles leave for home and decides to take in an afternoon baseball game between the barnstorming House of Daniel team and a local nine. By the end of the game, the House of Daniel is in desperate need of a centerfielder to take the place of the one severely injured during the game. The next thing Jack knows he is on the House of Daniel bus, the centerfield job is his, and Big Stu is in the bus’s rearview mirror. Of course, Big Stu is not going to give up that easily, and the chase is on.

All of this happens within the book’s first forty pages. The rest of the book is a baseball barnstorming tour of Oklahoma, Texas, and the American West of the Depression Era. And it’s fun – until it becomes so repetitive that it’s not fun and the reader begins to have as much trouble remembering which game was which as Jack says those on the team have in keeping games straight in their own minds.

The House of Daniel, while it is based upon a fun premise, would probably have been more effective if held to a novella-length book, but it’s still an enjoyable journey into one of Harry Turtledove’s strange worlds. ( )

The subtitle (A novel of wild magic, the Great Depression, and semipro ball) may be a trifle misleading, and would be more accurate if the items were reversed. The House of Daniel is first and foremost a baseball novel, set during an alternate-history version of the Great Depression, with the magical elements mostly serving to emphasize the otherness of this version of history. Other than a single incident which could easily have been rewritten, they're only incidental to the plot, and while they're interesting and add a good deal of color to the novel (zombies contributing to unemployment by working for far less than living people, sasquatches in the Pacific Northwest) they could easily have been left out.

Most of the fun of The House of Daniel lies in spotting the references to real baseball players and teams of the era, most obviously to the House of David, a real barnstorming team that, like the novel's House of Daniel, really did wear long beards as a gimmick. If you can't pick Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson out of a crowd with slightly disguised names ("Carpetbag Booker" and "Job Gregson"), or don't get a chuckle out of the Titans playing at the Cricket Grounds rather the Giants at the Polo Grounds, you may want to give this one a pass. I had a lot of fun with it, but it has no more plot than a baseball season (arguably less of one, since as a traveling team there's no postseason for the House of Daniel to aspire to) and only one really well-realized character in the narrator Jack Spivey himself. (Two if you count Carpetbag, but since much of his characterization relies on the reader recognizing his real-world analogue that may be less clear.) I happened to be in the target audience for this one, and enjoyed it quite a bit. ( )

This was the first book I have read that was written by Harry Turtledove. I was unaware of his reputation as "The Master of Alternate History" so I was expecting your average Great Depression baseball book. Imagine my surprise when the zombies, vampires and werewolves made appearances. It started out ok but got rather boring and repetitive. I continued reading because I was waiting for the big sci-fi twist that never happened. Ho-hum! ( )