Science
fiction has produced several wonderful authors in its history, but only a
few with a distinctive voice whose stories could only be conceived of and
told by a particular authors. Howard
Waldrop is one of those distinctive voices, the only person who could have
written such classics as “The Ugly Chickens” or “All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past.” Some
of Waldrop’s newer stories are collected in Horse
of a Different Color.
In
2003, Waldrop published a collection entitled Dream Factories and Radio Pictures, a title indicative of his love
for old movies and old Hollywood. Several
of the stories in Horse of a
Different Color could have fit into that earlier collection based on
their theme. The opening story, “Why Then Ile Fit You” is barely a
fantastic story, but rather a bittersweet examination of the last days of
George Zucco (1886-1960, career 1907-1951).
Sought by director Jimmie Whale for a starring role long after he
retired, Zucco refuses to even consider acting again, aware that his time
is past, yet at the same time waxing nostalgic about his career and those
of his compatriots, a nostalgia tempered by a full understanding of his
situation.
Robert
Howlin is imprisoned for the crime of lycanthropy in “The Wolf-man of
Alcatraz,” which shows him as a very thoughtful and intelligent man who
is incarcerated for his own good and that of society and fully understands
and accepts his fate. Serving
his time in Alcatraz for the entire time the prison was functional,
Waldrop sets part of the story against the 1946 “Battle of Alcatraz”
showing how different it could have played out with an unavoidable threat
within the cell block as well as coming from the outside.
Returning
to show business, Waldrop’s narrator in “The Horse of a Different
Color (That You Rode in On)” is Manfred Marx, the eldest Marx Brother
who died in infancy. Rather
than focus his attention on the Marx Brothers who appeared in film,
Waldrop portrays Marks, as he styles himself, as an old vaudevillian
telling the story of a duo who he used to appear with, Dybbuk and Wing,
who were much more than the vaudevillian jesters they appeared.
Just as “Why Then Ile Fit You” is nostalgic of the films of the
40s and 50s, “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On”
waxes nostalgic for a Vaudeville long gone and often misrepresented. The
addition of two men who travel in Vaudeville as a way to expand their own
horizons, both physical and spiritual, adds to the mystique of the life on
the road that Marks describes.
“The
King of Where-I-Go”
begins as a straight nostalgic, if sad, story of the summer of 1953 when
Bubba and Ethel were spending the summer with their grandparents in
Alabama and Ethel contracted polio. Glossing over most of their
history, although providing enough to get a feel for their relationship
with each other and their family's history, Waldrop tells of Bubba's
feelings of guilt as his sister slowly recuperates and regains the use of
her legs, only to find herself the subject of an experiment in psychic
powers and the potential for time travel. The story collects up the
sort of nostalgia which underlies so many of the stories collected in Horse
of a Different Color, although in this case, the nostalgia is very
personal and specific rather than the media-induced nostalgia of some of
the other tales.
Another
tribute to Hollywood of the thirties, "’The Bravest Girl I Ever
Knew…’” is a biography of film actress Ann Darrow. Darrow, of
course, was Fay Wray's character in King Kong, but Waldrop is very
happy to follow her career after she made her film with Carl Denhem as she
tackles roles in Tarzan films and a screwball comedy. Waldrop also
fills in her backstory, extrapolating from just a few lines Wray spoke in
the film. As with “Why
Then Ile Fit You” and “The
Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On),” Waldrop provides a
nostalgic look at the era without devolving into sap. If he never fully
convinces that Darrow was the great actress he makes her out to be, that
is more a product of the medium rather than Waldrop's narrative.
“Thin,
On the Ground” is a tribute to Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins
stories. Rather than a tall
tale, it describes a night of revelry just over the border in Mexico by a
couple of high schoolers to celebrate their graduation.
Moving from strange encounter to strange encounter, they don’t
allow themselves to think too much about the fantastic events they are
witnessing, merely desire to continue their revelry and to get away from
the eldritch occurrences, assuming them to either be just oddities of
human nature or the results of too much to drink until the evidence became
overwhelming that something strange was happening.
Almost a vignette with a detailed setting rather than a story,
“Thin, On the Ground” is a piece that leaves the reader wanting more.
“Kindermarchen”
is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel. Waldrop
provides an institutionalization for the children’s leaving their
father’s home, at once making the step-mother and father both more
understandable and more horrific than in the original version of the
story.
William
S. Gilbert joined three of his comic operas, H.M.S. Pinafore, The
Mikado, and Utopia, Ltd. together, so it seems only fair that
Howard Waldrop joins Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance
together in “Avast, Abaft!” Waldrop's story has the pirate crew
returning to its life of crime and being chased by the Pinafore.
Before the two ships can meet up for a rousing musical number, the find
themselves in a world far distant from the Victorian England in which they
were originally set. Waldrop captures the feel of the Gilbert and
Sullivan operas and intermingles his new elements adroitly.
A
second tribute story, this time honoring Jack Vance, is “Frogskin
Cap,” set in the universe of Vance’s Dying
Earth. Vance’s world was a post-apocalyptic earth unlike those seen
in the post-Cold War era, which immediately gives a dated feel to
Waldrop’s story set in the far future. Set at a local festival, Tybalt
actually knows something about the way the world works, rather than the
superstitions that have taken hold of the world, which gets his ire up
when he witnesses a flim flam man playing into those superstitions.
Tybalt, though, learns that things aren't always as they seem and
superstitions might have a place in the world.
The
collection closes with a World War I story, “Nineslando,” in which the
War takes on a life and personification of its own, intent on making sure
that it destroys the antebellum world and any hopes that humanity can
better itself. Rather than placing itself in opposition to the
Germans or the British who are furthering its goal by fighting the War,
the War works against those who have opted out of the War or hope and
believe that a better world is still in the making.
For
each story, Waldrop provides an afterword (as opposed to have a
foreword). Theoretically, this means he can discuss the story and
its origins without worrying about spoilers, but in fact he rarely goes
into that amount of details, often simply discussing the impetus of the
story and his health during the writing of the story, rather than talking
about the decisions that went into writing the story itself. These
afterwords are nice, but not essential and the crux of the collection is
the stories themselves, as it should be.
