Howard Who? by Howard Waldrop

I find writing reviews for books of short stories really hard. I read quickly, so I tend to burn through a story before it's had time to seep into my long-term memory. This means that I'm not doing the kind of memory reinforcement that happens when I read a novel over several days - each new day helps consolidate things about a book in my head. With short stories, that second crack at it never comes, and I'm not really interested in reading each story twice just to combat this.

In other words, short stories aren't really my favourite fiction conveyance. I do like some short stories, but they have to be really boffo to stick in my head. And when you read a whole bunch of them, and then sit down to write a review - particularly when you read another book of short stories just a few days before, and find they're blurring together in your mind...I'm just saying, it's not the easiest of tasks.

Of course, no one is making me write this review, or even making me read this book - both are things I freely and willingly chose. So let's get down to brass tacks and try to figure out what I thought of Howard Who?

Let's start this off by saying that I didn't have the same trouble with his female characters that I did with Mike Resnick's. Most of the stories are focused on men, but when the women appear, they are more interesting and varied, less caricatures. In fact, most of his characters have more to them than caricatures, given the space restraints inherent in short story writing.


Still, there were a couple of stories that I found troubling - not troubling as in "this makes me worried about the author and his viewpoints," but more "stories that made me uncomfortable and stuck with me." That's compounded a bit since both of those stories were about Jewishness - one is about a vampire attack in Germany that Hitler and his cronies use as an excuse to start the horrors of the Holocaust, and another about a Jewish elite time travel team that have a terrible, cruel plan they are carrying out in order to put their leaders in the present in the best possible position. I am not entirely sure what I think of either story, and I'm not entirely sure that what I got from them was worth the distress of reading them, but...I just don't know what I think yet, and will need quite a bit more time to mull it over.

But let's talk about the rest of the stories! They are mostly very fun! The first one in the book is about The Ugly Chicken, which is apparently his most famous story, and was a whole barrel of fun. It is about a...dammit, the word for scientist who studies birds is escaping me...bird scientist who runs into an older woman on a bus who identifies the dodo in the book he as looking at as one of those "ugly chickens" her neighbour used to have. This sends the scientist on a goose chase through Appalachia, trying to find out if the dodos really do still exist. The kicker to this story is delightful, if a little depressing. It does feel quite right.

There's also a lovely story about 19th century inventors who discover that one of the crackpot inventions that didn't work in our timeline does in theirs, with terrifying results. And one about a post-apocalyptic society where tractor pulls settle serious disputes, another with alt-history where Eisenhower was the musician and Elvis Presley the politician, and yet another where sumo wrestlers fight telekinetically, and the last, sad and yet hilarious story where Goofy, Donald, and Mickey go searching for a time capsule to tell them where all the humans went.

Most of these stories are humorous, but with an underlying elegiac, even mournful, undertone. Outside of the two stories that unsettled me, the rest were quite delightful.