From 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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this quirky, imaginative collectionAhis seventhAWaldrop proves that you can go home again, as long as you pack your rod, your singing saw, and your wrestler's mask. His introduction describes the poverty of the short-story writer's life, and Waldrop's solutionAfishing. These stories include a rewrite of "The Brementown Musicians," peopled with city gangsters from the 1920s, a new Scrooge in a new "Christmas Carol," and a Mexican masked-wrestler story. In most of these stories, Waldrop creates alternative histories: what if Hitler had won, what if World War II had never happened, what if Wolfe had survived and lived on with brain damage? Waldrop is adept at using lingo from various periods and is equally adept at Spanish phrases. With slogans and lots of period detail, he vividly captures the feel of each era, and as an added bonus, after each story he gives a brief history of how that story came into being. Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy, these stories will certainly attract new readers for this writer. Recommended for all fantasy collections.ADoris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
