Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations
by Howard Waldrop et al
(Golden Gryphon, $24.95, 254 pages, hardcover; published in April
2003.)
Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations is a stangely entertaining
collection of eight collaborations between Howard Waldrop and other,
mostly Texan, writers.
Part of what is strange is that I was so amused without thinking that
most of the stories were particularly good.
For all that these are collaborations, Waldrop's trademark chaotic
voice shines through in every story. These stories are anything but
concise. Even the shortest or best of these, despite their admirable
level of invention, all wear out their welcome. Waldrop has a habit
of saying in three paragraphs what could be better conveyed in one sentence.
And the dialogue is even more excessivily gabby. His characters go on.
And on. Too often, I just wanted them to shut up and get on with the
story.
The best stories are two of the three collaborations with Steven Utley,
both of them proto-steampunk tales from the 1970s. The irreverently
witty "Custer's Last Jump!" imagines an American Civil War in a world
where aviation was invented a century earlier, and "Black as the Pit,
from Pole to Pole" imaginatively, if messily, combines the fictions
of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, and others.
Another noteworthy story is "One Horse Town" (co-written with Leigh
Kennedy), a bittersweet Monty Pythonesque comedy about Homer and the
siege of Troy, with plenty of zany energy. Its characters, despite their
excessive verbosity, are memorable.
But the gems in this book are not the stories, they're Waldrop's introductions
and the collaborators' afterwords. Waldrop has never been funnier: sharp
and to the point, machinegunning absurdly delirous jokes and facts without
a pause.
The greatest showstoppers are Steven Utley's three afterwords. He made
me laugh until it hurt and I could barely breathe, and even then he
wouldn't let up.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 24 May 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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