Unsettling Futures - Deep Strata - Howard Waldrop's Night of the Cooters
Goddamn it, why's he gotta be so good at this?
Deep Strata is an infrequent series of posts about books that did peculiar things to me, usually when I was young and no one had yet warned me about the dangers of reading science fiction.
Trout-Fishing Man
There are books that reshape your brain.
You pick them up and start reading, and by the end, you feel like someone has unscrewed the top of your skull like a Mason jar, plucked out your brain, stretched it out, yes, further, arms fully extended now. Then everything gets scrunched back together again, crammed back inside your skull. And it doesn't fit the same. You ask people if they got the number of that truck that hit you.
And then, if you've got anything to say about it, you go back and read that book again. Because you didn't just like that book. (There's an outside chance you hated that book.) This book isn't just good, it's shown you things could be done with story you didn't even know were possible.
Mostly, these books are novels. But short story collections can do that, too.
Future on Fire and Mirrorshades hit me hard. I read and re-read Swanwick's Gravity's Angels so many times I ought to do a whole Deep Strata post about it alone. I still remember picking up Gibson's Burning Chrome in the Coles Books across from the mall food court, the first lines of Johnny Mnemonic like fire written on my cerebellum. Quite a bit of cyberpunk in there, leaving its mark.
But coming in from another angle altogether, almost from an alternate universe, there was Night of the Cooters by Howard Waldrop.
If you explain the plot of the title story of Night of the Cooters (go read it!) to someone, it will sound entirely normal: What if the Martians from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds landed in a small, dusty, Texas town as well as in Britain? The local sheriff and the townsfolk have to fight them off.
See? A totally normal sci-fi story. You could go write that! I could! Anyone could!
However.
Neither you nor I nor your anyone with an ounce of sense would start the story with the sheriff being awakened from a nap on the john, and then angrily berating his deputy for interrupting his dream, which turns into a half-page monologue about said dream, in which he was a teenaged Aztec athlete about to play the Mesoamerican ball game for the glory of the gods.
"I looks up at the grandstand, and there's Moctezuma and all his high muckety-mucks with feathers and stuff hangin' off 'em, and more gold than a circus wagon. And there was these other guys, conquistadors and stuff, with beards and rusty helmets, and I-talian priests with crosses you could barred a livery-stable door with."
What is this doing in a story about Martians landing in Texas? What thematic purpose does it serve? Shouldn't you cut this out and maybe establish this guy's character in some more conventional way that doesn't wrong-foot the reader?
These are the kinds of things you would say to Howard Waldrop if he was some ordinary dude who'd brought this story into a workshop or critique group. And the whole time, you'd have this guilty itch at the back of your mind, and you'd be apologizing for even suggesting that he cut the dream, because, holy hell, this is some fun, vivid, amazing writing.
But it's not how you write stories, is it? Particularly stories that you want to sell, for money.
Right?
But that guilty itch is correct.
Once you've read Night of the Cooters, all the way to the end (wherein our sheriff dreams that he's a king in ancient Babylon, being fed figs from a golden bowl, sleeping peacefully through the noise of the last of the Martian war machines being dynamited by the very, very angry and heavily armed people of Pachuco, Texas) you realize that there is no other correct way to start the story.
It's just Howard Waldrop.
He writes about the stuff that interests him, and sometimes his interests come out of left field – the Dreyfus Affair and turn-of-the-century cycling culture, or an obscure 1940s comic book character called Airboy, or the revival of a flash-in-the-pan Woodstock-era rock band – but there are a few he loops back to again and again. Movies and character actors, fishing (possibly his true passion, over and above writing), and a peculiar strain of alternate history that builds itself up from unlikely or small events that cascade out to big changes.
There are nine more stories in the Night of the Cooters collection, and since as a teenager the hardcover library copy of that book was all the Waldrop in the world I had access to, I read it about half a dozen times over as many years.
And I could describe those stories to you, but for the most part, I'd fail to get across the strangeness of them, the skew-whiff way Waldrop approaches his subjects.
I could tell you that French Scenes is about a future filmmaker obsessed with the French New Wave, who slowly cracks up. I could say that Thirty Minutes Over Broadway! is the opening story in George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards superhero anthology series, about a pulp hero who's hanging up his (literal) wings.* I can explain that Fin de Cyclé is about radical playwright Alfred Jarry getting into a bicycle duel on the goddamn Eiffel Tower using elephant guns and grenades, but, but…
But that wouldn't get you to what makes these stories amazing, wild, funny, poignant. (Okay, maybe the bike duel on the Eiffel Tower was a bit of a hint.) It wouldn't get at the specific hilarity of the scenes Waldrop writes for his film-within-the-story in French Scenes, or the dense layer of historical references that undergird Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!**, or the fact that Fin de Cyclé has the best fishing-while-high-as-fuck-on-absinthe-and-laudanum-and-hashish scene anyone has ever written or will ever write. Not to mention one of the finest mid-fight-scene rejoinders ever put to paper:
"By your red suit, I take you for an anarchist. Very well, no rules," said the reporter. The cane whistled.
"By our Red Suit, you should take us for a man whose Magenta Suit is being cleaned," said Jarry. "This grows tedious. We grow bored." He pulled his Navy Cold Model .41 from his waistband, cocked it and fired a great roaring blank which caught the reporter's pomaded hair on fire. The man went down yelling and rolling while others helpfully poured pitchers of water on him.
The Passing of the Western is a story so structurally odd that a good portion of the intro is about George R.R. Martin berating Waldrop and tearing his hair out at the bass-ackwardsness of it all. And yet it reads as smoothly as anything you've ever seen, the craft is impeccable.
I finally got a copy of the Night of the Cooters collection around 25 years after I first read it – a paperback my wife dug up for me from the depths of eBay for Christmas. And every once in a while, I think I ought to go back and read just one story, and of course, I wind up reading at least half of them.
Some of these stories I like a little less than when I first read them, a quarter century ago. But most of them I like more. And they're still doing what they did back then – tugging on my brain like taffy.
Waldrop has never been famous within SFF fandom at large. (His first short story collection is called Howard Who?) He's incredibly well thought of by his fellow writers, he's been nominated for and won awards, and apparently he's a heck of a nice guy. But he's also done exactly what he wanted for his entire career, which was to mostly write short stories instead of novels, which is no way to become moderately financially successful, much less rich. And the fact that he isn't better known is an indictment of the field, frankly.
SFF writing has two faces.
On one side, there's the story we're told that it's wild and free, that you can do anything! You've got the whole universe, and a billion others, past, future, Earth and the solar system, distant worlds and galaxies, all of them your playthings! You can do anything, try anything!
And on the other side, there are rules, formal and informal, spoken and unspoken. We're hemmed in by the traditions of pulp adventure-driven storytelling, by world lengths, by publishing trends and fannish expectations.
Sometimes folks break out of these chains, and you get the New Wave, or cyberpunk, or the New Space Opera and so on.***
Howard Waldrop just shrugged those chains off. It's possible he didn't even notice they were there.
Then he probably went fishing, and while he was casting, he thought about Elvis Presley and Dwight Eisenhower, or Disney animatronics, or some Appalachian family with the world's ugliest chickens. And then he came back, and hung up his rod, and wrote a story fit to tear your head off.
Hey, look!
George R.R. Martin finally got them to make a short film out of Night of the Cooters! As far as I am concerned, this is a perfectly good use of his time.
Obligatory Self-Promotion
Broken Road, the audio drama podcast based on my story Patience Lake, is still running! Up to episode five now! Check it out!
Remember, do not like, subscribe, or share this post with your friends!
Unless you think they'd like Howard Waldrop, of course. Then I recommend you print this post out on high-quality bond paper, write a note in your most exacting cursive, and mail it to them. Howard Waldrop, at least as of a 2017 interview, did not own a computer or even a cell phone, so it's only fair.
Footnotes
*Thirty Minutes Over Broadway! appears to be one of several attempts over the years by GRRM to throw some money at Waldrop. There are two separate GRRM anecdotes in the intros to these stories, and both of them are great. The recent short film of Night of the Cooters, produced by GRRM, is clearly the apotheosis of this decades-long work of patronage.
**This one has annotations in the collection. It's pretty great.
***Arguably forging a new set of chains as they go, but that's genre for you.