Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2014; $40.00 hc; 292 pages
Writers are not competitive. If we were competitive, I’d keep a list of who were better writers than me in Austin. Of course I’d check off Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, who both left town—and with a sigh remove Neal Barrett when he joined the Hereafter Gang. But I would never do that. I just worry about South Austin—and that leads to the problem of Bradley Denton. You see, he’s oddly talented—so I was pretty stoked when I got his latest collection to review.
It had a talking dog story, a tribute story drawn from his best-known novel, and a novella from a themed collection with a dead writer in it. Three marks of a loser. I was stoked. It simply couldn’t be good.
Then I read it. Damn it, it’s good.
The first novella, “Sergeant Chip” (2005), isn’t a talking dog story; no, it’s a goddamn telepathic dog story. The modified dog is in the Army, and it’s engaging in a revolt against moral-less authority and Army stupidity. The theme of decency versus abuse is Denton’s mainstay, and in an era of writing without a moral compass, he stands out like the Pole Star. The dog is not a human in fur; he thinks like a dog. He both understands and fails to understand the humans who train him as a dog would—he has the loyalty-to-the-pack morality of a dog. And in time of warfare this makes him the most moral being around. The narration does not spare blood nor hide the horror of war, yet certainly it does not glorify these things. After his master dies and Chip becomes the Alpha male, I found myself rooting for him every step of the way. His heart is clearly better than those in charge, and so likewise is his mind. The science fictional trope that allows him to communicate to some humans is presented in a believable way and has its roots in current research. The ending is left open, and as always with Denton the prose is crisp—somewhere between Stephen King (on his good days) and Mark Twain.
The second novella, “Blackburn and the Blade” (2006), features the return appearance of Jimmy Blackburn, the perfect killer-with-a-code eponym of Denton’s 1993 novel Blackburn. The state of Texas put Jimmy to death a few years ago. Jimmy is perfectly appealing: he kills those people who (as we say in Texas) need killin’. You know them—the folks in line at the “Ten Items or Less” checkout line with their goddamn fourteen items. Denton has told us that Jimmy killed 17 people—but he left out some details, leaving room to go back for more. Jimmy gets a worthy opponent this time: Joe Lansdale’s “God of the Razor.” Jimmy has to make things right against a smarter, socially protected, crueler opponent. In other words, Denton once again pits evil against evil. He doesn’t let Jimmy’s self-righteous anger be seen as good—but it does appeal to the dark side of the good reader. If you’ve ever looked askance at the aforementioned fourteen-item shopper, you will eat up this masterful exercise in narrative voice as though it were pecan pralines.
The third novella—to use an over-used reviewer’s phrase—is what you buy the book for. “The Adakian Eagle” (2011) is a story of murder and shamanism in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. A scheming lieutenant colonel sets up a young Army boxer on a murder charge. The young boxer meets an older corporal with the initials D. H., who wrote some book about a bird. In this contrafactual tale, which we used to call “alternative history” until Michael Chabon won the awards that Howard Waldrop should have—never mind; Howard’s face is on a stamp in another dimension and besides he lives in North Austin and doesn’t screw up my schemes.... As I was about to say: In this contrafactual tale the reader gets a literary hard-on when he recognizes the real historical figure being used. Yet Denton violates this structure by telling us that it’s Dashiell Hammett in his introduction. In a really good contrafactual, the story is so compelling that the added history is a cherry on the banana split of plot, characterization, and imagery. A friend of Howard Waldrop’s for some decades, Denton has learned from the best.
One of the important characters here is Unangan, not the generic movie Eskimo, and Denton does a great job of getting the anthropology right. Three of the characters in the story take the traditional Amanita muscaria and rotten fish soup, which can reveal the whole life-streams of the celebrants. The narrative for 95% of the piece is pure Hammett, and deft handling of the multiple timeline mosaic takes Hammett’s The Glass Key up a few notches.
The story can be read on many levels—a good account of the Aleutian campaign in WWII (with its use of native Aleuts), a great mystery and revenge story (like the other novellas in this book), and finally a philosophical response of Western thought to shamanism that is neither Orientalist nor whitewashed. But the best part? You get to see the older Corporal Hammett scare the bejesus out of the lieutenant colonel. Like Jimmy Blackburn and Sergeant Chip, he is a badass who excels at taking bad guys with a cool mixture of word and deed.
Denton learned his craft from James Gunn at the University of Kansas. He’s the real deal, trained in the sciences (BA in astronomy) and humanities (MA in English literature). Denton has been a permanent fixture of the Austin scene since 1988, a man of unfailingly good temper and a thoughtful friend to the writing and fan communities.
This collection may be the best introduction so far to Denton’s moral themes, speculative fiction finesse, and lively plotting. It’s hard to believe that this book was not created as a whole; without his introductions, I would have believed this to be a single work of great artistic harmony.
Don Webb lives in Austin, Texas.
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