Tim Pratt, Hart and Boot & Other Stories (Nightshade, 2007)
If there is any justice at all in this universe, Tim Pratt will someday be as wealthy and famous as Neil Gaiman. Why do I say this? Because he's every bit as good a writer as Neil is now. So just what he will be like in another few decades?!? Jason Erik Lundberg held the same opinion when he reviewed Little Gods, Pratt's previous short collection for us:
Every generation, there are writers who emerge who seem to get it a little better than the rest of us. They're the ones who understand story and myth and the ways we write our own histories. They see the world through a unique perspective, and bring us their vision of that world in astonishingly beautiful prose. Jeff VanderMeer is one recent example of this type of writer, with his award-winning fiction in the phantasmagorical locales of Ambergris and Veniss. Tim Pratt is another.
I agree with Jason -- yes, he's that good.
In reviewing his first novel, I said that:
It shouldn't surprise you that I am a rather finicky reader. I have been known to read the beginnings of a half dozen novels without finding one that is of sufficient interest to keep me reading to the very end. Hell, I've read a hundred pages of a forthcoming novel and said 'Enough!' more than a few times. So heed me when I say that The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl is even better as a work of horror tinged mythic fiction than Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and is equally as good as much of the work done by such writers as Stephen King and Roger Zelazny. Yes, it's that good. And it was so good that it was a novel I knew I was going to thoroughly enjoy reading within pages of starting it.
Now understand that I don't favor short fiction as a reading experience, as I like novels where I can get deep into a story and be with it for quite some time. So I picked Hart and Boot & Other Stories up when it came in just to glance through it.
(I admit that I was furst looking to see if we got quoted in the blurbs. Yes, we did -- from our review of Small Gods. Ego boost is a good thing. Well, most of the time it is. . . .)
Several very pleasurable hours later, I had finished Hart and Boot & Other Stories. Sigh. . . . What's good here? No, let me state that differently. What's fucking brilliant here? When I got done reading 'Terrible Ones' (from The Third Alternative, Spring 2004), wherein an actress and part-time domintrix finds herself followed by a Chorus giving weird advice while she's sought out by the Furies for a crime she didn't commit. I thought it simply was quite simply best urban fantasy story I'd ever read. But that was before I read 'Romanticore' (originally published in Realms of Fantasy, December 2003), which was every bit as good as anything that Roger Zelazny wrote. Only Pratt, unlike Zelazny, can write characters that feel real. Don't get me wrong -- I love Zelazny's work but his weakness was, in my opinion, an inability to sketch out characters who felt fully real. Zelazny's characters much more often than not were one-dimensional, little more than plot devices. Not so with Pratt's characters. Ray, the misfit of a writer in 'Romanticore', turns out to much more than he can even dream he is. Ray feels real, like someone I'd run into in this city.
Did I mention 'Hart and Boot & Other Stories' (Polyphony 4, September 2004), which riffs nicely off the motifs of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl? Or 'Cup and Table' (Twenty Epics anthology, July 2006), which is as good as anything done by Gaiman or Zelazny? I've read hundreds of single author short story collections over the decades -- I must say this collection is far better than almost any of them. Indeed it's good enough that I'll be keeping it for re-reading! And like Lazarus Long in Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, generally casual fiction is disposed of after reading. This I'm keeping.
There are other wonders here -- a southern retelling of the Irish tale of Finegas and the salmon of knowledge . . . a lesbian love story mediated by a harpy . . . a DVD shop with some very unusual product . . . a dragon who longs to be human. Go read it -- I'm sure you'll find many a story here that will delight. After you're done reading Hart and Boot & Other Stories, meet me in the Green Man Pub and we'll discuss it. First pint of Guinness is on the house!
