Fierce Pretty Things

April 1, 2019
Howard’s dark debut of eight noir stories is streaked with fantasy that deconstructs society’s lost and wasted lives. Parading a string of blue-collar losers and underachievers on whom redemption is wasted, Howard enlists themes of regret, dreams unrealized, and lives immobilized by apathy. “Better you don’t expect anything too fine from the world,” says the violent father in the title story to his shoplifting punk son, who tries to improve himself. In “Bandana,” the ghost of a gang member wannabe becomes the spirit guardian of the boy he beat up. The saddest story, “Hildy,” follows a teenage boy futilely trying to protect his younger sister as he succumbs to a global plague. In the near future in “The Magnificents,” a 50-year-old drunk enters into a contract to kill himself and leave money to his estranged son. An elderly man with dementia thinks he sees his dead children playing in the yard while his dying wife contemplates a murder/suicide in “Scarecrows.” Though not for the faint of heart, Howard’s stories depict his characters’ ruminations on abandonment, neglect, teen angst, and gun violence, making for an intense and effective collection.

February 1, 2019
The stories in Howard's debut collection blend raw emotions with surreal forays into the supernatural and metaphysical.These stories encompass a host of topics, from the vagaries of memory to cycles of violence to the process of grieving. Plenty of their elements are harrowing enough on their own, including a man losing ground to dementia ("Scarecrows") and a student shooting and killing his classmate ("Bandana"). But Howard opts to take many of these stories in a surreal direction: The murdered child in "Bandana," for example, remains on Earth to act as his murderer's adviser and "spirit guardian." It adds an element of the absurd to the proceedings, but the spectral narrator's relative detachment ends up making things even more horrific rather than less so. "Scarecrows" is structured so that the reader begins to understand things even as the ailing protagonist, Dixon, does, aided in part by notes he's left himself in his more lucid moments. He's trying to understand strange visions he's been having of the past but also why he shouldn't tell his wife, who's become his caretaker. There's a dreamlike quality to this story, along with several others--notably "Grandfather Vampire," which has a Ray Bradbury-esque blend of pastoral and uncanny. The title character's nickname was coined by a friend of the narrator's, noting that he "looked like a vampire who'd stepped into the sunlight a million years ago and got bleached white as bone." The narrator and his friend end up watching a series of movies about a reanimated boy who ages over the course of several films and turns out to have a connection to their lives.Howard's fiction follows an unexpected logic, but at its best it achieves a deep emotional resonance.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.