FIERCE PRETTY THINGS

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.