Fierce Pretty Things: Stories

by Tom Howard

Overview

In these eight darkly comic stories, Tom Howard explores the instincts for violence and tenderness that mark his character's lives. A brother and sister wander the pier after a deadly plague destroys most of humanity. A high school bully struggles to overcome his demons. A man in the grips of dementia is visited by his children's ghosts. The people in these blistering tales grapple with past mistakes, trying to navigate their way toward redemption and resurrection and failing often—but always with a ferocious heart. Their unforgettable voices guide us through schoolyards, cemeteries, drive-in theaters, and the rich landscapes of their own imaginations.
Equal parts funny, tragic, and wise, Fierce Pretty Things is a striking debut that teaches us how to live in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253041494
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2019
Series:	Blue Light Books
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tom Howard's stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, Booth, and elsewhere, and have been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, the Masters Review Short Story Award, and the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. He holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.

Table of Contents

BANDANA
HILDY
TEMPLE & VINE
FIERCE PRETTY THINGS
SCARECROWS
GRANDFATHER VAMPIRE
THE MAGNIFICENTS
XIOMARA

What People are Saying About This

"

The title of Tom Howard's collection says everything you need to know: these stories are fierce, and they are pretty (though I'd call them beautiful instead). These shards of life offer up a strange and gorgeous and mind-clearing punch, and I look forward to the career in words Howard has in store for us all.

"

Bret Lott

"

The title of Tom Howard's collection says everything you need to know: these stories are fierce, and they are pretty (though I'd call them beautiful instead). These shards of life offer up a strange and gorgeous and mind-clearing punch, and I look forward to the career in words Howard has in store for us all.

"

Samrat Upadhyay

"Fierce Pretty Things won me over, fiercely, with characters who demonstrate unyielding love and pizzazz even as life comes at them hard. The collection features mostly young protagonists, but they exude ancient wisdom as they traverse the landscapes of boardwalks and school playgrounds and drive-in movie theaters and basement magic chests. Each sentence, tight and beautiful, reads like a proof of what powerful fiction can do. And the humor—my god!—when was the last time I laughed so unashamedly while reading a book?"

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2019

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"The stories in Howard's debut collection blend raw emotions with surreal forays into the supernatural and metaphysical. . . . Howard's fiction follows an unexpected logic, but at its best it achieves a deep emotional resonance. "—Kirkus Reviews

"Though not for the faint of heart, Howards stories depict his characters ruminations on abandonment, neglect, teen angst, and gun violence, making for an intense and effective collection."—Publishers Weekly

"The title of Tom Howard's collection says everything you need to know: these stories are fierce, and they are pretty (though I'd call them beautiful instead). These shards of life offer up a strange and gorgeous and mind-clearing punch, and I look forward to the career in words Howard has in store for us all."—Bret Lott, author of Letters and Life and Jewel

"Fierce Pretty Things won me over, fiercely, with characters who demonstrate unyielding love and pizzazz even as life comes at them hard. The collection features mostly young protagonists, but they exude ancient wisdom as they traverse the landscapes of boardwalks and school playgrounds and drive-in movie theaters and basement magic chests. Each sentence, tight and beautiful, reads like a proof of what powerful fiction can do. And the humor—my god!—when was the last time I laughed so unashamedly while reading a book?"—Samrat Upadhyay, author of Mad Country

From the Publisher

2019-01-28

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.

Kirkus Reviews