This is the 5th episode in my series on sf, fantasy and horror with San Antonio ties.
One of the SF world’s strangest storytellers was born in the Alamo City 80 years ago.
The Strange Stick Together: Neal Barrett (right) and fellow Weird Texas writer Howard Waldrop.
NEAL BARRETT JR., purveyor of some of the oddest SF, fantasy and mystery fiction ever put to paper, was born in San Antonio, raised in Oklahoma and now makes Austin his home. If your taste runs to dead heroes wandering a heaven that looks a lot like small-town Texas and robotic talking bears wandering the wasteland, you probably owe it to yourself to read some Neal Barrett Jr.
“If I try to get deadly serious, I start laughing at myself,” Barrett told the San Antonio Express-News back in 1997. “I’ve got to see the light side of things. Off the wall, a little bit bizarre — that’s the way I like it.”
It’s not surprising that other Weird Texas writers including JOE R. LANSDALE and San Antonio’s SCOTT A. CUPP count themselves as immense Neal Barrett fans.
After years of toiling, Barrett’s 1987 tome Through Darkest America proved to be his breakthrough to a wider SF audience. And 1991’s supremely strange The Hereafter Gang landed him on the New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year list.
Barrett had a homecoming of sorts in 1997, when he served as toastmaster for the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio. With a folks aiming to have a second WorldCon here in 2013, it seems like a perfect opportunity to have Neal repeat the performance.
I cannot recommend Neal’s fiction too highly. I love The Hereafter Gang and Pink Vodka Blues (PVB had me laughing so hard in my hotel room I fell off the bed. True!) And his Aldair series published by DAW back in the early 80′s is one of the oddest fantasy quest novels you will ever read – very much like what would happen if you threw the comic strip Pearls Before Swine into any fantasy trilogy and stirred. Read his books.