Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree
The Legend of Charlie Fish, Josh Rountree (Tachyon 978-1-61696-394-1, $16.95, 192pp, tp) July 2023.
It might seem that a writer as unusual as Waldrop would have limited influence in much more than a technical sense; I’ve talked to a number of writers over the years who were fascinated by how he did what he did in structuring stories. But is there something like a Waldrop tradition in terms of more than technique? I’d hazard a guess that Josh Rountree is an example of just such a tradition. It’s not just that Waldrop wrote the introduction for Rountree’s first story collection back in 2008, or that Rountree’s new novel The Legend of Charlie Fish features a Texas setting and introduces an iconic pop culture gill-man into the actual historical catastrophe of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, or that a classic flim-flam man shows up as one of the villains and a nine-year-old sharpshooter as one of the heroes. It’s also that Rountree meticulously manages his two narrative voices, those of a loner named Floyd Betts and a 12-year-old girl with witchlike powers named Nellie Abernathy, and that the tone can shift unexpectedly from Western-style violence to a kind of wistful elegance that, while beautifully written, at times borders on sentimentality.
When Betts returns to his hometown to bury his abusive and alienated father, he meets Nellie and her brother Hank – that sharpshooter kid – recently orphaned by a fire that killed their parents and was likely set by hostile locals, who viewed the mother as a witch. Appalled by the cruelty and contempt with which even the local preacher treats the kids, Betts decides to take them back to his rooming house in Galveston, run by his friend Abigail. Along the way, they rescue a strange gill-man from being captured and exploited by a snake-oil salesman and his goon, who soon become their nemeses. While the gill-man can apparently speak no human language, Nellie can communicate with him using her ‘‘whisper voice,’’ and Hank promptly dubs him Charlie Fish.
The problem is, they arrive in Galveston only a couple of days ahead of the hurricane, which Rountree reminds us in an afterword remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history (and which coincidentally was featured in another recent Gothic Western, Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Silverberg Business). While there’s nothing unusual about using a vast natural catastrophe to literally wash away unresolved plot points (it’s the nature of disaster tales), Rountree’s description of the storm is nothing less than harrowing, and the whole affair is framed by chapters narrated by an older Nellie in 1932, as another hurricane approaches. Her voice, which is that of a resourceful and scrappy teenager filtered through the memories of the haunted survivor she has become, lends a surprising resonance to a tale that is more complex than it at first seems – which itself, I suppose, is a bit Waldroppian.
Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, with a similar set for the 1960s forthcoming. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.
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