Review
My Cold Mad Father
2018
Diplodocus Press
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #14 (December 2018).
One book that was announced in the early 1990s by the late Pulphouse Press was Somtow’s collection My Cold Mad Father, which was intended to be the final volume, #30, of their acclaimed ‘Author’s Choice’ series. However Pulphouse folded just before the collection came out, and there it ended for the next twenty-six years, so a quarter of a century late is certainly better than never.
The collection is themed around ‘fathers and sons’ and contains four stories that may be familiar to aficionados but less so to new readers. ‘Kingdoms in the Sky’ is the first tale, set in Peru, and tells of an American father who requires his son to participate in an ancient and terrifying sacrificial ceremony. Next is ‘Fire from the Wine-Dark Sea’, in which a tormented poet with twin sons meets Odysseus on the shore of Cape Cod. Third is ‘The Bad News Express’ (retitled from ‘A Child of Earth and Starry Heaven’) in which a teenage boy hallucinates playing a game of baseball with Death on a train from Greece to both save the soul of his father and keep his family together. Finally we have one of Somtow’s best and most beautifully realised tales, ‘Darker Angels’, about a teenage soldier in the American Civil War who meets a Haitian witch doctor and who helps him overcome some dark history with his father. This collection was intended to be the first place this masterful story appeared in print – it turned out to be the fifth. All of which illustrates that historically the path to getting one’s work published can often be anything but smooth; with today’s technology, however, this book shows how easily taking the self-publishing PoD/e-book route can connect acclaimed authors with new readers.
