February 28 - "Blue Yodel"

“Blue Yodel”
by Scott Snyder
Voodoo Heart (2006)

* * * * * (Excellent) Realistic

Preston Bristol has been chasing the silver blimp with six white tail fins ever since his girl Claire took off in it one chilly day. Rambling across the country in his Model T, Pres seeks the elusive blimp while thinking back to Niagara Falls and their life leading up to this cross-country quest.

This was another collection I had been anxious to start when I had the time to read its lengthier stories. I couldn’t be more impressed with the story and the writing. The dialogue here firmly grounds this story in the past, the early 1900’s. There’s nothing flashy about this dialogue; it just rings with the truth of the time and the characters and the emotion. It has that rapid-fire give and take pattern of the time that I’ve always enjoyed in those old screwball comedies. And the dialogue is but one part of many that make this story enjoyable. I also found the quest, the romance, and the fishing for barrel riders from the Falls to be so very entertaining. There aren’t many stories in this collection, but even half of them are as good as this tale, then I’m in for a treat.

I had to share this brief passage to give you an idea of the beauty of these sentences:

“The rope felt a part of him, the blimp too, and for a moment when he gazed up at its body, sunlight gleaming off its silver skin, what he saw floating up there was not a blimp at all but an extension of himself, his own heart, swelled to bursting and released from his chest. His heart, swinging him through the sky. He thought about all the places and wonders he’d seen these past months, and felt a strange gratitude toward Claire for taking him all this way.”

I feel a strange gratitude for finding such a great story in what I hope will be a wonderful collection and introduction to a new author.