Night of the Cooters

A Locus Award–winning collection featuring the story “Night of the Cooters,” produced by George R. R. Martin as a short film starring Vincent D’Onofrio.

Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award–winning author Howard Waldrop wrote amazing short fiction that ran the gamut from alternative history to pulpy space adventures. He was able to turn his meticulous research into compulsively readable tales featuring iconic literary figures, aliens, and comic-book-style heroes, capturing the culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

“Night of the Cooters” is Waldrop’s take on H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which a small Texas town faces a Martian invasion. Meanwhile, a new member of the Baker Street Irregulars joins Sherlock Holmes in investigating what could be a Jack the Ripper murder in “The Adventure of the Grinder’s Whistle.” The first story in George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards shared-world series, “Thirty Minutes over Broadway!” follows the adventures of Jetboy, a teenage fighter pilot phenom whose post-World War II career includes stopping a madman from destroying New York City. 

Ten stories in all round out a classic science fiction collection that’s “magical, beautifully written, enormous fun to read” (Michael Swanwick).

“There are plenty of good writers still among us, but there will never be another Howard Waldrop . . . Night of the Cooters is a wide-ranging collection with all sorts of stories, linked only by their high quality.” —Reactor