A rather episodic time travel novel switching between three different time zones/alternative histories. Quite a good idea but I didn't find any of the characters realised apart from the 'hero' in one and the man who befriends him in the pre Colombian type society where he ends up. ( )

Time travel back to North America before the arrival of Europeans. A real page turner, although the parallel side stories about the archeological dig trying to puzzle out what happened and the soldiers who were also sent back in time were less satisfying. Recommended though and would like to read more by Wadrop. Seems like mostly he wrote short stories. ( )

Howard Waldrop's quirky and off-the-wall short stories have always been a great source of pleasure; 'Them Bones', one of his few novels, is obviously cut from the same cloth but the quirkiness is tempered - perhaps a bit too much - by the sense that Waldrop was setting out here to Write A Novel; and in the course of all the careful work needed to make a novel and to carry it off convincingly, it seems to me that some of the essence of his short stories got lost.

The premise is promising. We start with an archaeologist, working on a dig amongst the remains of the Mound Builder culture in Louisiana, in the 1920s. She comes across something that shouldn't be there; the remains of a horse, in an archaeological layer dating from a time when horses were not known on the North American continent. Then she finds what killed it - modern bullets.

We are then switched to the viewpoint of a time traveller, a pathfinder for a larger expeditionary force, stepping out of his portal into pre-Columbian America. Which comes as a bit of a shock, as he was expecting to land in the 1930s. The expedition he was pathfinding for never emerges from the portal. As the time portal is only one-way, he sets out to find civilisation. He meets, and builds a life with, indigenous peoples, and becomes a part of their community. He also finds that not only is he not in the time he expected, but there are other problems as well...

A third strand shows us what happened to the expedition, told through a diary and official documents. The three strands come together in not unexpected ways; but Waldrop manages the process perfectly well. Along the way, we begin to find out the motivation for the time expedition. Where this novel falls down is in the structure and pacing. I found myself fairly ripping through the story, because it gave me a lot of impetus to find out what was going to happen next; I'm certain there were things I missed in that process. And yet, I had the sense towards the end that, having carefully and meticulously planned the novel out, Waldrop painted himself somewhat into a corner. In the last third of the novel, one of our p.o.v. protagonists travels on foot to a neighbouring settlement; he makes his escape pursued by an angry (and armed) mob. He then has to get home; and that sequence becomes quite extended and a bit unbalanced. I got the feeling that Waldrop was a bit taken aback by how far he'd taken his protagonist and how much ground he'd have to cover to get him safely back to his village. Sadly, this dragged a little.

Characterisation, though, is excellent. In particular, there is one secondary character, who I got quite attached to, who sounds to me like Chief Dan George, the First Nation chief who became well known for playing wise but laconic native Americans in films, particularly 'Little Big Man' and Clint Eastwood's 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'. If this be so, his was a good model to emulate. Even the officer filling out the reports in the expeditionary force that is stranded in the past manages to come through as a real person rather than as a mere functionary.

I can recommend Waldrop's writing wholeheartedly; but this novel is likely to be met with indulgence by those who like his work.Those who know him not would be better advised to seek out his short stories. ( )

The hardback edition of this book is one of my most treasured possessions (purchased, if I remember correctly, at my first Octocon.) Howard Waldrop's short stories blew me away, but this was my first head-wrecking, brain-buzzing encounter with a writer who bends fiction and time and space and history into equally gonzo shapes.

Them Bones has three separate strands of war, archaeology and adventures amongst the Amerindian Moundbuilders of the Mississipi as refugees from a dying world try to save their own future and instead doom another, while a team tries to save the past and preserve the truth against rising floodwaters. This is a slim book, and the prose is polished til it shines, but it still covers epic ground as the slow scale of the tragedy becomes clear. Not quite like anything else you'll ever read. Then find his stories, which are something else again. ( )

My usual reaction to reading a Waldrop story is yes, it's obvious he did a lot of research, but what was the point, why should I care?

This novel has something usually lacking in Waldrop -- emotion. It's a fast-paced, poignant read of time travelers stranded in two versions of the American Moundbuilder culture: one from our history and one in a world where Rome lost the Second Punic War. Waldrop does his usual thorough research, and here he actually gives us, rather than his usual bizarre juxtapositions of characters, some likeable people whose struggles and joys seem very real -- to us, the reader, but almost invisible to the archeaologists from 1929 who study some odd mounds in Louisiania. This is a look at lives buried by time and ultimately, like all lives, capable of being seen and felt only in the imagination.

Waldrop fans will like this.

More importantly, even if you're sometimes annoyed by Waldrop, you'll like this. ( )