This is one of my favorite authors, and this set of short stories is one more reason to love this guy. I esp loved the title story, "Letting Loose The Hounds". In a dry but funny way, he captures the essence of the spirit of his characters, and his stories always have somewhat of a surprise ending. Quirky, sarcastic, real and unforgettable....... ( )

i so very rarely find a collection of short stories, either by one person or many, where every single one included is powerful and well written and completely worth reading. this is that rare book.

there is a lot of humor in these pages, but most of these stories, at their base, are about how people cope with filling in the space that someone leaves when they die or are taken away (like through custody). there is at least a dull ache in all of the stories, and often the pain is much more present than that. it's never overdone or anything other than poignant, utterly realistic, and beautifully written.

i generally marvel at how an author can invest a reader so deeply in a short story that's, say, 15 or 20 pages long. in this collection udall has a story that made me both chuckle and cry (not just tear up) that was one page long.

i wish i was still in touch with the person who recommended me this book so i could thank her, and i wish that udall wrote faster because even though this first of his books is from 1997, he only has 2 others.

so good. ( )

Brady Udall’s stories have humor, pain, loss and trouble rolled up together into a tumbleweed. In Midnight Raid a large Indian delivers a pygmy goat in the middle of the night to his son, who now lives with his ex-wife and her husband. He takes time to tell their neighbor to quiet down on the way.

In the title story, Goody Yates wanders away from a dental office in a daze after having four molars extracted. He gets picked up by a man named Custer and helps him get revenge on the man Custer’s wife left him for. A Mormon hell raiser in Buckeye the Elder gets close to a family of devout Baptists when he dates the daughter. A city boy returns to the ranch where he was raised – in the place where his father died – with an idea of getting revenge on the man responsible.

Letting Loose the Hounds has ex-wives, dead wives, dead fathers, dead children, and the people left behind that ache for them, and just ache in general. The sadness in each story is leavened with comedy and freshness. ( )

Read me. ( )

http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/2003/02/letting-loose-the-hounds/ ( )