RIP Harlan Ellison (1934-2018)

The inconceivable has happened: we now live in a world without Harlan Ellison. It is not exaggeration on my part when I tell you that he was perhaps the most important writer for me, an author whose words and ideas were apocalyptic when I began reading him in the mid-1980s (thanks to Stephen King's Danse Macabre, which I believe is where many fans of my generation first learned about him). My library includes more books, both in paperback and hardcover, by him than by any other writer (and I'm still searching for various editions).

I can still recall the excitement with which I read his classic collections Strange Wine, Deathbird Stories, and No Doors, No Windows these many years later. And of course it wasn't just the stories! No, it was the introductory essays and think pieces and forewords and such that really opened up my head, that put me in touch with a righteous anger and passion that I had never encountered before. Harlan Ellison pulled back the curtain on the writer's life and duty and I had never seen those workings before. I will never be able to thank him for that.

Below is an old blog-post of mine from 2007 that only scratches the surface of how I feel about Harlan.

Since the death of Tom Snyder several weeks ago, I got to thinking again about "the irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison," who Snyder interviewed famously many times over the years. One of my most favoritest writers ever of all time, I was introduced to Ellison's writing when I was around 14 or 15, when I borrowed Strange Wine from the local library after reading about Harlan in Stephen King's Danse Macabre. And in those many years since, I've amassed nearly 30 copies of his books, most all of which are long out of print but can be found through diligence and patience scouring used bookstores. 

Deathbird Stories, a collection of his early ’70s works, is one I had not read in some time. It's essential Ellison. It contains some of his tightest, most controlled works: moody and enigmatic, laced with an existential dread while displaying an unnerving knack for an ugly, yet appropriate, climax, like a crack of the whip—or a snap in the neck. The collection is subtitled “A Pantheon of Modern Gods,” which is the height of irony—is there anything less modern than a god? That’s exactly the point: people are still desperate to worship, to prostate themselves before some imagined superior power or any strange artifact that can somehow impart meaning upon this random and unexplainable life.

And Ellison, despite his compassion for such poor souls, spares none in these moral fables. "I am a religious man," states the melancholic protagonist of "Corpse." "One would think that would count for something. Apparently it does not." Then there's the gut-wrenching "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," in which Ellison recreates the chilling murder of Kitty Genovese as an act of sacrifice to a new and terrifying god. "The Deathbird," the final story, is an emotionally exhausting reimagining of the origin of evil—in the form of a multiple-choice final exam.

I can still remember the first time I read these stories, a hot summer in 1988 sitting in the stifling office of the gas station I worked at, filling my head with Ellison’s rants and ravings and obscure references that didn’t make me feel stupid or inferior—no, it was exciting, it made me feel like I had a lot to learn, and I had better get caught up fast. As he states in the intro, “As the God of Time so aptly put it, It’s later than you think.”

Snakes... Why'd It Have to Be Snakes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hot Blood, ed. by Jeff Gelb & Lonn Friend (1989): Heaven's on Fire

It's a no-brainer that horror and sex  are a popular pairing. A thrill is a thrill as far as our central nervous systems are concerned, and we can look to Freud and other psychologists and philosophers to intellectualize the seeming contradiction. As for as our beloved horror fiction goes, vampirism is the most obvious, and dare I say popular, manifestation of this theme. Fangs penetrating flesh and the sucking out of lifeblood barely counts as symbolism! But for 1989's Hot Blood anthology  from Pocket Books (alternately subtitled Tales of Provocative Horror or Tales of Erotic Horror), editors Jeff Gelb and Lonn Friend have chosen no real vampire stories... which I think was smart. Other horny creatures are slinking through the night, sure, but no Draculas or Lestats here. There've always been anthologies of great tales of vampire action, but the "erotic horror" market was, as a separate publishing entity back in the '80s, barely existent. Way to find a hole and fill it guys.

The authors included are a veritable who's-who of '80s horror fiction, which meant I was on top of this release immediately back in the day, although I don't recall reading it all. However I certainly never associated McCammon, Etchison, or Wilson with erotic horror, but I was willing to give 'em a shot. I liked seeing Harlan Ellison in a horror anthology, as his stories of adult relationships seemed always tinged with a loneliness and a darkness that, if presented just so, could be horrific. Ramsey Campbell had already produced his collection Scared Stiff, while Gary Brandner, Ray Garton, and Graham Masterton had all written overtly sexual horror fiction (hell Masterton was once an editor at Penthouse and had written a handful of popular sex manuals!). So, on we go...

 

First up is "Changeling" from old pal Mr. Masterton.  Set-up you've heard: Englishman away from home on business, meets too-hot-to-believe woman who - shock of shocks! - wants to fuck him. He can't stop himself. What horror ensues may be too literal but Masterton's  approach to sexual politics and gender identity - "Because it doesn't matter how beautiful a woman you are, or how rich a woman you are... Not even the poorest, most downtrodden guy in the whole world has to endure what women have to endure" - seems almost prescient today. A solid start to the anthology.

Signet '75... but of course

"The Thang" from all-American boy Robert McCammon kinda comes off like EC Comics porn: it's juvenile and silly, there's no reason for the extreme punishment for a guy who's just lookin' to... well. I think other readers will like it more than I did, though, because it does exhibit a ridiculous kind of charm. At the other end of the spectrum is  Richard Christian Matheson's "Mr. Right," which exists in that uncomfortable world of non-PC desires and behavior. Like most of his fiction, it's barely three pages long, but packs an illicit wallop. Indeed, one woman's horrifying Mr. Wrong...

Not all the stories are original to Hot Blood; Gelb and Friend looked backward as well. From 1962, "The Likeness of Jenny" by the estimable Richard Matheson is a cool, calm and plainly written story of (prefiguring King tales like "Nona" and "Strawberry Spring") an undeniable criminal urge. The comeuppance is implied, and the more chilling for that.

Major SF/F author Theodore Sturgeon appears with "Vengeance Is." (period included), a 1980 story that might be the best in the anthology. Told with muscle and imagination mostly through dialogue, it's a harrowing story of sexual assault, with a perfect reveal in the final line, like so much of vintage genre fiction. Modern readers might think it a bit gimmicky, but I felt Sturgeon's style mitigated that. Another 1980 tale from a major SF/F/and whatever else author is Harlan Ellison's "Footsteps," written in the front window of a bookstore (a stunt he performed many times). Claire is a woman of the world, and now is in the City of Light, preparing for a meal...

Her orgasm was accompanied by a howl that rose up over the Seine and was lost in the night sky above Paris where the golden sovereign of the full moon swallowed it, glowing just a bit brighter with passion.

 

 1989 chapterbook

Unmistakably Ellison, it is beautifully written, darkly witty, expertly conveying Claire's loneliness and fear and hunger. A winner for sure, even with an ending that might leave some scratching their heads.

Masques editor and prolific author J.N. Williamson gives us "The Unkindest Cut," which concerns a vasectomy *shiver*. Not bad, but it simply reminded me of  an anecdote Stephen King tells in Danse Macabre about an old Arch Oboler radio program and an unfortunate day at the dentist... Editor Gelb himself contributes "Suzie Sucks," in which we get a pure example of a primal male fear (an image that appears in a couple stories here, bet you can guess what).

"Aunt Edith" by the recently-late Gary Brandner, whose first novel The Howling was powered by a very strong and effective erotic charge, sets up a scary/sexy scenario. A young man meets his girlfriend's voodoo-practicing aunt, who turns out to be well-nigh irresistible. It all ends as a dirty tasteless joke but it actually works. F. Paul Wilson, who I'm not a fan of, presents "Ménages à Trois," about a crippled old woman and the young man and young woman who tend to her, and her shocking manipulation of their teenage desires. Not bad, standard '80s fare with that little zing at the very end.

Several entries I was familiar with: Dennis Etchison's story from '73 before as it was included in his collection The Dark Country. May I quote myself? "I adored 'Daughter of the Golden West,' which begins as a Bradbury-esque fantasy of three college-age men (the collection is dedicated to Bradbury) and ends with a revelation of one of California's greatest tragedies." Exactly the same goes for Les Daniels's "They're Coming for You" (in Cutting Edge), Lisa Tuttle's "Bug House" (in Nest of Nightmares), and David J. Schow's "Red Light" (in Lost Angels). All fine, good stuff!

"Punishments" is the most depressing story, another of Ray Garton's broadsides against the oppressive Seventh-Day Adventist faith he was raised in (and later rejected). No stranger to the mingling of sex and horror - not erotic horror - Garton presents a sad, fatalistic short that reveals how abuse is handed down, how it exploits ignorance, how its effects pervert a healthy curiosity, how the innocent are made to be guilty through not fault of their own. It pulls no punches. Ouch.

Other stories by the usual horror suspects - Campbell, Bloch, Skipp and Spector, Rex Miller - who twine sex and death in their own recognizable styles, the effects of which range from quite good to simply okay. Then there was the sensitive if perplexing "Carnal House" from the generally reliable Steve Rasnic Tem... necrophilia right? Oh well.

2004 Pinnacle Books reprint

Successful enough that it became the first of a long-running series, Hot Blood provides decent horror entertainment, with a smattering of true gems. These gems understand the id of our sexual selves from experience, not just fruitless imaginings. Several of the stories, while not outright duds, combine sex and horror in a clumsy, even trite, manner and aren't erotic at all (provocative, I suppose, yes). Some use an easy narrative trick, to greater and lesser effect, to get men understand what it's like to be a woman, that of physical or emotional transference. And I certainly would have appreciated a Thomas Tessier or Poppy Z. Brite entry (Tessier appears in a later volume, and female writers appear as well), two writers whose tales of eroticized horror are smart, sly, and modern, and lack that regrettable obsessive adolescent tone that mars the underwhelming stories here. But rereading it 20-odd years later, I still think Hot Blood is a worthwhile addition to the groaning shelves of '80s horror anthologies.

Borderlands, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone (1990): Wake Up in the Night with a Fear So Real

An admission: I almost didn't read this one back in the day. The cover art of a skeleton driver at the wheel almost turned me off Borderlands (Avon, Nov 1990), the first in the anthology series edited by Thomas F. Monteleone. At that time I was just so over skulls and skeletons on covers, thinking that whatever was inside was just as cliched and tiresome. But I finally succumbed to that wonderful blurb from Peter Straub, had already enjoyed Wagner, Klein, and Lansdale, and so found Borderlands to be a terror treasure trove, stuffed with inventive, colorful, eclectic stories I remember fondly - well, I remember fondly that I enjoyed them almost 25 years ago. I've been wanting to revisit and review Borderlands since I began this blog more than three years ago....would it hold up on this reread?

Some of the titles have jumped around in my head for ages, as did a few of the authors names, both because some became favorites and others because they seemed to become nothing. What Borderlands offers is stories that feature all kinds and styles of horror, from the non-supernatural to the otherworldly, from the quiet whisper to the shockingly violent, from dark fantasy to urban realism, psychological thriller to fairy tale, gritty suspense to gothic decadence. There's something here for the proverbial everyone. This means you.

The tone is set, wisely, with the first story, "The Calling." It's by the recently late David B. Silva, who edited one of the essential horror magazines of the 1980s, The Horror Show (many of the writers in this antho sold their first stories to Silva). Grim and despairing and all too real: a man caring for his mother as she slowly succumbs to cancer. This is horror of humiliation and embarrassment, failure and resentment. With a delicate yet graphic touch, Silva deftly explores what we choose to ignore. The ending is the essence of horror. And I just learned "The Calling" won the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for best short story; no surprise there.

"Scartaris, June 28th" is Harlan Ellison in Deathbird Stories (1975) mode: What happens to gods after their last believers die? Here Ellison's anger and impatience are tempered by a more forgiving, more understanding nature. A nameless man wanders the globe, giving a cessation of suffering to some, simply a hard time to others who deserve to be confronted about their outmoded beliefs. Ellison drops arcane comparative mythology knowledge on the reader and it'll help if you know who Arne Saknussemm is. Ellison's story is the most sophisticated and ambitious of works here and it contains some of his finest-ever writing.

(Speaking of Ellison, Borderlands was also my very first introduction to Poppy Z. Brite, whom Ellison lauded to the sky and back. "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" is a goth-punk update of Lovecraft's "The Hound," both factors endearing her to me at once. I wrote about this story here.)

1994 reprint from White Wolf, cover art by Dave McKean 

It was a pleasure to reread tales I'd half-remembered: "Muscae Volitantes" by Chet Williamson, but mostly unforgotten since I've been plagued by the titular condition for years. A husband's lover threatens to reveal the truth to the wife. Surely the husband can see his way out of this untenable position? And things get wonderfully, maniacally surreal in "Oh What a Swell Guy I Am," a story Monteleone happened upon out of the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts he received. Jeffrey Osier, a regular contributor to small press mags like Deathrealm and The Horror Show, possesses a strong, passionate prose style; his bizarre images are conveyed fully formed, which resonated uncomfortably with me. In a good way. The title... is literal. Oh man, is it literal.

A quick stop in lycanthropy land, in which Les Daniels upends who's monster and who's man; like his other fiction, "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" uses standard horror tropes with wit and irony but is no less the horrific for it. Pure entertainment. John Shirley's "Delia and the Dinner Party" is part child's-eye view of the titular event and splatterpunk reveal, while Nina Kiriki Hoffman's creepy short-short "Stillborn" reminded me just a bit of the underseen 1990 film The Reflecting Skin, children obsessed with... well, no spoilers!
 

Ed Gorman's (above) "The Man in the Long Black Sedan" has a family man in the grip of madness - or utter calm rationality? - confront a most innocuous villain in a motel room. Gorman is more known for his crime fiction but wrote quite a few pulp-horror novels under the name Daniel Ransom. Likewise, "Suicide Note" by Lee Moler isn't necessarily horror but more dark erotic suspense, a man obsessed with carnality till the very end of life.

In a more general vein, two looming specters over horror fiction of this era appear in Borderlands: religious fundamentalists and sexual abuse/incest. Today these topics seem a little shelf-worn in fiction, tropes that inexperienced or lazy writers can trot out and use to push readers' buttons all too easily (it's not just in genre lit either you can be sure). But when these themes starting appearing in horror fiction it signaled efforts to make horror more serious, more real, more involved with the world at large than retreating into the vagaries of the imagination à la Lovecraft, say. These themes date Borderlands but negate it little.

Bizarre hands indeed

Fortunately their appearances here are for the most part handled with intelligence. And, yes, irreverence: Joe R. Lansdale's "By Bizarre Hands" trades in both businesses, riding the edge of irreverent black humor and down-home horror in his own inimitable style as a pedophiliac preacher/conman drives the dusty roads of Texas looking for simple-minded girls he can "save" with the Good Lord's help. Joe's story ends Borderlands on a very high note, no surprise there. And "The Good Book" from G. Wayne Miller works the Lord works in mysterious ways just right, I thought.

A handful of contributions leave the reader spooked but bewildered, such as "The Pounding Room" by Bentley Little (above). An author whose only work I've read have been this story, twice now. Neither read has gotten me interested in reading more of his stuff, but that's me. Obviously lots of readers like the inexplicability of this story, this style, revealing the unbelievable horrors that lurk behind, beyond, beneath the mundane. But to what end? Perhaps that's the point: the horror of incomprehension. He would become one of the big paperback horror writers of the turn of the century but oh well.

Nazis, chemical pollution, and the nightmare of a homeowner's lawn care make John DeChancie's "The Grass of Rememberance" an intriguing read; the connection of these disparate elements didn't quite come together for me. "Alexandra," from '80s anthology essential Charles L. Grant, was quite good but again, the ultimate intent seemed to dance away from me at the last moment. A subtle and powerful woman befriends an Oxrun Station physician. Cool, but you all know Charlie: it's what he leaves out that is probably the most important aspect of his fiction. Sometimes I wish he'd just left it in.

Works from my faves: several times Karl Edward Wagner (above) has written sensitively of the fallout of the Vietnam War; in "But You'll Never Follow Me" a veteran still beholden to his war-torn battlefield ethic must now deal with his aging, ailing parents. It's a sad, sad story, without a trace of the unreal, and the climax hits a lot harder today than it did in 1990. Read it, and see what I mean. Ouch.

In "Evelyn Grace," by Thomas Tessier, a young man feels up a female corpse in a funeral home. Then things get weird. This one ends with very nearly the most objectionable word in the English language... and it is oh so right. Another one outta the park for Tessier; he's batting 1.000 here at TMHF. The ever-welcome-but-rarely-seen T.E.D. Klein contributed one of his few short stories of the '90s, "Ladder." Fate is a gamesman, a wordsmith, trailing an Irishman as he travels the globe. Klein's sense of place and locale is impeccable, and his brand of Borgesian wordplay tickle the intellect but unsettle it too; surely we are not gamepieces for an idle god...

One of the more infamous short stories of its day - the impact of which I've never forgotten even if the specifics were vague - "Stephen" ruminates upon bodily disfigurement in several disturbing ways, none of which resort to the supernatural. Elizabeth Massie (above) knows that while it was once proper to look away from the physically unfortunate, we all want to stare. And stare she does, unblinking, sympathetic, but without pity. Anne Zaccaria volunteers at a nursing home for the disabled and learns to confront her own deformities - not of the body but of her mind, her past, her family - thanks to the title character. "Stephen" is perhaps the most emotionally wrenching tale in Borderlands, never faltering in places where a lesser writer may have stumbled into grotesque tastelessness - well, I suppose there's some grotesque tastelessness here, but that's life. Excellent stuff, and another Bram Stoker Award winner, for best long fiction.

When I solicited material for what I hope will be the first of many volumes, I made it clear I didn't want stories that employed any of the traditional symbols and images of the genre. I wanted writers to expand the envelope, to look beyond the usual metaphors, and bring me something new... They are all extremely well-written. Some stories will dazzle, while others will quietly subvert, but they will all reach down and grab for the soft parts.

So says Tom Monteleone (above) in his intro, and he really deserves kudos for his editing skill here - and I don't have room to go into everything included. There is an air of conviction in all the stories; every one means business, even the "lesser" stories. No juvenile hijinks mar the carefully crafted terrors, no lapses in the write stuff to break the spells cast. Even the tales that get under the skin in a surreal yet inexplicable manner are serious in intent and purpose but without that sense of literariness of, say, 1988's Prime Evil; it's not so high-minded as that anthology. Borderlands (and the subsequent volumes, of which I own only the second today) promises to take us far, and it does, oh it does. What you will see there you've not seen elsewhere, but it's a one-way trip. So be warned: you'll have to find your way back on your own.

On Vacation

On vacation out of town, of course I've got my huge book list, and here are just some of the paperbacks I hope to acquire - so wish me luck guys. See you in about two weeks!