Shatterday by Harlan Ellison
Tachyon, $14.95, 318pp, tp, 9781892391483. SF/F/H collection.
There’s a reason everyone talks about Harlan Ellison, and it isn’t just because he’s done has damnedest to make himself a memorable character. The reason is that he’s a damned good writer. As a writer, I read his stories and say “Damn, he makes it look so easy,” but when I sit at my own keyboard, I know full well that he makes it look easy, but it certainly isn’t.
This book is a collection of stories from the late 1970s, and except for a few very small bits, they all read as if they could have been written last year. This is timeless stuff, speaking to (mostly) the dark within each of us, but also at times uplifting, light, and funny.
When I read, my internal narrator has a very neutral voice: it’s no one and everyone, that unaccented midwest accent that used to be de rigeur for newscasters. But occasionally (and this is in large part based on getting to know many of the authors whose books I read), the narrator will take on the author’s voice. It doesn’t happen often, usually with words that sound just like they came out of the author’s mouth. In this collection, it happened on page 53, in Ellison’s introduction to “Flop Sweat.” In the introduction, he writes about accepting the challenge of writing a short story to present on the air on a live radio show, and writing it all in the seven hours preceding the show. He talks about his mad drive over to the studio, as the host on the radio is saying Harlan Ellison isn’t here yet, but he’s on his way. And he yells at the radio “I’m coming, godammit, I’m coming.” In those words, I heard Ellison’s voice, and for the rest of the book, I wasn’t reading it: he was telling me his stories. This is just a long aside to urge you who haven’t yet tried to meet the authors of the stuff we call speculative fiction to make the effort to get out to a convention or three (see our convention reviews for more on the subject). They’re a great place to meet authors, which will in turn make their books a far more rewarding experience.
So, back to the collection. This is a collection of 16 kick-ass stories, some a little weaker than the rest, but all of them worthy of your attention. And his introductions to the stories definitely add the feel of what he was doing writing these stories, the backgrounds of how they came to be.
“All the Lies that Are My Life” is the longest story in the collection, and the one that felt most like he was simply sitting there telling me the story (the writing is that facile: even though he uses big words and occasionally convoluted constructions, he doesn’t let the writing get in the way of telling the story). It’s a wonderful tale of the life-long relationship between two writers at different levels of public acclaim, and though the MacGuffin remains hidden (I fell the same frustration as the narrator: what the hell is it?!), it is a satisfying story. Damn you, Jimmy.
“Jeffty is Five” is a very moving story of lost innocence, and what we might to do recapture it. Very sad, but then, many in this collection are either sad or horrific.
“How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?” has a brilliant example of authorial infallability, which made me want to simultaneously wring his neck and applaud at the sheer audacity of it. And it comes in the midst of a very funny story about Enoch Mirren doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.
If you’ve ever been screwed over by a company and gotten absolutely no satisfaction from the customer disservice department, you’ll need to read “The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge.” Ellison has a very dark, almost scary side when he wants to let it out, and this revenge fantasy is by no means pleasant or uplifting.
“All the Birds Come Home to Roost” is a nicely low-key story about meeting someone from your past, but Ellison has a knack for turning it into a quietly terrifying tale of memory and predestination.
“Flop Sweat,” the story he wrote one afternoon to read on the radio that night, may have been a bit more horrific in his own voice over the airwaves, but it definitely stands the test of time (do you really want to listen to that off-the-wall talk radio show?).
I very much recommend this collection. And if you’re browsing in a bookstore, Ellison is even clever enough to, on the back cover, show you how to browse through the book to decide whether or not you want to buy it (he points out the good lines that should grab your attention: they grabbed mine).
Contents: Introduction “Mortal Dreads”; “Jeffty is Five”; “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?”; “Flop Sweat”; “Would You Do it for a Penny? (in collaboration with Haskell Barkin); “The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge”; “Shoppe Keeper”; “All the Lies That Are My Life”; “Django”; “Count the Clock That Tells the Time”; “In the Fourth Year of the War”; “Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage”; “All the Birds Come Home to Roost”; “Opium”; “The Other Eye of Polyphemus”; “The Executioner of the Malformed Children”; and “Shatterday.”