In honor of Harlan Ellison's 84th birthday, I'm reposting a pair of book reviews I wrote for THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION regarding three of his most recent short story collections. These two reviews originally appeared in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION #295 (March 2013) and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION #335 (July 2016)....
Still Pulling This Train:
Harlan Ellison’s PULLING A TRAIN and GETTING IN THE WIND
by Robert Guffey
Bearing titles with deliciously lascivious double entendres,
Harlan Ellison’s latest story collections—Pulling
a Train: Violent Stories of Naked
Passions and Getting in the
Wind: More Stories By a Very Young
Harlan Ellison—are dark twins linked by the common themes of erotic
violence and violent eroticism.
Though well-known for having written such classic short stories
as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), “I Have No Mouth, and I
Must Scream” (1967), “Grail” (1981), and “The Man Who Rowed Christopher
Columbus Ashore” (1992), Ellison began his career in the late 1950s churning
out penny-a-word pulp stories for men’s magazines such as Guilty, Manhunt and Trapped.
Considered pornographic upon their original 1959 paperback release, under
the title Sex Gang, the stories
featured in Pulling a Train and Getting in the Wind have been resurrected
by Brooklyn-based Kicks Books publisher Miriam Linna (a former musician who
once performed with such punk bands as The Cramps and Nervous Rex). Intended as nothing more than space-filler
for long-deceased “he-man publications” such as Knave, Rogue and Caper, these tales have risen like a
perverted phoenix from the puritanical ashes of 1950s moral strictures. Both books are fascinating time
capsules. What must have seemed like
standard softcore porn in 1959 now emerge in the 21st century as historical
records of the cultural mores of midcentury America and the ever-shifting
borders between what’s considered decency and degeneracy in mainstream culture.
If titillation alone had been the main impetus of these
stories, then reprinting them now would be a waste of time. But Harlan Ellison, even in his early 20s,
was too talented to take the easy way out of any assignment no matter how
perfunctory it may have seemed at the time.
In his entertaining introduction to Pulling
a Train (entitled “Inescapable Cemeteries”), Ellison calls these “zilch” stories
“crude,” and of course they are. And yet
the overall tone of the stories are
permeated with an offbeat world weariness, genuine schadenfreude, unusual for a young writer fresh out of Ohio who somehow
found himself in the 1950s Big Apple cranking out one-handed reads to make ends
meet. It’s this curiously dark tone that
lifts the material above its utilitarian roots.
The centerpiece of Pulling
a Train is a lurid novella entitled “Sex Gang,” a hardboiled crime story
about an eighteen-year-old thug named Deek Cullen who seems to be at the end of
his rope when we’re first introduced to him and quickly descends—inch by
painful inch—deeper into darkness as the tale progresses. Cullen’s desperation is palatable and effectively
conveyed through Ellison’s staccato, stripped-down prose as the protagonist
becomes unwillingly involved with an all-girl gang who spend their empty days
stalking the mean streets of New York
and raping virile young men like Deek in their spare time. Though the novella was “written for a buck”
(as Ellison says in his intro) at lightning speed, nonetheless one can’t help
but feel for Cullen’s confusion and his utter inability to escape the tragic
fate that awaits him. Ostensibly aimed
at male readers, from the perspective of the present day one might nonetheless
interpret this quasi-noir tale of sudden and near-inexplicable violence as a
proto-feminist manifesto, Valerie-Solanas-style, almost ten years ahead of its
time. Its blood-spattered plot twists,
interspersed with tough-talking knockout Amazons, prefigure the self-aware,
self-mocking tone of Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film, Death Proof. Indeed, while
reading “Sex Gang,” I couldn’t help but think that this is the stuff Quentin
Tarantino probably dreams about writing.
(I also couldn’t help but think that “Sex Gang” would make a fascinating
21st century film, if adapted properly—or perhaps “improperly” would
be the apt word in this context.)
The most intriguing stories in both Pulling a Train and Getting
in the Wind are those that merge pornography with noir strains: the aforementioned “Sex Gang,” “A Girl Named
Poison,” “Dead Wives Don’t Cheat,” and “Carrion Flesh.” All four of these pessimistic tales have not
been in print since their original appearance in 1959 and are worth the price
of admission alone.
After finishing these two books at a fast clip, I pulled out
my copy of Leslie Swigart’s exhaustive (and now very rare) 1973 bibliography of
Ellison’s works entitled Harlan
Ellison: A Bibliographical Checklist,
and uncovered references to many other early Ellison tales that—to my
knowledge—have never been reprinted since their original publication in the
1950s pulp magazines that spawned them. These
stories bear such wonderfully over-the-top titles as “Psycho at Midpoint,”
“Homicidal Maniac,” “Scum Town,” “Glug,” “Satan Is My Ally,” “Only Death Can
Stop It,” and “A Corpse Can Hate.” One
can only hope that the release of Pulling
a Train and Getting in the Wind
might soon lead to the resurrection of these other lost gems from America’s pop
cultural past.
To order either Pulling
a Train or Getting in the Wind, visit the publisher’s website by clicking HERE.
A Cabinet of Wonders: Harlan Ellison's CAN & CAN’TANKEROUS
by Robert Guffey
Harlan Ellison’s latest short story collection, Can & Can’tankerous, is nothing less
than a cabinet of wonders built by a demented magician—a box filled to bursting
with carnivalesque impossibilities such as doomed and/or omnipotent homunculi,
conquering alien imps who unknowingly help the human race while trying to
destroy it, time travelling super models, beneficent rubber ducks, Martian sex
slaves, phantom cartographers, the 1948 Cleveland Indians, at least twenty-six different
brands of mythological beings, and (thrown in for good measure) the ghost of
Satchel Paige. This collection of ten short
stories published between 1956 and 2012 spans an impressive array of genres,
time periods, worlds, and emotions.
As with his previous books, such as the classic collections Deathbird Stories (1975) and Angry Candy (1988), Ellison is able to
gracefully segue from one genre to another within only a few pages—sometimes within
the same story. For example, the third
offering in the book, “Objects of Desire in the Mirror Are Closer than They
Appear,” combines classic science fiction tropes with a heavily noirish
atmosphere, creating a hybrid that somehow looks and feels nothing like the
parent-genres that breathed it into existence in the first place.
The
centerpiece of the book, a 15,000-word novella entitled
“The Toad Prince, or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes,” is a
near-impossibility: an impressive feat of close-up magic that
excels at pulse-pounding science fiction adventure redolent of 1950s
pulp
stereotypes while succeeding in being a satirical deconstruction of
those same
well-worn clichés. As I avidly read the
planet-hopping adventures of Sarna (Our Hero), a Terran prostitute
trapped in a
world of sex-crazed Martians, for some reason my brain insisted on
imagining
this epic as a graphic novel drawn by the late sui generis artist Moebius, who often combined cosmic vistas,
blatantly sexual themes, and Golden Age science fiction tropes in his own
unforgettable stories. (Hollywood producers,
please take note: If not a comic book,
this novella would also make a wonderful animated movie in the style of such
borderline-psychedelic SF films as Fantastic
Planet and Heavy Metal.)
For
the purists among you who have an inherent distaste for Golden
Age retro themes in your genre of choice, rest assured that this
collection of
stories includes at least four Master Class tales that are as
accomplished as
the best short fiction produced in America during the past two decades:
“How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (which won the Nebula Award for
Best Short Story in 2011), a wildly inventive—and oddly affecting—twist
on the
age-old concept of the golem; “Incognita, Inc.,” a melancholy tale about
an old
man responsible for creating the maps that have led countless
generations of adventurers
to the lands of myth and legend, a deft parable that can ultimately be
seen as
a wistful meditation on the death (and, one hopes, rebirth) of the
imagination
in our overly commodified society; “He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock
Holmes,” a
devilishly clever jigsaw puzzle of a tale that compels you to begin
rereading
it the second you’ve finished the final sentence; and “Goodbye to All
That,” an
absurdist fantasy that has the fearless audacity to create a scenario
that can
only be resolved by revealing the Ultimate Punchline to the Ultimate
Joke… and,
in the end, despite this ostensibly impossible-to-overcome buildup,
somehow manages
to be funny.
“Goodbye to All That” is also noteworthy in that it expands
on Ellison’s ongoing obsession with Lost World scenarios, a type of story rarely
attempted these days; in fact, one could say it’s an extinct subgenre. Ellison’s contributions are unique in that
these types of exotic adventures, whether novelistic or cinematic, tend to be
epic in nature, e.g., H. Rider Haggard’s She
(1887) or Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933). Ellison’s
Lost World stories, however, compress such sweeping narratives into only a few
pages. Some of the most memorable tales
in Ellison’s 1997 collection, Slippage,
played with Lost World scenarios in a variety of fascinating ways (e.g., “Darkness
Upon the Face of the Deep,” “Chatting with Anubis,” and “Midnight in the Sunken
Cathedral”).
Several of the stories in Can & Can’tankerous flirt with this venerable Lost World
concept, e.g., “From A to Z, in the Sarsaparilla Alphabet,” “Incognita, Inc.,”
and “Goodbye to All That.” I suspect “Goodbye
to All That” was inspired by a juxtaposition of two wildly different
narratives: James Hilton’s bestselling
1933 novel Lost Horizon, perhaps the
most famous Lost World story of the twentieth century (the protagonist of
“Goodbye to All That” is named Colman, no doubt in honor of Ronald Colman, the
star of Frank Capra’s 1937 film adaptation of Lost Horizon) and Robert Sheckley’s antic 1976 Playboy story “What Is Life?” in which an explorer treks to a mountaintop
in the Himalayas only to be confronted by an invisible deity who demands that
the intruder provide him with the ultimate answer to the ultimate
question. In “Goodbye to All That”
Ellison manages to trump Sheckley’s insanely clever solution to an impossible
scenario (I won’t spoil the punchline to Sheckley’s story in case you’ve never
read it, but it can be found in his 1978 short story collection entitled The Robot Who Looked Like Me).
Overall, Can &
Can’tankerous is a worthy follow-up to Ellison’s Slippage, his last book of “previously uncollected, precariously
poised stories.” The wonders in this particular
magic cabinet are just as precariously poised (perhaps even more so), in the
sense that they seem simultaneously familiar and unpredictable, graceful and
unbalanced, logical and irrational—a genuine paradox, perhaps the greatest
magic trick of all.
To order Can &
Can’tankerous, visit the publisher’s website by clicking HERE.
