"Harlan Ellison - Gentleman Junkie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Strange Wine

An Edge in My Voice

City on the Edge of Forever

Paingod and Other Delusions

Introduction
The Children of Nights

“Race of Abel, drink and be sleeping:

God shall smile on thee from the sky.
“Race of Cain, in thy filth be creeping

Where no seeds of the serpent die.

•••
“Race of Abel, fear not pollution!

God begets the children of nights.
“Race of Cain, in thy heart’s solution

Extinguish thy cruel appetites.”

fromCain and Abel ;

Baudelaire: FLOWERS OF EVIL

WRITERS WITH THEIRbooks are like fickle daddies with their children. There are always favorites
and less-than-favorites and even (though daddies wouldnever cop to it) ones they hate. They love this
one because it sums up the totality of their worldview, and that one because it has the best stretch of
sustained good writing, and that one over there under the cabbage leaf because nobodyelse loves it …
the runt of the litter.

I love this book shamelessly because it was the book that was most pivotal in changing my life. Not once,
god bless it, butthree times. And having it back in print after fourteen years fills me with such good
feelings, I’d like to let them bubble over, to share them with you.

The first time this book turned me around, it wasn’t even a book; it was merely a random group of
stories, uncollected, published here and there in a variety of magazines that ranged from the
then-prestigiousAlfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to the sexually cornball men’s magazines of the
fifties, magazines likeKnave andCaper . You see, I started writing for a living in 1955 when I got booted
out of college for diverse reasons and went to New York. At that time, I wrote a lot, and I didn’t always
write very well. Learning one’s craft, in any occupations save writing and doctoring, permits a margin of
error. If you’re a plumber and you fuck up, the worst that can happen is that a pipe will break and you’ll
flood someone’s bathroom. But writing and doctoring leave the evidence behind. And a bad story is
liable to become as stinking a corpse as a surgeon’s slip of the knife. Both come back to haunt you years