"Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

and they’ll finish the story and — even if they liked it — they’ll hurl this book against the wall. “I been
robbed!” they’ll shriek. And I don’t blame them. If I go to a massage parlor for a massage, and some
nice young woman suggests we perform acts of a personal nature one would have to really stretch the
word “massage” to include, well, I’d be annoyed also. If I buy a can of pineapple, I don’t want to spill
beets out into my plate. I am dead against false advertising. Yet there NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS
was, right smack in the middle of the sf shelves. So. In the name of fair business practices, I urge you to
buttonhole the management of the newsstand or bookstore where you purchased this nifty tome, and
insist on the following: “Mr. Owner [you should say], the books of Harlan Ellison that are being published
by the wonderful Pyramid Books cover the full spectrum of Mr. Ellison’s multifarious literary talents and
virtually horizonless range of interests. Each one is numbered.” And then you point out to him or her — in
which case it would be Ms. Owner — the big series number in the “O” of the name ELLISON on the
front cover. “These books are not always speculative fiction [you will continue, I hope, dashedly cleverly
avoiding that nasty phrase we agreed you’d never use again]. Some of them are contemporary novels;
some are nostalgia fiction of the world as we knew it in the Fifties; some are autobiography; some are
television essays; and this one I hold in my hand is a superb collection of crime and suspense fictions.”
Then the Owner, not a bad sort, but sadly in need of guidance, will moan, “But Ihave to categorize
everything, otherwise the assholes who never read anything but their specialty wont be able to find what
they want. See, over here, ten thousand gothics. You can tell they’re gothics because there’s a scared
lady in a nightgown running away from a dark house on a rainswept mountaintop, and there’s only one
light lit in an upper storey of the mansion, see? And here … fourteen hundred nurse novels, all with
apple-cheeked angels of mercy staring covertly at interns with naked lust in their clear blue eyes. And
here … violence series novels: The Slaughterer, The Crusher, The Kung Fu Brigade, The Pillager, The
Hardy Boys.” And he or she will take you on a tour of the westerns, the classics, the sexy historicals —
all with titles like THE FALCON AND THE HYACINTH or THE PLUME AND THE SWORD or
THE DIKE AND THE FINGER — the fact science books, the metaphysical books — where forty-two
versions of the few lines Plato wrote about Atlantis have been rewritten and re-rewritten by shameless
hack popularizers in direct steals of Ignatius Donnelly and that poor coocoo, Madame Blavatsky — the
self-help books, the cookbooks, the stiffeners with their wonderfully exotic titles like SUCK MY
BUTTONS and WHIP GIRL, the war novels, the detective books and, if it’s a fairly large stock, the
movie star biography books cheek-by-jowl with all those handy reference works on how to shoot a
movie in your spare time, by people like Jerry Lewis and Peter Bogdanovitch, at least one of whom [to
borrow a phrase from John Simon] does not exist. And thenyou can release the poor Owner from this
labyrinth of spatial immurement by saying, “But sir, or ma’am, you have merely fallen prey to the
outmoded theory of commercial marketing distinctions. Mr. Ellisontranscends such pitiful categories. His
work is one with the ages; something for everyone; no home should be without a full set of all nineteen of
his handsome Pyramid Books with their delicious Dillon covers; his work uplifts, it enthralls, it ennobles, it
clears up acne and the heartbreak of psoriasis; babies cry for more! Why not start a Harlan Ellison
section, right here in the very forefront of your shop, directly next to the cash register, whose charming
tinkle win be heard ever more frequently with Ellison product chockablock beside the Dyna-Mints and
TV Guide, where your unenlightened flock can grab a stack of meaty titles as they would a life preserver
in a turbulent sea? Mr. Ellison is a category unto himself.Sui generis! Oh do, do, kind sir or madame!
Make this a better world in which to live. Put Ellison where he belongs: all by himself.” And having said
that, the Owner will, with tears in eyes, clasp your hand and thank you for the pristine lucidity of your
thinking.

(And I won’t have to argue with Tom Snyder that when I do theTomorrow Show he shouldn’t have a
flash-card overprinted on my beaming image that says HARLAN ELLISON, SCI-FI GUY.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. A book of suspense stories, and how nice it is to finally get noticed as a writer
who’s written lots of other things than fantasy.