"Harlan Ellison - Shatterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

are the ones that drive you to crazy beliefs in Scientology, est, the power of dope, hatred of
elitism and intellectual pursuits, astrology, messiahs like Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones,
fundamentalist religions. I try to tell you that fear is okay if you understand that what you fear
is the same for everyone.
Not the bogus oogie-boogie scares of Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott’s Alien,
slavering creatures in the darkness that want to pierce your flesh with scorpion stinger tails
and ripping jaws, but the fear of Gregor Samsa waking to discover he isn’t who he was when
he went to bed; the fear of Pip in the graveyard; the fear of Huck finding his dead father on
the abandoned houseboat. The fears to which we are all heir to simply because we are tiny
creatures in a universe that is neither benign nor malign...it is simply enormous and unaware
of us save as part of the chain of life.
And all we have to stand between us and the irrational crazy chicken-running-around-
squawking terror that those mortal dreads lay on us is wisdom and courage.
That is why I tell you all this, and why I write to shock you and anger you and
frighten you. To tell you with love and care that you are not alone.
These stories are about the mortal dreads.
Each one is a little different from all the others because, to fall back on words of
Irwin Shaw again, “...in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories
you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons
abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned.”
And so, with the serious warning that you not try to pick out the pieces of the Author
that went into the writing of each of these little cautionary tales, I give you another year or
two of my life’s work, all of which say, with love and care, and the intent to anger, shock and
frighten you...
Honest to god--or whoever’s in charge--you are not alone.

HARLAN ELLISON
Los Angeles
14 February 80
Jeffty is Five
INTRODUCTION

Writers take tours in other people’s lives.
The purpose of these introductory notes to each story is to reaffirm that fact, over and
over again. It cannot be said too often. A writer cannibalizes his own life, that’s true: all we
have to relate are the perceptions of ourselves and our experiences that parallel other people’s
perceptions and experiences. But you are not alone; where you’ve been, there have I gone;
what you’ve felt, I have also felt. Pain and joy and everything that lies between are universal.
I have taken what you’ve given me--though you never knew I was watching--and I’ve
run it through the purifier of my imagination for the sole purpose of giving it back to you
with, I hope, some clarity. If you would best use these reconstituted snippets and scintillae of
your lives, I urge you to hold up the realities portrayed here to the mirror of fantasy. Things
often seem clearer in the silver light of the extraordinary. Some call this magic.
Take “Jeffty Is Five” for example.
At the moment, this is one of my half dozen favorite stories. It is both a hard-edged
and a romanticized view of the innocence that we all possessed as children. Jeffty has become
an image of reverence for the parts of my childhood that were joyous and free of pain.
I suppose what I’m saying is that a large part of myself as an adult is Jeffty. They are
parts of my nature I hold very dear. But, sadly, Donny is also a part of me. The part of me that
grew up in order to deal with the Real World.