"Harlan Ellison - Stalking the Nightmare" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

feel like a spinster librarian who once got kissed on the Fourth of July.
Coupled with the ferocity of purpose is a crazed confidence--the confidence of a man who does not just walk
wires but runs across them full-tilt-boogie. There are folks who find this trait equally unendearing. People who are
afraid don’t like people who are brave. People who eat pallidly and politely at the Great Banquet of Life (Chew that
fish--there might be a bone in it! Skip the beef--if you eat enough of it, you get cancer of the bowel! No
eggs--cholesterol! Heart attacks! Eat the carrots. Eat the carrots. They’re safe. Boring, but safe.) resent people who
dash wildly up and down, trying some of this, scarfing up some of that, swallowing something really gruesome and
barfing it back up.
Put another way, Harlan knows now--and has, I would guess, since about 1965--that if you’re gonna talk that
talk, you gotta be able to walk that walk; that if you got the flash you better have the cash, and that sooner or later you
gotta put up or shut up. He rides the shockwave.
All of this comes through admirably in the man’s fiction and essays (as it damn well should; otherwise his
impact would die with him), and I think that’s the reason I always end up writing like the guy after I’ve been reading
the guy. It’s the force of his personality, the sense of Harlan Ellison as a living person that’s caught in the lines. There
are people who don’t like that; there are many people who are convinced that Harlan is some sort of trick, like that
miniature guillotine that will slice a cigarette in two but leave your finger intact.
Others, who know that few tricksters and literary shysters can hang around for better than twenty-five years,
publishing fiction which has steadily broadened its area of inquiry and which has never declined in its energy, know
that Harlan is no trick. They may begrudge him that apparently inexhaustible energy, or resent his chutzpah, or fear his
refusal to suffer fools (of some people it is said they will not suffer fools gladly; Harlan does not suffer them at all), but
they know it isn’t a trick.
The book which follows is a case in point. I’m not going to pre-chew it; if you want someone to chew your
food for you, send this book back to the publisher, get a refund, and go buy a few volumes of Cliff’s Notes, the mental
babyfood of college students everywhere for the last forty years or so. You won’t find one on Harlan, and I hope you
never will (and speaking of wills, why not put it in yours, Harlan? “NO FUCKING CLIFF’S NOTES! IF YOU WANT TO
KNOW WHAT GOES ON IN DEATHBIRD STORIES, GO READ A COPY. YOU FUCKING MENTAL MIDGET!” God. I
sound like Harlan today--don’t you think so?) Certainly you won’t find a Harlan-Ellison-in-a-nutshell in this
introduction.
But I will point out that these stories and essays range from almost Lovecraftian horror (“Final Trophy”) to
existentialist fantasy (“The Cheese Stands Alone,” with its almost talismanic repetition of the phrase “My fine stock”)
to the riotously funny (take your pick; my own favorite--maybe because it’s gifted with a title that even Fredric Brown
would have admired--”Djinn, No Chaser”) to good old nuts-and-bolts science fiction (“Invulnerable”).
The essays have a similar range; Harlan’s essay on the Saturn fly-by of the Voyager I bird could fit
comfortably into an issue of Atlantic Monthly. while one can almost see “The 3 Most Important Things in Life” as a
stand-up comedy routine (it’s a job, by the way, that Harlan knows, having done it for awhile in his flaming youth).
Harlan’s wit, insight, and energy inform all of these stories and essays. Are they uneven? Yes, of course they
are. While I haven’t been given the “lawyer’s page”--that is, the dates of copyright on each short story and essay,
along with where each was previously published--just the Xerox offprints I’ve been sent suggest that there is also a
wide range of time represented in STALKING THE NIGHTMARE. Different typefaces and different return addresses
tell part of the tale; the evolution in style tells part of it; the growth of confidence and ambition tells much more of it.
But even the earliest stories bear the unmistakable mark of Ellison. Take, for example, “Invulnerable,” one of
my favorite stories in the present collection--in fact, I guess I’d go a step further (God hates a coward, right?) and say
it’s the favorite, mostly because of the original way Harlan handles a very old idea--here is Superman and Krypto the
Wonder Dog for thinking adults. Exactly how old is the tale? Without the lawyer’s page it’s impossible to tell, but it’s
possible to don the old deerstalker hat and make a couple of Sherlock Holmes-type deductions just the same. First,
“Invulnerable” was originally published in Super-Science Fiction, and the illustration (just a hasty pen-and-ink;
you’re not missing a thing) is by Emsh, whose work I haven’t seen in years. So, still wearing the deerstalker hat, I’d
guess... maybe 1957. How far off am I? Take a look at the lawyer’s page, if you want. If it’s more than five years either
way, you’re welcome to a good horselaugh at my expense.