Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

It is not the purpose of this book to talk about people per se , nor is it the purposeof this chapter on horror fiction to fulfill a "personal glimpse of the writer" sort of function; that is the job of the Out of the Pages section in People magazine (which my youngest son, with unknowing critical acuity, insists on calling Pimple ). But in the case of Harlan Ellison, the man and his work have become so entwined that it is impossible to pull them completely apart.

The book I want to talk about here is Ellison's collection of short fiction, Strange Wine (1978). But each Ellison collection seems built on the collections which have preceded it- each seems to be Ellison's report to the outside world on the subject This Is Where Harlan Is Now. And so it becomes necessary to discuss this book in a more personal way. He demands it of himself, and while that doesn't specially matter, his work also demands it . . . and that does matter.

Ellison's fiction is and always has been a nervous bundle of contradictions. He's not a novelist, he says, but he has written at least two novels, and one of them, Rockabilly (later retitled Spider Kiss ), remains one of the two or three best novels ever to be published about the cannibalistic world of rock and roll music. He says he's not a fantasist, but nearly all of his stories are fantasies. In the course of Strange Wine , for instance, we meet a writer whose work is done for him by gremlins after the writer himself has gone dry; we also meet a nice Jewish boy who is haunted by his mother after she dies ( "Mom, why don't you get off my case?” Lance, the nice Jewish boy in question, asks the ghost desperately at one point; "I saw you playing with yourself last night," the shade of Mom returns sadly).

In the introduction to the book's most frightening story, "Croatoan," Ellison says he is pro-choice when it comes to abortion, just as he has said in both his fiction and in his essays over the last twenty years that he is an affirmed liberal and free-thinker,* but "Croatoan"-and most of Ellison's short stories-are as sternly moralistic as the words of an Old Testament prophet. In many of the out-and-out horror tales there is more than a whiff of those Tales from the Crypt/Vault of Horror ghastlies where the climax so often involves the evildoer having his crimes revisited upon himself . . . only raised to the tenth power. But the irony cuts with a keener blade in Ellison's work, and we have less feeling that rough justice has been meted out and the balance restored. In Ell' son's stories, we have little sense of winners and losers. Sometimes there are survivors. Sometimes there are no survivors.

*Ellison Anecdote #2: My wife and I attended a lecture that H