Harlan Ellison - Stalking the Nightmare

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This man is

STALKING THE NIGHTMARE

For less than a measly three bucks you can sign on his safari and * search for the holy grail called True Love

(your native bearer will be the deadly demon Surgat) * sit on the shore of a sea of black glass on the night the dead

return * hunt the most terrifying beast in the universe, the ristable, on a far planet also called Ristable (ominous, ain’t

it?) * learn the answer to the question of the secret of life in a weird bookshop in mysterious Monterey * and

otherwise explore the dark..

We don’t want to alarm you BUT…

Make out your will before you depart!

HARLAN ELLISON

STALKING THE

NIGHTMARE

Acknowledgments

The Author, besotted with humility, would like to take this opportunity to thank all the little people whose

support and assistance made his climb to the top possible: Lemuel Gulliver; the girl in the Golden Atom; Billy Barty;

General Tom Thumb; the Ty-d-bol man; Barbie & Ken; Manners the Butler; Dr. Miguelito Loveless; Poppin’ Fresh, the

Pillsbury Dough Boy; the representative of the Lollipop Guild; Speedy Alka-Seltzer; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Snap,

Crackle & Pop; Scott Carey, the Incredible Shrinking Man; Chip’n’Dale; Tattoo; and all the gang over at Dr.

Cyclops’s.

But seriously, folks.

I couldn’t’a done it widdout’cha, friends:

Diana Adkins, Sid Altus, Isaac Asimov; Richard Fontaine, Dale Hardman, Bobbie J. Kroman and Willie

Wilson of B. Dalton Bookstores; Greg Bear, Alex Berman, Arthur Bemhard, Ben Bova, Mayer Alan Brenner, Jeff

Bridges, Edward W. Bryant, Jr. ; Sharon Buck, Mark Carlton, Alan Chudnow, (Ms.) Marty Clark, Jon Clarke, Ed Coffey,

Catherine Crowell; Arthur Byron Cover, Lydia Marano and Linda Mayfield of the Dangerous Visions Bookstore in

Sherman Oaks, California; Buzz Dixon, Clint Eastwood, Audrey and Edward L. Ferman, Charles Garcia, Mel Gilden,

Joanne Gutreimen, Burt Handelsman, C. E. ; James Haralson, Joe L. Hensley, Walter Hill, Richard Hoagland, Michael

Hodel, Nancy Hodel, Terry Hodel, Stephen King, Steve Kirk, T. E. D. Klein, Cele Goldsmith Lalli, Gil Lamont, Shelley

Levinson, Barry R. Levin, Tim Lewis; Jane Mackenzie in a class by herself; Elinor Mavor, Jon R. McKenzie, Larry

McMurtry, Joyce Muskat, Sharon O’Hara, Frank Olynyk, Jerry Pournelle, Eric Protter, John Ratner, Mary Riordon, Jeff

Rubenstein, Bonnie Sue Russell, Jared Rutter; John Sack, W. W. Scott, Larry T. Shaw, Robert Silverberg, Judith Sims,

Tad Stones, William Stout, Genadie Sverlow, Leslie Kay Swigart, the impossible-to-locate Mike Taylor; Emily Boxer

and Tom Brokaw and the late Jessica Savitch of the NBC Today Show; Dan Turner, (Ms.) Randall Warner, and my

former editor at Future Life, the long-suffering Bob Woods.

For each and all of you, a blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: “God be between you and harm in all the

empty places you walk.”

In every possible way

this book is for

(Ms.) MARTY CLARK

Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION: Quiet Lies The Locust Tells

Grail

The Outpost Undiscovered By Tourists

Blank...

The 3 Most Important Things In Life

Visionary

Djnn, No Chaser

Invasion Footnote

Saturn, November 11

Night of Black Glass

Final Trophy

!!!The!!Teddy!Crazy!!Show!!!

The Cheese Stands Alone

Somehow, I Don’t Think We’re In Kansas, Toto

Transcending Destiny

The Hour That Stretches

The Day I Died

Tracking Level

Tiny Alley

The Goddess In The Ice

Gopher In The Gilly

I don’t have much patience with the facts, and any writer is a congenital liar to begin with or he

wouldn’t take up writing…I write to say No to death…an artist is a creature driven by demons.

He don’t usually know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why…

--WILLIAM FAULKNER

STALKING THE

NIGHTMARE

FOREWORD

Stephen King

It drives my wife crazy, and I’m sorry it does, but I can’t really help it.

All the little sayings and homilies. Such as: There’s a heartbeat in every potato; you need that like a hen

needs a flag; I’d trust him about as far as I could sling a piano; use it up, wear it out, do it in, or do without; you’ll

never be hung for your beauty; fools’ names, and their faces, are often seen in public places.

I could go on and on. I got a million of ‘em. I got them all from my mother, who got them all from her mother.

Little kernels of wisdom. Cosmic fortune-cookies, if you like.

They drive my wife absolutely BUGFUCK. “But honey,” I’ll say in my best placatory voice (I’m a very

placatory fellow, when I’m not writing about vampires and psychotic killers), “there’s a lot of truth in those sayings.

There really is a heartbeat in every potato. The proof of the pudding really is in the eating. And handsome really is

as--” But I can see that it would be foolish to continue. My wife, who can be extremely rude when it serves her

purpose, is pretending to throw up. My four-year-old son walks in from the shower, naked, dripping water allover the

floor and the bed (my side of the bed, of course), and also begins to make throwing-up noises.

She is obviously teaching him to hate me and revile me. It’s probably all Oedipal and sexual and neo-Jungian

and dirty as hell.

But I have the last laugh. Two days later, while this self-same kid is debating which card to throw away in a

hot game of Crazy Eights, my nine-year-old son tells him, “Let me look at your hand, Owen. I’ll tell you which card to

throw away.”

Owen looks at him coldly. Calculatingly. Pulls his cards slowly against his chest. And with a humorless grin

he says: “Joey, I’d trust you just about as far as I’d spring a piano.”

My wife begins to scream and roll around on the floor, foaming, pulling her hair out in great clots, drumming

her heels, crying out: “I WANT A DIVORCE! THIS MAN HAS CORRUPTED MY CHILDREN AND I W ANT A

FUCKING DIVORCE!”

My heart glows with the warmth of fulfillment (or maybe it’s just acid indigestion). My mother’s homilies

have slipped into the minds of yet another generation, just as chemical waste has a way of seeping into the

water-table. I think: Ah-hah-hah-hah! Another triumph for us bog-cutters! Long live the Irish!

Another of this wonderful woman’s wonderful sayings (I told you--I got a million of ‘em; don’t make me

prove it) was. “Milk always takes the flavor of what’s next to it in the icebox.” Not a very useful saying, you might

think, but I suspect it’s not only the reason I’m writing this introduction, but the reason I’m writing it the way I’m

writing it.

Does it sound like Harlan wrote it? It does?

That’s because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to

speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a

brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle

Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review:

KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!).

How do I know this is what has happened? I know because I have been writing hard for about twenty-five

years now--which means (as Harlan, or Ray Bradbury, or John Crowley, or any other writer worth his or her salt will tell

you) that I have also been reading hard. The two go together. I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be

writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting

up Mount Everest saying that he “didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.”

And part of the dues you pay while you’re doing this hard reading, particularly if you start your period of

hard writing as a teenager (as most of us did--God knows there are exceptions, but not many), is that you find yourself

writing like whoever you’re reading that week. If you’re reading RED NAILS, your current short story sounds like that

old Hyborian Cowboy, Robert E. Howard. If you’ve been reading FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, your stuff sounds like

Raymond Chandler. You’re milk, and you taste like whatever was next to you in the refrigerator that week.

But this is where the metaphor breaks down... or where it ought to. If it doesn’t, you’re in serious trouble.

Because a writer isn’t a carton of milk--or at least he or she shouldn’t be. Because a writer shouldn’t continue to take

the flavors of the people he or she is currently reading. Because a writer who doesn’t start sounding like himself

sooner or later really isn’t much of a writer at all; he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy. But take heart--little by little, that voice

usually comes out. It’s not easy, and it’s not quick (that’s one of the reasons that so many people who talk about

writing books never do), but there comes a day when you look back on the stuff you wrote when you were

seventeen... or twenty-two... or twenty-eight... and say to yourself, Good God! If I was this bad. how did I ever get any

better? They don’t call that stuff “juvenilia” for nothing, friends’n neighbors.

The imitativeness shakes out, and we become ourselves again. But. One never seems to develop an immunity

to some writers... or at least I never have. Their ranks are small, but their influence--at least on this here New England

white boy--has been profound. When I go back to them, I can’t not imitate them. My letters start sounding like them;

my short stories; a chunk of whatever novel I’m working on, maybe; even grocery lists.

Lovecraft. Raymond Chandler (and, at second hand, Ross Macdonald and Robert Parker). Dorothy Sayers,

who wrote the clearest, most lucid prose of our century. Peter Straub.

And Ellison. That’s really where it hews to the bone, I guess. When you take it right back down home, you

come to this: the man is a ferociously talented writer, ferociously in love with the job of writing stories and essays,

ferociously dedicated to the craft of it as well as its art--the latter being the part of the job with which writers who have

been to college most frequently excuse laziness, sloppiness, cant, and promiscuous self-indulgence.

There are folks in the biz who don’t like Harlan much. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know;

if you know Phantasia Press, whose imprint this book bears, then you probably know enough about speculative

fiction to know that. These anti-Harlan folks offer any number of reasons for their dislike, but I believe that a lot of it

has to do with that ferocity. Harlan is the sort of guy who makes an ordinary writer feel like a dilettante, and an

ordinary liver (i.e., one who lives, not a bodily organ which will develop cirrhosis if you pour too much booze over it)

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.

[Readers of the above-entered praise, seeking in vain for the story “Invulnerable” (published in the April, 1957 issue of

Super-Science Fiction--you get the Mad Hound of the Moors award for deductive logic, Steve), will be confused, bemused and even

dismayed--as will Stephen King--to find the work absent from this book. I suppose some sort of explanation is in order. It goes like

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