Author: Harlan Ellison
Title: Strange Wine: Fifteen New Stories from the Nightside of the World
Year of publication: 1978
Page count: 272
Rating: ★★★
I read Deathbird Stories some years back, upon Stephen King’s recommendation, who sung Ellison’s praises in Danse Macabre, and considers both of these short story collections some of the finest horror fiction released in their time. I don’t remember much of Deathbird Stories except for a few stand-outs (including the incredible title story) that have stayed with me all these years, and the fact that most of them managed to shock me while often walking a very fine line to distasteful. Their outrageousness, and the fact that I had expected pure horror fiction only to find that his background was firmly rooted in science and speculative fiction—two genres I wasn’t particularly interested in in my early 20s—led to my relegating the other recommended collection to the bottom of my reading pile… until Ellison passed away at the end of June, which seemed like a good opportunity to delve back into his works.
Ellison was a divisive figure in writer circles, a self-professed hostile asshole, known for his outspoken and abrasive personality (his Wikipedia page has a 9-part “controversies and disputes” section), which shines through in this particular collection, where he wrote an introduction to each story, usually telling the reader where the idea came from, or why and how and where he wrote them. I thought that all of these introductions were highly interesting and actually contributed to my understanding or enjoyment of the tale that followed, for the most part. The whole collection opens with a longer introduction titled Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself, where he goes on a rant about the mind-numbing dangers of television:
“I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.”
I can get behind the sentiment, but I find it a bit rich coming from someone who made his living by penning screenplays for shows such as Star Trek, Outer Limits, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and later, Babylon 5 and The New Twilight Zone. I don’t have a problem with most of his views, just the holier-than-thou attitude and douchey, patronizing, sometimes sexist way he expressed them in. Anyway, the fact that he was an unlikeable, bitter old bully of a writer isn’t news, so I’ll try and separate the man from his work: I admire how he didn’t pull any punches in the controversial topics he chose to write about, and he was capable of distilling the most wonderful thoughts on the craft and impact of writing in the simplest words, such as this excerpt from the same introduction:
“This is a collection of fantasies, strange wine. Fifteen draughts your mind can quaff. They lie here, silent, waiting for you to activate them with your imagination.
In writing them, I fulfilled myself. That is why I write. If this book were never to be opened and read they would, nonetheless, have served their purposes for me. I wrote them. But now they belong to you. They were mine only as long as they were unformed and incomplete. That is the nature of the tragedy: the work is mine only when it is being done. Thereafter it must be remanded to the custody of the readers, and the writer can only hope for intelligence, patience, and tender mercies.
I urge those of you who find pleasure or substance in these random dreams to ignore the analyses of academicians and critics. Ignore what they tell you these stories are “about.” Surely, you will decide what they’re about. What they mean and what they meant when I wrote them are quite different. When I wrote them they had personal significance for me. What they will do for you depends on how you feel at the moment you read them, whether or not you feel estranged or loved, what kind of a day you have had, where your emptiness lies on that particular day.”
The three stars rating is almost a given, as most short stories collections are a mixed bag that ultimately averages out. There was only one story I really did not like, The New York Review of Bird, although the introduction to it was really interesting in its own right, if a bit self-indulgent. My favorites were Hitler Painted Roses and the titular Strange Wine, with Croatoan, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, In Fear of K, and Emissary from Hamelin as other personal stand-outs.
Croatoan · ★★★★
It’s a testament to his already mentioned polemical nature that he chose to place this story as the very first in the collection. It’s about a man who is forced to descend into New York’s sewers by his hysterical girlfriend… to retrieve the aborted fetus he flushed down the toilet. It gained him death threats from pro choice and pro life defenders alike, but it’s really less about abortion rights and more about personal responsibility.
Working With the Little People · ★★★½
The token story about writer’s block that every writer seems to have to write at some point in their career. Rather amusing in parts and uncharacteristically light-hearted, it provides some commentary on the impact of legends.
Killing Bernstein · ★★½
An executive at a toy company kills his female ex-lover colleague whom he suspects of trying to sabotage his career… but then she turns up at work the next day looking just fine. It had the potential of turning into an absolutely brilliant story about obsession, madness, and the cracking boundaries between fantasy and reality, but then he ruined it with a ridiculously literal ending.
Mom · ★★★
In this tongue-in-cheek tale, so very different from everything else by Ellison I’ve read thus far, the ghost of a Jewish mother keeps nagging her surviving, grown son and tries to set him up with a respectable Jewish woman.
In Fear of K · ★★★★
A man and woman who despise each other are trapped in an underground pit surrounded by a labyrinth prowled by an unseen monster they’ve taken to calling K. A rather chilling allegory about fear of the unknown, and the things we’d rather suffer through than face whatever awaits in the dark.
Hitler Painted Roses · ★★★★★
My favorite if I had to choose one, this story about injustice has little to do with its eye-catching title; it’s about how reputation and belief affect and change reality, while following the damned soul of a woman wrongly executed for murder who has made her escape from Hell. What makes this story all the more remarkable is that he wrote it during a live radio broadcast during which listeners called in suggesting phrases he had to work in.
The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat · ★★
It’s hard to write a story about sounds, but he somehow pulled it off. The imagery and descriptions were absolutely breathtaking, and I thought the underlying idea quite intriguing, but it ultimately fell flat for me (pun intended).
From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet · ★★
Written over three days while sitting on display in a bookshop window, this story is actually twenty-six pastiches. Each letter of the alphabet is given a nonsense word and a paragraph-length vignette—sometimes just a few lines. Hard to rate as a whole and mostly forgettable (although I quite liked the one for the letter F), it’s mostly note-worthy for the pretty unique stunt he pulled in writing it.
Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time · ★★★½
A brief and grim allegorical tale about loneliness, clearly a product of its time, when the sexual revolution was still in full swing.
Emissary from Hamelin · ★★★★
The fabled Pied Piper comes back to Earth with an ultimatum and a warning to humans to stop destroying the planet.
The New York Review of Bird · ★ (or none at all)
A farcical, much too long story that’s nothing but the vehicle for a personal rant; Ellison’s own pseudonym (which he slapped on his work to alert readers when he felt that it had been butchered beyond repair by others) comes to life and is on a mission to destroy the forces of evil who reign in the book publishing industry. Ridiculously bad, and very telling of his character.
Seeing · ★★★
Violent, grim, and nasty sci-fi horror with a slight Blade Runner vibe. In the future, a rich and powerful old lady arranges the kidnapping of a young woman with genetically rare “forever eyes”, which can see much more than ordinary light, to have them transplanted into her own head.
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams · ★★★★
Probably the most effective and chilling story in the collection, all the more remarkable because of its brevity. An old man who was at the Nuremberg trials sees dead Nazi war criminals walking down a Manhattan street…
Strange Wine · ★★★★★
Admittedly, this titular story lays it on pretty thick, but I loved it anyway. It follows an unlucky and unhappy man who believes he’s actually an alien sent to Earth to live in a human body as a punishment for crimes he cannot remember.
The Diagnosis of Dr. D’arqueAngel · ★★½
A gorgeous doctor periodically injects her high-paying patients with doses of distilled essence of Death so they can build up a tolerance and live forever.
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