Harlan Ellison’s “Deathbird Stories” from Subterranean Press
I’m not sure how it happened, but last year Subterranean Press published an oversized edition of Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories collection. Just $45 for the trade edition that’s 416-pages of pure and painful joyous fun. As I’ve said before (“Repent, Harlequin!†Said the Ticktockman reading post here) I love Ellison’s work, but it’s so engaging and disorienting that I have to swear Ellison is from another race and not human.
But even though I’m not from the same world as Ellison I still enjoy his short stories. They come from out of nowhere and punch you, leaving you sitting there trying to figure out what just happened. I can’t read entire volumes of his work in one week — it’s exhausting — but, when taken a story or two at a time — his writing is seriously more fun that it should be. And now I see I should order this book before they’re all gone.
For more than three decades this singular collection of stories in which the New Gods of freeways, and slot machines, internal combustion deities and evil so enormous that it swallows the streets in shadow, for more than thirty years the power of this book has compelled the attention of not only readers of imaginative bent, but the praise of hard-line literary critics. One cannot codify modern literature of the fantastic without including a reference or selection from this dark book of godly and troubling stories that will not be ignored.
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