Short stories that can give you nightmares but so well written that you read them again and again. ( )

(Original Review, 1980-12-10)

Houghton Mifflin finally delivered a receptacle for the Shatterday limited edition book plate Ellison: the book itself. I definitely approached the book with a pro-Ellison prejudice, but even normalizing for that leaves me in awe of this guy. Half way through, every story so far has captivated me--even the funny ones have their punch. The book is 332 pp., 16 stories including "Jefty is Five", "Count the Clock That Tells the Time", "All the Lies That Are My Life", and the story everyone will remember Harlan read during his lecture a few years back, "The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge". (Note: Harlan said he wrote that one "just for us Techies", but I've been told the very same story was read at an earlier lecture at some other US Univ. earlier...) The quality of the physical volume is startling, compared to the cardboard-like nature of "Dragon's Egg" (binding only, Bob! The book was great!) and "Beyond the Blue Even Horizon", the other hardcovers I've recently purchased. Shatterday's binding is close to Gregg Press durability, paper heavy, and there are nice frills like tinted intro-pages to each story. There is an interesting continuity to the intro's this time, revolving around the phrase "Writers take tours in other people's lives".

PS1. Cripes. Doesn't the Lennon ordeal sound like something out of "The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart of the World"?

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] ( )

Shatterday

I felt this was a very balanced collection and enjoyed Harlan's introductory anecdotes. He is one of my favorite writers. ( )

Harlan Ellison will be EIGHTY years old in May (2014). How the hell did that happen? I realized that this was one of those books I'd read from the library, and that I did NOT own, and I've just rectified it. It has "Jeffty is Five" (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an issue I no longer own, to my terrible regret).

This is one of his better collections, filled with some of the best. ( )

Indeholder "Jeffty Is Five", "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?", "Flop Sweat", "Would You Do It For a Penny?", "The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge", "Shoppe Keeper", "All the Lies That Are My Life", "Django", "Count the Clock That Tells the Time", "In the Fourth Year of the War", "Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage", "All the Birds Come Home to Roost", "Opium", "The Other Eye of Polyphemus", "The Executioner of the Malformed Children", "Shatterday".

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Someday, Moansday, Duesday, Woundsday, Thornsday, Freeday, Shatterday. ( )