Shatterday

When Harlan Ellison died last year, I realized I had read none of his work. I saw him in person--at a sci-fi convention, where he spoke on a panel and was an outrageous personality. So I turned to my college friend Joe, whom I had recently found on Facebook, and asked him what to read, and he suggested Shatterday.

Ellison was pointedly not a science-fiction writer; if you called him that, he said, he would come to your house and nail your pet's head to the coffee table. But he did write what I think is referred to as speculative fiction, where things just aren't as they are in the real world. Perhaps his most enduring work is the script for what many consider the best episode of the original Star Trek's run: "The City On The Edge Of Forever."

Shatterday is a collection of short stories published in 1980. Most of the stuff comes from the late '70s, and Ellison writes an introduction for each one, giving us an insight into what prompted him to write the story. Often the introduction is better than the story. He writes: "I don’t know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe." Or, more succinctly: "I see myself as a combination of Jiminy Cricket and Zorro."

He repeats "Writers take tours in other people’s lives." And so many of his stories are narrated by men who are at wit's end, out of their time, or out of their element. In "Count The Clock That Tells The Time," a man literally disappears into a void where all wasted time goes--he's wasted his life. Another man, in "Alive And Well On A Friendless Voyage" is confronted about his mistreatment of a woman, and we are led to believe this is a voyage to the great beyond, which will never end.

Indeed, these are not exactly peppy stories. "The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge" sees a contractor who stiffed an old man having his life fall apart, and he's led to believe that the old man is behind it, even though he's not. "Opium" is about a woman who tries to kill herself, believing that death is the ultimate drug and a way out of her miserable existence. "Flop Sweat" concerns a radio show in which a serial killer calls in.

Some of these stories have a Twilight Zone feel to them--Ellison did do a lot of writing for television, to pay the bills. "Jefty Is Five" is about a kid who never ages past the age of five, and his friend marvels at how nothing changes for him. It stems from Ellison's typical old man rant that things were better in the old days: "Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past?" The best of these are two near the end of the collection: "All The Birds Come Home To Roost" has the narrator mysteriously meeting each of his romantic conquests, in reverse order, which leads him to realize he will one day get to his first wife, who was part of the worst event of his life, and the title story, "Shatterday," which, well the set-up is in this sentence: "He stood in the phone booth, in the restaurant, in the night, the receiver to his ear, and listened to his own voice. He had dialed his own number by mistake, dialed an empty apartment…and he had answered."

Ellison was no optimist, and it shows here. But he was a brilliant wordsmith, with a sesquipedalian vocabulary, often using words that even my Kindle dictionary didn't recognize. I think a line in one story sums it up: "she was a harridan, a real termagant." I think most people don't know the meaning of either word. He also could whip up a great simile like, "I felt like a cobra at a mongoose rally." And, "In the dead of night, when I was hovering on the lip between wakefulness and whatever was strobing across the face of my bedside television set, and the abyss of thankful sleep, he would begin laughing. It was the sound I’m certain was made when the broken-handled claw hammer wrenched out the rusty spikes from Jesus’s crucified wrists."

Ellison suffered no fools, and I almost feel afraid that even after death he will read this and mock me for it. That's how strong a personality he was, and that comes across in his writing.