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From "one of the great . . . American short story writers," comes a collection of dark fantastical fiction (The Washington Post). In the Locus Award-winning "Croatoan," a man descends into the sewers of New York City to confront the detritus of his irresponsibility. An "Emissary from Hamelin" presents humanity with an ultimatum, or everyone on Earth will have a dear price to pay the piper. And in the title story--famously written by the author in the storefront window of a Santa Monica bookshop--Willis Kaw is convinced that he is an alien trapped inside an Earthman's body, only to discover his suffering serves a purpose. Strange Wine includes these three stories and a dozen more unique visions from the writer the Washington Post hails as a "lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, and purveyor of pure horror and black comedy." Includes: "Croatoan," "Working With the Little People," "Killing Bernstein," "Mom," "In Fear of K," "Hitler Painted Roses," "The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat," "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet," "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time," "Emissary from Hamelin," "The New York Review of Bird Seeing," "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," "Strange Wine," "The Diagnosis of Dr. D'arqueAngel"… (more)
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Of course, with an author so prolific, you know you won’t like everything, but I’ve generally admired the fearless risk taking behind even the stories that I haven’t particularly liked. Reading the fifteen stories in Strange Wine made me think that, somewhere along the line, he went from an author that writes stories that speak to me in a powerful way to an author who writes stories about what a great author he is. (Note that, from the plethora of laudatory quotes on the cover and within, there were obviously plenty of reviewers who didn’t feel that way about the book.)
None of these stories were great. Almost half of the fifteen stories in the collection were decent enough that I gave them a 6 out of 10 rating: “Working with the Little People,” “Killing Bernstein,” “In Fear of K,” “The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat,” “Seeing,” “Strange Wine,” and “The Diagnosis of Dr. D’arqueAngel”
A little more than half, then, left me disappointed enough to rate them a 5 out of 10 or less. I thought that “The New York Review of Bird,” a story about an avenging literary superhero who takes on the Publishing Establishment, was truly awful (and that a shared storywriting game that I participated in a couple of years back which touched on the same topic was in fact funnier, more creative, and more satisfying). “Mom,” a story about a recently deceased Jewish mother who comes back to haunt her son in a stereotypically nagging manner, was an utter waste of time. “From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet” did nothing for me, and wasn’t a story at all.
I would probably have liked this book more without the story introductions. I don’t really care whether he wrote a story after a adulterously impregnating a woman who had told him she was on the Pill, or sitting inside a bookstore window, or during a live radio broadcast, or at a Chinese restaurant, or winning a race with two other respected science fiction authors. I care about whether the story itself works for me, and more often than not, these didn’t.
One of the relatively decent stories in this collection, “Working with the Little People,” tells of an amazingly talented young writer of science fiction and fantasy who suddenly finds his creative genius has run dry. Looking at the stories in this volume, I can’t help thinking that Harlan Ellison was speaking from personal experience.
I was reading a book by the name of 'Strange Wine' by Harlan Ellison recently. The book is very good, but that is not what I want to talk about. He has an introduction titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself." I would
[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”.]
“Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.”
“The dinosaurs had no strange wine.”
All the above quotes are from the Introduction, which is mostly about the evils of television, something I wholeheartedly agree with! And most of
As for the stories...
This collection starts off well! I liked the first four stories right away, and five of the first six! "Killing Bernstein" may be my favorite of them! Then my enjoyment fell precipitously! Maybe four of the final nine held any entertainment value for me, with "Emissary From Hamelin" being the best of those four. The more sci-fi the stories became, the less I enjoyed them. But make no mistake, Ellison is an excellent writer! And he included one of may favorite quotes by Jack Kerouac in here, from "The Dharma Bums" -
“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.”