Harlan Ellison is undoubtedly one of the most audacious, infuriating, brazen characters on the planet. Which may help explain why he is also one of the most brilliant, innovative, and eloquent writers on earth. Slippage simply presents recent, typical Ellison. In a word, masterful. The 21 stories in this 1997 collection, which is encased in black boxes, show Ellison at the height of his powers, with several of the stories (no surprise here) major award-winners. Highlights include a black mind reader who pays a visit to a white serial killer, a husband who falls prey to a vampiric personal computer, and a love affair between a young man and a woman who may be more undead than alive. Perhaps even more fascinating are the painfully candid snapshots of autobiography running throughout the volume. Even if Ellison's unsettling fictions are not enough to dazzle you, his often bizarre life experiences as an author will still keep you compulsively turning the page like a polite voyeur. --Stanley Wiater


From Library Journal
Ellison writes contemporary, absorbing, literate sf and fantasy that often go beyond the genres' boundaries. The Nebula and Hugo award-winning author of I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream (1967) and Deathbird Stories (1975) has compiled here 18 short stories, two essays, and one teleplay previously published in genre periodicals and anthologies but never before collected in one volume. Included is his award-winning novella, "Mephisto in Onyx," a powerful story of a black psychic whose friend convinces him to look into the mind of a white Alabama serial killer. Essential for both general short story and sf collections. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
``The world seems precarious to me now,'' the prodigiously productive Ellison (more than 65 books, including some 1,700 short stories) notes in his introduction to this collection of 21 previously uncollected science-fiction/fantasytinged tales, ``everything changes so fast, and no one remembers anything.'' Change is a recurrent element in these typically gruff, exuberant pieces, as is the conviction that humans possess an extraordinary range of talents and powers, few of which we thoroughly exploit. In ``Go Toward the Light,'' for instance, a cynical ``timedrifter,'' who travels back and forward in time as part of a government research project, finds his long-ignored faith stirred by an encounter with a priest in ancient Palestine. Ellison's ability to inject fantastic elements into otherwise grimly realistic situations is powerfully on display in ``Mefisto in Onyx,'' a gritty, terse, deeply disturbing novella about the encounter of a black psychic and a white serial killer on death row. Ellison, 63, needn't worry too much. It's likely that the best of his tales, mingling fantasy and grim, angry realism in a distinctive mix, will be remembered for a long time to come. A varied and powerful collection. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Equal parts funny, brazen, sarcastic, and sacrilegious."


Review
"Equal parts funny, brazen, sarcastic, and sacrilegious."


Book Description
With this, his best-selling and most critically acclaimed collection ever, Ellison celebrates four decades of brilliant, outrageous writing. The award-winning novella "Mefisto in Onyx" is the centerpiece of an irreverent and wildly imaginative book that the San Diego Union-Tribune called "electrifying...Ellison is back, as unsettling as ever."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With this, his best-selling and most critically acclaimed collection ever, Ellison celebrates four decades of brilliant, outrageous writing. The award-winning novella "Mefisto in Onyx" is the centerpiece of an irreverent and wildly imaginative book that the San Diego Union-Tribune called "electrifying...Ellison is back, as unsettling as ever."

SYNOPSIS

With this, his best-selling and most critically acclaimed collection ever, Ellison celebrates four decades of brilliant, outrageous writing. The award-winning novella "Mefisto in Onyx" is the centerpiece of an irreverent and wildly imaginative book that the San Diego Union-Tribune called "electrifying...Ellison is back, as unsettling as ever."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The ever-provocative Ellison is at the top of his form in these 21 stories and essays, dynamiting fault lines where the fantastic erupts into the everyday and jolting interfaces between the mythic and the mundane. None of the characters in this outstanding collection is invulnerable to slippage, that sudden disorienting sense that "the universe shifted over one notch": not the fugitive criminals who discover that they can't escape a rendezvous with the supernatural in "Sensible City"; not the dinosaurs made extinct by extraterrestrials in "The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams"; not even the gods no one believes in any more in "Chatting with Anubis." Ellison's loquacious protagonists are so personable, and their lives and appetites so appealingly ordinary, that one is easily beguiled into accepting their outrageous revelationsfor example, that life's random injustices are the work of cosmic string-pullers on a lark, as in "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," or that computers are a vampiric life form that feed through our fingertips, as in "Keyboard." An antic spirit pervades most of the stories; but even when playing the court jester, Ellison can be deadly earnest, hurling barbed commentaries dripping with insight. "Mephisto in Onyx" explores racial prejudice through its conceit of a black mind-reader summoned to interrogate a white serial killer. "The Few, The Proud" and "Pulling Hard Time" are sardonic inquiries into social hypocrisy that divulge the true motives of men hailed by the public as heroes or vilified as villains. Ellison has purged his writing of the excesses and indulgences that burdened the stories in Angry Candy (1988). These newer efforts are, by contrast, as sleek and on-target as a cruise missile. (Aug.) FYI: Slippage was previously published in a limited edition by Mark Ziesing.

Library Journal

Having won too many awards to list here, veteran Ellison collects several small gems: "Mefisto in Onyx," called his "best work in years" (LJ 12/93) when it was published in an expanded version two years ago; "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," which appeared in The Best Short Stories 1993; and "Keyboard," based on a theme suggested by Robin Williams.

Kirkus Reviews

"The world seems precarious to me now," the prodigiously productive Ellison (more than 65 books, including some 1,700 short stories) notes in his introduction to this collection of 21 previously uncollected science-fiction/fantasytinged tales, "everything changes so fast, and no one remembers anything." Change is a recurrent element in these typically gruff, exuberant pieces, as is the conviction that humans possess an extraordinary range of talents and powers, few of which we thoroughly exploit. In "Go Toward the Light," for instance, a cynical "timedrifter," who travels back and forward in time as part of a government research project, finds his long-ignored faith stirred by an encounter with a priest in ancient Palestine. Ellison's ability to inject fantastic elements into otherwise grimly realistic situations is powerfully on display in "Mefisto in Onyx," a gritty, terse, deeply disturbing novella about the encounter of a black psychic and a white serial killer on death row. Ellison, 63, needn't worry too much. It's likely that the best of his tales, mingling fantasy and grim, angry realism in a distinctive mix, will be remembered for a long time to come. A varied and powerful collection.