Gabino Iglesias Reviews Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison
Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison (Union Square & Co. 978-1-45495-337-1, $19.99, 496pp, tp) March 2024. Cover by Max Loeffler.
What can be said about Harlan Ellison at this point? The man is a legend. Unfortunately, sometimes legends get lost in the folds of time and that makes it harder for newer generations of readers to discover their work. Greatest Hits, a superb collection of some of Ellison’s best short stories, is here to help remedy that.
On top of being a great writer, Ellison was also a prolific one, which surely made the selection of stories for this collection a complicated task. However, editor J. Michael Straczynski did a fantastic job of selecting tales that showcase Ellison’s brilliance and range. The collection kicks off with “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”, a narrative that immediately submerges readers in Ellison’s wild style. A story that ignores most of the conventions of the genre, it as timely now as when it was originally published in 1965, and shows a dystopian world in which time has been strictly regulated. Intense and with a dash of dark humor, this story sets the stage for what follows.
It would be very hard review almost 500 pages of nuanced stories here, especially because Ellison’s short fiction often strayed a bit from the “short” part. However, there are plenty of gems that deserve attention. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, not only a great title but also one of the most haunting last lines ever written, is a wonderful, feverish exploration of technological misuse and its dangers that seems to have been written for whenever humans actually figured out how to turn artificial intelligence into the stuff of nightmares instead of a useful technological development. It’s also one of those stories that remains constantly surprising because you have no clue what will happen next.
Besides his writing, Ellison was famous for two things: being a fighter for equality who very vocally stood against things like racism and sexism, and being a gruff, cantankerous man. In this collection two stories remind fans of, and expose new readers to, Ellison’s knack for writing stories that pull at your heartstrings. The most powerful of these is “Jeffty is Five”, which tells the story of a man who grows up with a friend who remains forever stuck at the age of five. Full of heartbreak, nostalgia, and friendship, this is a story that, despite its somewhat predictable ending, sticks in your head long after you finish reading it. And then there’s “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, which is a very sad ghost story about loneliness like only Ellison could have written.
One of my favorites here is “Mefisto in Onyx”. The novella follows a man with telepathic powers who, as a favor to a friend and past lover, uses his power to look into the mind of a serial killer to see if he’s guilty of the atrocious things he’s been sent to death row for. Fast, violent, full of mystery, and ultimately a truly bizarre love story that is also a speculative fiction tale that’s mostly about crime, this one showcases Ellison’s ability to write gripping fiction regardless of genre.
Greatest Hits delivers exactly what it promises. It contains the cold brutality and horror of “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, which drags readers into the rotten core of a “great big snapping dog of a city” where, like in most big cities, everyone minds their own business to the detriment of society as whole. It holds the tension of the impossible “Shatterday”, in which a man becomes, literally and figuratively, his own worst enemy. It also packs “The Deathbird”, which is the literary equivalent of a floating signifier that refuses to be pinned down because of its many layers (something that can also be said about the aforementioned “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”).
Readers, especially those reading Ellison for the first time, are never sure of where he might be going next with a story…. and sometimes they might not even be sure of where they’ve been taken even after finishing a tale. That, in part, was also part of his power as a writer. His fiction remains as important now as it was when he wrote it, and Greatest Hits is an outstanding collection that will hopefully bring his brilliance to new generations of readers.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the June 2024 issue of Locus.
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