The beast that shouted love at the heart of the world

It is wholly inaccurate to categorize what Harlan Ellison writes as "science fiction" even as it is pejorative to call the stories of Edgar Allan Poe "detective fiction" or the novels of A. B. Guthrie "westerns". Poe wrote Poe-stories, Guthrie told Guthrie-stories, and Harlan Ellison's visions are peculiarly his own. "Fantasies" might be closer, yet no fantasist working today manages to trap the mist of fantasy in the Klein Bottle of contemporary events as well as the author of these fifteen strange and strangely-disturbing stories.

A summary of the wonders in this largest single collection of Mr. Ellison's recent work reads like the itinerary for a trip down a bottomless rabbit hole.

• The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World won Mr. Ellison his fourth Hugo award at the 1969 World Science Fiction Convention. It is a circular story that begins with a psychopathic killer and ends on the hushed shores of a thought, in the shadow of a sigh.

• Try A Dull Knife explores the parameters of the terrifying paranoid delusion of a man whose vampirish friends feed on his slow charisma leak.

• Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R. includes such mind-boggling scenes as the shootout that takes place in the men's room of the Camarillo State Mental Institution between a James Bond Kris Kringle and Ronald Reagan in the form of a 7-headed hydra.

• The Place With No Name advances the dizzying theory that Christ and Prometheus were homosexual alien lovers.