Ellison's fiction is and always has been a nervous bundle of contradictions. He's not a novelist, he says, but he has written at least two novels, and one of them, Rockabilly (later retitled Spider Kiss ), remains one of the two or three best novels ever to be published about the cannibalistic world of rock and roll music. He says he's not a fantasist, but nearly all of his stories are fantasies. In the course of Strange Wine , for instance, we meet a writer whose work is done for him by gremlins after the writer himself has gone dry; we also meet a nice Jewish boy who is haunted by his mother after she dies ( "Mom, why don't you get off my case?” Lance, the nice Jewish boy in question, asks the ghost desperately at one point; "I saw you playing with yourself last night," the shade of Mom returns sadly).
In the introduction to the book's most frightening story, "Croatoan," Ellison says he is pro-choice when it comes to abortion, just as he has said in both his fiction and in his essays over the last twenty years that he is an affirmed liberal and free-thinker,* but "Croatoan"-and most of Ellison's short stories-are as sternly moralistic as the words of an Old Testament prophet. In many of the out-and-out horror tales there is more than a whiff of those Tales from the Crypt/Vault of Horror ghastlies where the climax so often involves the evildoer having his crimes revisited upon himself . . . only raised to the tenth power. But the irony cuts with a keener blade in Ellison's work, and we have less feeling that rough justice has been meted out and the balance restored. In Ell' son's stories, we have little sense of winners and losers. Sometimes there are survivors. Sometimes there are no survivors.
*Ellison Anecdote #2: My wife and I attended a lecture that Harlan gave at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1974. He had at that time just finished "Croatoan," the skin-freezer which leads off Strange Wine , and he'd had a vasectomy two days before. "I'm still bleeding," he told the audience, "and my lady can attest that I'm telling the truth." The lady did so attest, and an elderly couple began to make their way out of the auditorium, looking a bit shocked. Harlan waved a cheery goodbye to them from the podium. "Night, folks," he called. "Sorry it wasn't what you wanted.”
"Croatoan" uses that myth of alligators under the streets of New York as its starting point- see also Thomas Pynchon's U. and a funnyhorrible novel called Death Tour by David J.
Michael; this is an oddly pervasive urban nightmare. But Ellison's story is really about abortion.
He may not be antiabortion (nowhere in his intro to this story does he say he's pro -abortion, however), but the story is certainly more sharply honed and unsettling than that tattered piece of yellow journalism which all right-to-lifers apparently keep in their wallets or purses so they can wave it under your nose at the drop of an opinion-this is the one which purports to have been written by a baby while in utero . "I can't wait to see the sun and the flowers," the fetus gushes. "I can't wait to see my mother's face, smiling down at me . . ." It ends, of course, with the fetus saying, "Last night my mother killed me.” "Croatoan" begins with the protagonist flushing the aborted fetus down the toilet. The ladies who have done the deed to the protagonist's girl friend have packed their d & c tools and left.
Carol, the woman who has had the abortion, flips out and demands that the protagonist go and find the fetus. Trying to placate her, he goes out into the street with a crowbar, levers up a manhole cover . . . and descends into a different world.
The alligator story began, of course, as a result of the give-a-kid-ababy-alligator-aren't-they-just-the-cutest -little-things craze of the midfifties. The kid who got the Bator would keep it for a few weeks, then the tiny alligator would all of a sudden not be so tiny anymore. It would nip, perhaps draw blood, and down the toilet it went. It was not so farfetched to believe that they might all be down there on the black underside of our society, feeding, growing bigger, waiting to gobble up the first unwary sewer repairman to come sloshing along in his hipwaders. As David Michael points out in Death Tour , the problem is that most sewers are much too cold to sustain life in fully grown alligators, let alone in those still small enough to flush away. Such a dull fact, however, is hardly enough to kill such a powerful image . . . and I understand that a movie which takes this image as its text is on the way.
Ellison has always been a sociological sort of writer, and we can almost feel him seizing upon the symbolic possibilities of such an idea, and when the protagonist descends deep enough into this purgatorial world, he discovers a mystery of cryptic, Lovecraftian proportions: At the entrance to their land someone-not the children, they couldn't have done it-long ago built a road sign. It is a rotted log on which has been placed, carved from fine cherrywood, a book and a hand. The book is open, and the hand rests on the book, one finger touching the single word carved in the open pages. The word is CROATOAN.
Further along, the secret is revealed. Like the alligators of the myth, the fetuses have not died. The sin is not so easily gotten rid of. Used to swimming in placental waters, in their own way as primitive and reptilian as alligators themselves, the fetuses have survived the flush and live here in the dark, symbolically existing in the filth and the shit dropped down on them from the society of our overworld. They are the embodiment of such Old Testament maxims as "Sin never dies" and "Be sure your sin will find you out.” Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder.
I am the only adult here.
They have been waiting for me.
They call me father.
At its simplest, "Croatoan" is a tale of the just Revenge. The protagonist is a rotter who has casually impregnated a number of women; the abortion on Carol is not the first one his friends Denise and Joanna have performed for this irresponsible Don Juan ( although they swear it will be the last). The Just Revenge is that he finds his dodged responsibilities have been waiting for him all along, as implacable as the rotting corpse which so often returned from the dead to hunt down its killer in the archetypical Haunt of Fear story ( the Graham Ingles classic "Horror We? How's Bayou?" for instance) .
But Ellison's prose style is arresting, his grasp of this myth-image of the lost alligators seems solid and complete, and his evocation of this unsuspected underworld is marvelous. Most of all, we sense outrage and anger-as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic. Accompanying these feelings is the feeling that Ellison is preaching to us . . . not in any lackluster, ho-hum way, but in a large, bellowing voice that may make us think of Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." His best stories seem strong enough to contain morals as well as themes, and the most surprising and gratifying thing about his short fiction is that he gets away with the moralizing; we find he rarely sells his birthright for a plot of message. It should not be so, but in his fury, Ellison manages to carry everything, not at a stagger but at a sprint.
In "Hitler Painted Roses," we have Margaret Thrushwood, whose sufferings make job's look like a bad case of athlete's foot. In this fantasy, Ellison supposes-much as Stanley Elkin does in The Living End -that the reality we experience in the afterlife depends on politics: namely, on what people back here think of us. Further, it posits a universe where God (a multiple God here, referred to as They) is an imageconscious poseur with no real interest in right or wrong.
Margaret's lover, a Mr. Milquetoast veterinarian named Doc Thomas, murders the entire Ramsdell family in 1935 when he discovers that the hypocritical Ramsdell ( "I'll have no whores in my house," Ramsdell says when he catches Margaret in the kip with Doc) has been helping himself to a bit of Margaret every now and then; Ramsdell's definition of "whore” apparently begins when Margaret's sex partner stops being him.
Only Margaret survives Doc's berserk rage, and when she is discovered alive by the townspeople, she is immediately assumed guilty, carried to the Ramsdell well naked, and pitched in. Margaret is sent to hell for the crime she is presumed to have committed, while Doc Thomas, who dies peacefully in bed twenty-six years later, goes to heaven. Ellison's vision of heaven also resembles Stanley Elkin's in The Living End . "Paradise," Elkin tells us, resembles "a small themepark." Ellison sees it as a place where moderate beauty balances off-but just barely-moderate tackiness. There are other similarities; in both cases good-nay, saintly! - people are sent to hell because of what amounts to a clerical error, and in this desperate view of the modern condition, even the gods are existential. The only horror we are spared is a vision of the Almighty in Adidas sneakers with a Head tennis racket over His shoulder and a golden coke-spoon around His neck. All of this comes next year, no doubt.
Before we leave the comparison entirely, let me point out that while Elkin's novel was heavily and for the most part favorably reviewed, Ellison's story, originally published in Penthouse (a magazine not regularly purchased by seekers after literary excellence), is almost unknown. Strange Wine itself is almost unknown, in fact. Most critics ignore fantasy fiction because they don't know what to do with it unless it is out-and-out allegory. "I do not choose to review fantasy," a sometime-critic for no less an organ that the New York Times Book Review once told me. "I have no interest in the hallucinations of the mad." It's always good to be in contact with such an open mind. It broadens one.
Margaret Thrushwood escapes hell through a fluke, and in his heroically overblown description of the auguries which foreshadow this supernatural belch, Ellison has an amusing whack at rewriting Act I of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar . Humor and horror are the original Chang and Eng of literature, and Ellison knows it. We laugh . . . but there is still that undercurrent of unease.