“An enjoyable, irascible collection” of smart and sometimes-scathing film criticism from a famously candid author (Library Journal). Everyone’s a critic, especially in the digital age—but no one takes on the movies like multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison. Renowned both for fiction (A Boy and His Dog) and pop-culture commentary (The Glass Teat), Ellison offers in this collection twenty-five years’ worth of essays and film criticism. It’s pure, raw, unapologetic opinion. Star Wars? “Luke Skywalker is a nerd and Darth Vader sucks runny eggs.” Big Trouble in Little China? “A cheerfully blathering live-action cartoon that will give you release from the real pressures of your basically dreary lives.” Despite working within the industry himself, Ellison never learned how to lie. So punches go unpulled, the impersonal becomes personal, and sometimes even the critics get critiqued, as he shares his views on Pauline Kael or Siskel and Ebert. Ultimately, it’s a wild journey through the cinematic landscape, touching on everything from Fellini to the Friday the 13th franchise. As Leonard Maltin writes in his preface, “I don’t know how valuable it is to learn Harlan Ellison’s opinion of this film or that, but I do know that reading an Ellison essay is gong to be provocative, infuriating, hilarious, or often a combination of the above. It is never time wasted. . . . Let me assure you, Harlan Ellison is never dull.”

Masterpieces of myth and terror about modern gods from technology to drugs to materialism—“fantasy at its most bizarre and unsettling” (The New York Times). As Earth approaches Armageddon, a man embarks on a quest to confront God in the Hugo Award–winning novelette, “The Deathbird.” In New York City, a brutal act of violence summons a malevolent spirit and a growing congregation of desensitized worshippers in “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” an Edgar Award winner influenced by the real-life murder of Queens resident Kitty Genovese in 1964. In “Paingod,” the deity tasked with inflicting pain and suffering on every living being in the universe questions the purpose of its cruel existence. Deathbird Stories collects these and sixteen more provocative tales exploring the futility of faith in a faithless world. A legendary author of speculative fiction whose best-known works include A Boy and His Dog and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream—and whose major awards and nominations number in the dozens, Harlan Ellison strips away convention and hypocrisy and lays bare the human condition in modern society as ancient gods fade and new deities rise to appease the masses—gods of technology, drugs, gambling, materialism—that are as insubstantial as the beliefs of those who venerate them. In addition to his Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Edgar, and other awards, Ellison was called “one of the great living American short story writers” by the Washington Post—and this collection makes it clear why he has earned such an extraordinary assortment of accolades. Stories include: “Introduction: Oblations at Alien Altars” “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” “Along the Scenic Route” “On the Downhill Side” “O Ye of Little Faith” “Neon” “Basilisk” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” “Corpse” “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” “The Face of Helene Bournouw” “Bleeding Stones” “At the Mouse Circus” “The Place with No Name” “Paingod” “Ernest and the Machine God” “Rock God” “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54' N, Longitude 77° 00' 13" W” “The Deathbird”

Stories of fear in all its forms, from “the leading craftsman in the literature of terror and dread” (Louisville Courier Journal & Times). You have nothing to fear but fear itself. The only trouble is, fear comes in so many different shapes and sizes these days—the rejection by a beautiful woman, the threat of impending nuclear holocaust, the erratic behavior of wackos walking the streets who only need a wrong word and there they go to the top of an apartment building with a sniperscope’d rifle. Fear is all around you, and the minute you get all the rational fears taken care of, all battened down and secure, here comes something new. Like the special fears generated in these sixteen incredible stories. Fear described as it has never been described before, by the startling imagination of Harlan Ellison, master fantasist, tour guide through the land of dreadful visions, unerring observer of human folly and supernatural diabolism.

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."

Originally published in 1962 and re-issued in 1974 and in 1983, Ellison Wonderland contains sixteen stories with copyrights ranging from 1956 to 1961. This edition contains an Introduction written for the 1974 edition and updated for the 1983 edition. This collection was among Ellison's first and it shows a writer with a wide-ranging imagination, ferocious creative energy, devastating wit and an eye for the wonderful and terrifying and tragic. Among the gems are "All The Sounds of Fear", "The Sky is Burning", "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" and "In Lonely Lands". Though they stand tall on their own merits they also point the way to the sublime stories that followed soon after and continue to come even now, more than forty years later.

The New York Times called him "relentlessly honest" and then used him as the subject of its famous Sunday Acrostic. People Magizine said there was no one like him, then cursed him for preventing easy sleep. But in these stories Harlan Ellison outdoes himself, rampaging like a mad thing through love ("Cold Friend," "Kiss of Fire," "Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman"), hate ("Knox," "Silent in Gehenna"), sex ("Catman," "Erotophobia"), lost childhood ("One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty") and into such bizarre subjects as the problems of blue-skinned, eleven-armed Yiddish aliens, what it's like to witness the end of the world and what happens on the day the planet Earth swallows Barbra Streisand. Oh yeah, this one's a doozy!