"Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Ten тАФ White Trash DonтАЩt Exist
Eleven тАФ Thicker than Blood

Twelve тАФ Two Inches in TomorrowтАЩs Column

Thirteen тАФ Promises of Laughter

Fourteen тАФ Ormond Always Pays His Bills

Fifteen тАФ The Man on the Juice Wagon

Sixteen тАФ Tired Old Man

Introduction
Blood / Thoughts
тАЬWriting has nothing much to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint тАж

тАЬEvery fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things or people of the received world are
unacceptable. Every fiction writer dreams of imposing his invention upon the world and winning the
worldтАЩs acclaim. (Such dreams are known as delusions of grandeur in pathology but tolerated as
expressions of would-be genius in bookstores and libraries.) Every writer begins as a subversive, if in
nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who
cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred
is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for
lunacy he will come to nothing.тАЭ

GEOFFREY WOLFF, 1975

What are we to make of the mind of humanity? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams
are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names
for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that
become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or
may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only moments of truth a human calls
throughout a life of endless lies.

Who will be the first to acknowledge that it was only a membrane, only a vapor, that separated a Robert
Burns and his love from a Leopold Sacher-Masoch and his hate?

Is it too terrible to consider that a Dickens, who could drip treacleand God bless us one and all, through
the mouth of a potboiler character called Tiny Tim, could also create the escaped convict Magwitch; the
despoiler of children, Fagin; the murderous Sikes? Is it that great a step to consider that a woman
surrounded by love and warmth and care of humanity as was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, the greatest romantic poet western civilization has ever produced, could herself produce
a work of such naked horror asFrankenstein? Can the mind equate the differences and similarities that
allow both anAnnabell Lee and aMasque of the Red Death to emerge from the same churning pit of
thought-darkness?

Consider the dreamers:all of the dreamers: the gloriousand the corrupt: