When I was 12 or 13 my Dad signed me up to The Science Fiction Book Club, which sent an SF novel through the post once a month. I was introduced to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (later filmed, stupefyingly, by Tarkovski as Stalker), An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest, and Blackpool Vanishes by Richard Francis, but there was also a short story collection by the hack writer (I use the term with admiration) Harlan Ellison, called (and I beg forgiveness for Harlan here) Ellison Wonderland. The story that stuck with me was ‘All the Sounds of Fear’, which tells the tale of the terrible fate awaiting actor Richard Becker, known to the world as ‘The Man Who IS The Method’. The final scene left a visual impression which remains through to the present.
Ellison is maybe best known for his screenwriting, which included the classic Star Trek episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’. He cultivated a tough-guy, straight-talking writer-for-hire persona, personified by him sending a copy of every story he ever published to an Ohio State University professor who had denigrated his writing. Ellison punched him and was expelled. But this was a story Ellison told, and the boundary between Ellison the self-imagined writer and Ellison the living man is forever blurry. His short stories are madly imagined, overwrought and passionate. Perfect teenage reading, in other words.
First published in the UK in The Saint Detective Magazine, 1962. Collected in Ellison Wonderland, Paperback Library, 1962
A Personal Anthology 