Over the Edge/An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  A modest literary goal, maybe, but a clear demonstration in formal terms of Harlan Ellison’s trans-categorical vision.

  Ellison doesn’t see the techniques of the story writer or the critic or the polemicist or the comic book scenarist or the screenwriter as separate kits of literary tools any more than he sees thematic material, settings, character, or for that matter the laws of physics, as defining separate genres of fiction.

  He writes down the stuff inside his head, using whatever palette of effects borrowed from whatever literary sphere seems appropriate at the time.

  And like most of us, the inside of his head is like something thought up by Dali, who himself seemed to have laid down on canvas his vision of the moment with complete disregard for categories.

  In this ultimate sense, if one must categorize Harlan Ellison, then call him a literary surrealist.

  Which is why, though he is not a science fiction writer, he still cannot help but involve himself in the lives and times of those who are, and bear passionate witness thereto in an anguished screed like “Xenogenesis.”

  For in the ultimate sense, surrealism is indeed the state of the spirit that the fans call “sense of wonder” and that all who write science fiction and fantasy share in one degree or another or they wouldn’t be following even the narrowest version of such a speculative path.

  Which is why Harlan Ellison, no science fiction writer, is a writer of speculative fiction in his heart of hearts.

  —Norman Spinrad Paris, France

  INTRODUCTION: Brinksmanship

  It is February of 1996 as I sit here writing these words. More than twenty-five years since OVER THE EDGE was first published as a crummy little 75¢ paperback original from a company called Belmont. It was printed on something like woody, pulpy blotting-paper, and the best things about it were the gorgeous cover painted by my old friends, the Caldecott Award winners, Leo &. Diane Dillon, and a generously laudatory foreword by the excellent novelist and social critic, Norman Spinrad.

  The book contained eleven stories and one essay.

  About 60,000 words of material.

  It was my nineteenth or twentieth published book. May of 1970. I had just turned 36. OVER THE EDGE made virtually no splash. It was read, seemed to have a pleasant effect on more or less eighteen thousand people (which is how many copies it sold at the time), and vanished. I never let the book be reprinted. Not because the stories weren’t good enough to have an ongoing existence, but because I had other fields to plow, and, well, as the cliché would have it, I’d been there, done that.

  In the intervening years, because some of those eleven stories were ones for which I retained pride and affection, I used them in other collections of my work. Collections that contained more current, better-crafted stories. And yet, the selections I cadged from OVER THE EDGE fit right in. They were better than just okay. They were stories that were still able to sing their song, and they fit right in.

  But the entire book lived in shadow and memory. It never got around to being reprinted when one or another publisher would commit to doing a long series of reprints. Two or three times since 1970, major programs of multi-volume publication; but OVER THE EDGE just didn’t get re-done.

  This is the first new edition of OVER THE EDGE in more than a quarter of a century. And there has been some facelift, a bit of tuck&roll, a fresh coat of Mar-Tex and the carbs have been flushed. Also new rims and header.

  Of the original eleven stories (the original lone essay has been retained, and two new ones, never before collected, have been added), six have been excised and four previously-uncollected stories have been added. Six pieces are gone, and six new ones have been ushered in as replacements. The book is now something like 80,000 words long, more substantial than in its first appearance.

  (Oh, by the way, don’t fret. Those six deleted stories are in other books that will appear in White Wolf volumes as the next few years see this publication program continue. But for your peace of mind, here’s the list of stories I’ve removed, and the upcoming books in which they will appear: “Final Trophy,” “!!!The!!Teddy!!Crazy!!Show!!!,” “Tiny Ally” and “Blank…” will come to you in STALKING THE NIGHTMARE, my 1982 collection; “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” my Jack the Ripper story, is one of the collaborations in PARTNERS IN WONDER, from 1971; and “Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center” returns to its first home, GENTLEMAN JUNKIE And Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation, from which it was pilfered to appear in the Belmont book.)

  If you wonder why I’ve gutted OVER THE EDGE and installed some bright, shiny, new material that’s never been included in any of my sixty-something books, the answer is a touchstone to my attitude about my liaison with those who read my work. And the answer is this:

  Quite a few years ago, before I knew better, I shifted and shuffled stories from book to book, to get the right mix. But one day I read a review of my latest tome by some young critic whose name I’ve long-since lost, a review that whacked me upside the head. He said that it was dismaying how many books currently available included stories that were in other collections by the same authors. And I thought, yeah, what a gyp.

  You see, the motivation for re-using stories was neither venal nor merely expedient. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough new material to go around (with more than 1700 stories published that was never a problem), and it sure as hell wasn’t laziness. It was one of those rare manifestations of genuine humility on my part. As those who know me well will attest, I do humility really badly.

  But my thinking, born out of an uncommon humility, was that no one was so devoted to my writings that s/he would have all the books, and thus would likely never have seen stories from older collections that were no longer in print. So I’d grab up a story here and there, not too often, but now and then. And there were duplications over the years.

  Well, when I read that criticism, I resolved to eliminate all duplications when earlier books came back into print, and not to let that onerous practice happen again. (I have kept that resolve for almost twenty years. But I do hope the astute reader will exclude the 35-year retrospective THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON, from Morpheus International, that is almost entirely composed of previously-published work. That’s why it’s called a retrospective, stupid.)

  So here comes OVER THE EDGE again, more than two decades later, and I’ve excised the dupes, and added longer, newer, never-before-collected pieces, and this is a new introduction.

  You may ask why I didn’t reprint the original version of “Brinksmanship” in this spiffy new package. Well, er, uh, I was going to do just that…reprint the old introduction…and add a few short remarks just to deal with the fresh material in the book…but then I made the mistake of reading the stupid thing. Jeezus, it blew. Massively. A hocker of auctorial phlegm. And since I have this systemic aversion to aiding and abetting myself in public humiliation, I decided to shit-can the thing.

  Don’t frown. You’d’ve hated it.

  What you won’t hate is Norman Spinrad’s lovely new version of his original Foreword. Norman lives in Paris now, and he got married a couple of years ago—we all thought it an impossibility that a woman existed who could either snare or mollify the wild man—and he has written many controversial and memorable books since he was pal enough to front OVER THE EDGE’s initial release, but as a writer he has only grown and gotten more muscular; and he has remained a staunch friend. I am in his debt for “The Frontiers of Edgeville.”

  And here are a few side-bars to the stories.

  PENNIES, OFF A DEAD MAN’S EYES: was a title I had sitting around for years before I figured out the story to go with it. I had written the scene in the funeral parlor completely, had that part down cold, but ground to a halt thereafter; just couldn’t figure out where to go with it. So I put it aside for, oh, maybe two, three years. And then one day in 1970 I was sitting in that tiny space I called an office, in the treehouse I lived in, up the now-vanished Bushrod Lane, in Los Angeles, and I was worki
ng on a tv script—I think it was a Mod Squad teleplay, because I’d met Peggy Lipton on a plane flight to the East Coast, and we’d gotten to know each other, and I was single, and she was beautiful and had just been on the cover of Life, and—uh, that’s another story—and I seem to have wandered—and suddenly, right in the middle of this killer deadline crush, the studio screaming for the pages so they could start pre-production, I flashed on the scene of someone copping the dollars off a dead guy’s eyes, the scene I’d written years before, and I suddenly knew how to write the story, knew instantly and without any conscious imperative that the story was not a straight, mimetic, contemporary drama, but a straight, mimetic, contemporary fantasy with a social relevance that was buried in the fantasy element, that paralleled it. And I ripped the page of teleplay out of my typewriter, suicidally ignoring the phone calls that had been coming every hour or so from the studio…and I dug like a gopher through the file drawer of snippets and pastiches and unfinished texts and ideas on restaurant placemats, until I found what I’d written years earlier. And I went right back at it, clear as spring water, knowing precisely what I had to do. Now here’s the kicker: when I sent the story in to one of the science fiction magazines for which I was writing in those days, the editor bounced it. He said it wasn’t sf, neither was it a fantasy. I was dumbfounded. In the story, there is a phrase: “to go dark.” It means to turn oneself invisible, or at least to render oneself so unobtrusive that no one can see you, and so, in effect, one is invisible. That element alone would bring the story into the genre. But there is an even greater, more purely fantasy element in the story—which I’ll not reveal and spoil your pleasure at discovering it—which should certainly have resonated with that editor’s editorial needs. But he wasn’t one of the editors who would soon thereafter populate the field who were open to experimental writing. “Pennies” sold to the very next editor, the now-passed Ejler Jakobsson, a very fine man, who thought it was a terrific story (so did I, he said dimpling prettily) and who put it on the front cover of that issue of Galaxy, I reread that story every once in a while, and I’m glad it’s back in print; because I am extremely proud of it. And if you aren’t familiar with the concept of “passing” it is probably because you are a White Person, and maybe you ought to stop the nearest Black Person over the age of, say, thirty, when next you pass one on the street, and ask him or her what “passing” means. This has been an educational service of the Ellison Sociological Seminary.

  ERNEST AND THE MACHINE GOD: was one of the original stories in my examination of Gods for Our Times that led, in 1975, to my assembling the cycle of works titled DEATHBIRD STORIES. Some critics say that book is my best. Maybe. I don’t think so, but what the hell do I know? Anyway, the interesting sidelight to “Ernest” is that it really happened. To me. If you change the woman in the story—who is a lot meaner than I am, not to mention made up from bits and pieces of several wives of friends of mine—to Harlan Ellison, and you change the locale to North Carolina in the 1960s, you will understand why this story always creeps me out. I met the real kid who is Ernest in this fable. Met the rest of those guys sitting on the porch, too. I was this close to Ernest when he did to my car what Ernest in the story does to the woman’s car. I saw it happen, folks. He was an eerie kid. Sweet, and innocent, and scared the shit outta me. As those who read my work closely will attest, I am a pragmatic sonofabitch. Don’t believe in reincarnation, flying saucers, astrology, ghosts, ESP. But I saw Ernest talk to a car, and if psi powers don’t exist, as I believe, then that hillbilly kid was some weird sort of idiot savant. This is the other story of this collection that I’m most pleased with. It holds up real fat over the years.

  THE END OF THE TIME OF LEINARD: is one of the new pieces I introduced here to replace a story that was pulled. In the old days, when I first went to New York to write professionally, it was the last gasp dying moments of the pulp magazine era, and most houses had converted their titles to digest-size magazines. Over at Columbia Publications, “Doc” Lowndes has a few western books still going. In those days, they were big sellers to, of all people, cowboys. Ranch hands and folks out in the open spaces used to read the magazines regularly. Don’t ask me why. But when you were being paid only 1/2¢ a word, you wrote everything. And I wrote a couple, three, four westerns. This one is my favorite. I like this story a bunch; it is told in the style of the western films I admire most, those identified with the directors Sergio Leone and Anthony Mann. Never bought into that idealized “noble gunslinger” icon in most John Wayne flicks, or the later John Ford epics. Sam Peckinpah held my adoration. Warlock; Duck, You Sucker!; and one of the finest films of the last decade, Unforgiven, with that sensational David Webb Peoples screenplay that Eastwood rips off credit for having “interpreted.” One other thing about this story. It was adapted into graphic format for my comic book, Harlan Ellisons Dream Corridor, by the great visual artist Doug Wildey. It was Doug’s last job before he died a couple of years ago. He was a terrific man, a wonderful interpreter of times gone by, and a bunch of us miss the hell out of him. I thought I’d tell you that. If your friends don’t keep reminding the Uncaring Universe that you were here, who will? Friendship doesn’t end its responsibilities just because something shitty like Death gets in the way.

  ROCK GOD: was written to illustrate a moody Frank Frazetta cover on an issue of the now-defunct Warren Publications Creepy. It was visually adapted from the short story version by the legendary Neal Adams. It appeared in narrative form simultaneously in a little-known digest magazine called Coven 13. Part of my deal with Warren was that I would be able to buy the original art from “Rock God” from Neal Adams. Well, Mr. Warren was somewhat less than honorable—the word slippery leaps to mind unbidden—and the art mysteriously “vanished” soon after publication. It was not till ten years later that I had one of my most interesting hardboiled noir experiences, late at night in Manhattan, with an incognito trafficker in goods, during which encounter I finally laid hands on, and finally came into possession of, the missing originals. When we get together some evening, ask me to tell you that story. It’s a beaut. Simply a little bewty.

  FROM A GREAT HEIGHT: is both an old and a new story. I wrote it once, way back in the mid-Sixties, for a men’s adventure magazine, one of those “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!!!” books that featured hardboiled stories and bogus action-adventure tales allegedly written by outdoorsmen who had gone one-on-one with hammerhead sharks or rabid rhinos. Got paid the staggering sum of $200 from True Men, which was a big payday in those days. I recently pulled the yarn out of the drawer—it’s never been reprinted—and rewrote it as an homage to Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Chandler Brossard…that whole crowd of tough writers whose work inspired me so much when I was learning my craft. Gave it a new title, in its expanded incarnation, and it appears here in book-form for the first time.

  XENOGENESIS: is the longest essay I ever wrote. It’s been reprinted a half dozen times in various periodicals since its initial appearance a few years ago, but appears in book-form here for the first time. It took me years and years to complete. It may be the most controversial essay I’ve ever written that deals with the relationship of the reader to the writer. It has a weird effect on people. There are jerks who are perseverant nuisances, pains in the ass, schmucks who never notice that no one laughs at their idiot puns but themselves, the human equivalent of a bad cold, an infarct, a flatulence…those who are eristic to the point where your only thought is of violence…and it is these soiled festoons of ambulatory bumfodder who read “Xenogenesis” and get mightily pissed off. They do so, please take note, because they see themselves in the depictions. If there is an entry in this book that is truly “over the edge,” it is surely this one.

  The other stories and essays speak for themselves. They do the jobs they were created to do, and I offer them to you again, after all these years, without qualm.

  The cubic gallons that have poured over the dam since this book was first published could fill Poseidon’s J
acuzzi. Lives have been led, friends have died, entire publishing companies have sunk beneath the waves like the last shimmering towers of drowned Atlantis. I’m the same guy, yet several different guys. What was, what seemed immutable, has worn away to dust and been blown off on the trade winds. Most of you discovering me for the first time will be surprised to learn that I’ve been around a while.

  And intend to be around quite some time longer.

  Had this interesting encounter with Fate a while back. Shot some back-alley craps with him. He lost. I’ll be around a long time. Imagine how dearly that news is greeted by those who can’t stand my existence. Ain’t life grand, here on the edge?

  PENNIES, OFF A DEAD MAN’S EYES

  It was a slow freight in from Kansas City. I’d nearly emptied all the fluid from my gut sac. There were no weeds or water to fill it again. When the freight hit the outermost switching lines of the yards it was already dark. I rolled myself off the edge of the boxcar, hit running, went twenty feet fast and slipped, fell to my hands and knees, and tumbled over. When I got up there were tiny bits of white chalk stone imbedded in my palms; I rubbed them off, but they really hurt.

  I looked around, tried to gauge my position in relation to the town, and when I recognized the spire of the First Baptist, set off across the tracks in the right direction. There was a yard bull running like crazy toward me, so I went dark and left him standing where I’d been, scratching the back of his head and looking around.

  It took me forty minutes to walk into the center of town, through it, and out the other side, in the direction of Littletown—the nigger section.

  There was a coal bin entrance to the All-Holiness Pentecostal Church of Christ the Master, and I slipped inside, smiling. In twelve years they hadn’t repaired the latch and lock. The stairs were dim in the basement darkness, but I knew my way the way a child remembers his bedroom when the light is out. Across twelve years, I remembered.