Strange Wine

Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories was selected by the American Library Association as one of the Best Books for Young Adults, 1975. School Library Journal said the same thing. This modern master of the macabre invites lovers of Poe, Kafka and Borges to a gourmet's sampling of the headiest wine since Montressor's Amontiillado. Strange Wine: the quaffing of deep drafts of imagination...unsettling visions by the man whom Pete Hamill called "the Dark Prince of American letters." Fifteen previously uncollected tales in which the Pied Piper of Hamelin is come again, this time to pipe the Apocalypse for humanity; the spirits of executed Nazi war criminals walk Manhattan streets; the damned soul of a Lizzie Borden-like murderess escapes from Hell; a horny young man is haunted by the ghost of his Yiddishe Momma; an amoral womanizer seeks his awful destiny among the derelicts and alligators living in the sewers beneath the city; gremlins write the fantasies of a gone-dry writer; the nephew of The Shadow wreaks terrible vengeance on the New York Literary Establishment; and the exquisite Dr. D'ArqueAngel injects her patients with immunizing doses of the distillate of death.