Harlan Ellison made me a freak (and if you send him a corpse and some wire he'll make you one too).
Strictly speaking that isn't true. All he really did was give a particular shape, or pehaps only a cast of mind, to the freak that I always already was.
His short story 'The Whimpering of Whipped Dogs', its portrayal of futility, weakness and terror, with something all-encompassingly Other at its bleak, vicious heart, has had an incalculable effect on the gradual development of a malleable, mercurial perversity of mind and imagination. I'm glad to say.
His prose is like the movement of muscle beneath blood-covered skin. His words are coated in mucous. It has an insectile logic and the blackest humor. At the end of 'A Boy and his Dog', the Boy returns from Downbelow with his guns and the Girl who seduced him into going there; where he had his semen milked from him by a Masturbation Machine in order to rejuvenate a sterile population.
Back at the Surface he finds his cunt-hunting Dog, injured and starving.
He kills the Girl and he and the Dog eat her. The last shot is of the two of them walking off into the Sunset, the Dog laughing at the Boy over the incident of the Masturbation Machine. The Dog says, in the last words of the movie, 'Well, she knew how to pick a man - even if she didn't have good taste.' (The dog is telepathic - and a genius in combat strategy). As Men on Art would say "We have to give that two snaps up in a circle." That's from the masculine point of view, of course.
Harlan would understand.
Which is why I want sex with his head. The girl at the window, whipped into saying yes to the Monster in 'Whimper of Whipped Dogs', is an icon of my sexuality. As is the Great Beast she learns to worship.
When I first read him I found myself at home in his stories, or more nearly so than I had anywhere else up to that point. He first put into my head, though I could never have put it this way then, the thought that the cruelty, horror, and terror of life is in itself a bleak divinity, worthy and desirous of worship.
I am in agreement with that. I felt it as a child when in the cruelty of those days I never stopped reaching out, inarticulately, to a God I knew in my guts was there and listening - but didn't answer.
That kind of intellectual honesty and emotional awareness is rarely come by, in both life and literature. To be able to understand and accept that is a rare thing.
To be able to convey it in words that reach pass the skin of the mind and down into its bowels, without self-pity, with humor, is something much rarer still.
That's also why I want to fuck Harlan Ellison's head. Maybe some of that power, that mana, will transfer itself to me in the act.
His ancestors are Poe, Lovecraft, Ashton - Smith, William Hope Hodgson (read 'The Nightland' or 'The House on the Borderland' - give real depth to your nightmares), and also Lord Dunsany and the Eddison who wrote 'The Worm Ouroboros'. The same Terror, and the same Romance that gives the Terror its life and honesty, are to be found in them all.
His descendant is not Stephen King but Clive Barker. King makes the Other out to be answerable. Barker simply shows its Otherness.
But none of them capture the illlness of being human like Harlan does. And none of them can make it seem as pretty as he does. So like something that requires fucking.
Can you wonder that I want sex with Harlan Ellison's head?
