Were he to
have risen to popularity in the 21st century, Harlan Ellison would
have been the king of speculative fiction’s edge lords. Unafraid
of voicing opinion, controversial or otherwise, in the very least the
man can be respected for walking his own path when so many are
pressured to conform to an ever growing list of cultural standards.
And it comes through in his fiction. Though the overwhelming
majority of Ellison’s oeuvre is short story length, each selection
nevertheless has a uniqueness, a singularity that, like his opinions,
separates the author from the herd. Volume
2 in his Voice from the Edge
series, Midnight in the Sunken
Cathedral brings together eleven
of Ellison’s best stories, read by the author himself.
The
premise of the collection’s opening story “In Lonely Lands” is
quite simple: a blind man awaits the arrival of death with his
Martian friend on the red planet. A mood piece, Ellison wonderfully
captures the melancholy of the man’s final moments in both poetic
and direct manner, opening the door to the collection that follows.
A pastiche of alien invasions, “S.R.O.” sees a weak, poor New
York City man in the middle of lying to a potential date interrupted
by an alien invasion. Taking on absurdist tones, the invasion
becomes a stage performance the man attempts to take advantage of for
his own gain—a wonderful piss take on the strange manner in which
some people seek entertainment.
The title
story one of the weakest in terms of cohesive vision but grandest in
terms of sci-fi sensawunda, “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral”
finds a deep sea diver in the Atlantic trench having an out of body
experience. The imagery and visuals pushed to the max, Ellison
attempts to draw parallels between his creation and that our
instinctual need for connection with family, no matter how remote it
may be. A western, or perhaps more properly a post-western, “The
End of the Time of Leinard” sees a town rebel against its sheriff.
The times they are a changin’ their reasoning, the sheriff’s
downfall starts when he shoots the town drunk after he has had a
pistol pulled on him. While a short piece, Ellison touches upon a
key paradox to human existence in terms of the names under which
violence is committed.
Capturing
an exceptionally wonderful authorial voice (or perhaps it was just
Ellison’s wonderful narration—or likely both), “Pennies, Off a
Dead Man’s Eyes” sees a man return to his hometown to attend the
funeral of an old friend. Not an ordinary man, he has the ability to
become invisible, and therefore is witness to something sacrilegious
in the moments following the funeral. More a scene yet somehow still
a story, “Rat Hater” tells of a man interrogating a mobster who
killed his sister. The story part quite straight-forward, it’s in
the details of the scene, particularly the dialogue and inner
monologue of the narrator that Ellison captures something engaging.
Seeming to
capture perfectly its last breath—that moment of realization,
“Jeffty Is Five” is a story about the life and death of America’s
Golden Age. Written with an amazing ear for the flow of
words, it is the story of a man and his young son whose neighbor
doesn’t grow old. Wonderfully metaphoric, it is a look
at America’s loss of innocence post-WWII while remaining more
nostalgia than paean to bygone days. A proverbial Tommy gun, “Prince
Myshkin, and Hold the Relish” is perhaps the world’s briefest
frame story. About a guy buying a hot dog from his friend the
vendor, they get into a conversation on Dostoyevsky, and subsequently
the vendor’s dramatic love life. Like most stories in the
collection, it’s Ellison’s superb authorial voice which carries
the story—both of them. About the world’s most orthodox Jew who
also happens to be a time traveler (‘time drifter’ in the story’s
parlance), “Go Toward the Light” looks at the man’s reaction to
seeing with his own eyes some of the key moments of religious
history, and the resulting psychological impact on him. The
psychology of dreams and echidnas, yes echidnas, “The Function of
Dream Sleep” closes the audio collection with a foray into the
supernaturally subconscious, or subconsciously supernatural,
depending on perspective. Ostensibly about a woman still grieving
the death of her husband three months prior, the story shifts gears
to the man’s perspective as he tries to understand the loss.
Love him
or hate him, Ellison has a knack for reading aloud his own stories.
The pausing, the intonation, the varied pacing–it all feels
intrinsic to the story, adding a layer that the written word does not
contain, and in most cases enhancing the stories. I prefer books,
but in the Voice from the Edge series, Ellison’s narration brings
something to the table the reader simply can’t get in other forms.
Subsequently, for Ellison fans who are familiar with his oeuvre, this
collection, and the others in the series, offer something extra that
is worth seeking out, not to mention those in general who enjoy
audiobooks and are looking for fresh, unique material.
The
following are the eleven stories collected in Midnight
in the Sunken Cathedral:
In Lonely
Lands
S.R.O.
Midnight
in the Sunken Cathedral
The End of
the Time of Leinard
Pennies,
Off a Dead Man's Eyes
Rat Hater
Go Toward
the Light
Soft
Monkey
Jeffty Is
Five
Prince
Myshkin, and Hold the Relish
The
Function of Dream Sleep
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