"Strangers,
boiling hurling sweeping down the street toward him in a chiaroscuro
montage of chimerical madness. A vision out of Bosch." This is a quote
from Lonelyache.
And what will those strangers do to
Harlan, once they catch up with him? Let me give you a hint: take a look
at the guy tied upside down on a pole with an arrow thru him.
Lonelyache
is a tale Harlan judged one of the best he ever wrote. It is also one
of the most personally important to him, a story that, in Harlan's own
words, "saved my sanity."
Reflecting on this, his very personal short yarn made part of his 1967 collection, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,
Harlan has this to say: "It is a terror of the mind. In several senses
of the phrase. First, because it deals with the nightshade terrain
within the thoughts. And second because the thoughts were mine."
Harlan
notes how this story grew out of the emotional upheaval following the
breakup of his second marriage. For a number of months, Harlan had a
series of dreams, until in "mindless terror" he fled to his typer and
pounded out Lonelyache. Upon completion, the dreams vanished, for good.
The
plot of this series of dreams runs as follows: the narrator, Paul Reed
(stand-in for Harlan Ellison) had been a member of a gang. Now the gang
comes after him one at a time. "Thirteen times they had come against him
- these men were decent and pleasant and dedicated, whom he would have
been proud to call his friends under other circumstances - and thirteen
times he had escaped assassination."
Not only had Harlan aka Paul
escaped being killed but in his dream he murders each pleasant,
clean-cut chap in the grizzliest of ways - for example: "Paul had
grappled with the man interminably, slashing at his flesh and the
sensitive folds of skin between fingers, till the very essence, the very
reality of death by knife became a gagging tremor in his sleeping body. It was as though the sense, the feel of death-in-progress was evoked."
Pick up I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream and take a gander at this terrifying tale. Unforgettable experience.
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