Mercurial, belligerent, passionately in love with language and wild ideas. Harlan Ellison has, for exactly a quarter of a century, steadily gathered to himself and his thirty-seven books an undeniably fanatical readership. Winner of more awards for imaginative literature than any other living writer, he is the only scenarist ever to win the Writers Guild of America award three times for most outstanding teleplay. Though his contemporary fantasies have been compared favorably with the dark visions of Borges, Barthelme, Poe and Kafka, Ellison resists categorization with a vehemence that alienates critics and reviewers seeking easy pigeonholes for an extraordinary writer. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, "The categories are too small to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, purveyor of pure horror and black comedy; he is all these and more. In this, his thirty-seventh book, celebrating twenty-five years of setting down the mortal dreads we all share, Harlan Ellison has put together his best work to date: sixteen uncollected stories (half of which are award-winners), totaling a marvel-filled 105,000 words and including a brand-new novella, his longest work in over a dozen years.

Contents:

• Introduction: Mortal Dreads
• Jeffty Is Five
• How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?
• Flop Sweat
• Would You Do It For a Penny? [with Haskill Barkin]
• The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge
  
• Shoppe Keeper
• All the Lies That Are My Life
• Django
• Count the Clock That Tells the Time
• In the Fourth Year of the War
• Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage
• All the Birds Come Home to Roost
• Opium
• The Other Eye of Polyphemus
• The Executioner of the Malformed Children
• Shatterday