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Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison has and continues to hold tremendous influence over me, both in the way I view humanity and in my preferred writing style of grabbing the reader by the heart, even in those who consider theirs safely well-hidden. Throughout his career, he created characters and stories who lived on in the reader's mind and spirit. And Harlan being who he was, always hoping for better in people and too rarely finding it, he wrote with almost surgical precision--but it was difficult to predict whether that brilliant scalpel would choose to save the patient or condemn them to a far more troubling fate. I chanced upon one of Harlan's few novels (Spider Kiss) at a book sale where the woman running it urged us all to please take as many books as we wanted, because she was out of any free space to keep them. At that age, I couldn't imagine owning such a massive library that you'd ever let a single book go. They were treasures to me then, and though I, too, later found myself in the position where I had to pick and choose which to keep with me and which to leave behind, my respectable (compared to the completionists) Ellison collection has never left my side.

photograph by William Rotsler

Harlan Jay Ellison (1934-2018)

Neil Gaiman, the nearly-as-charming and wickedly talented writer, plays bad boy with his good friend and mutual admirer Harlan Ellison. Please be on the lookout for these dangerously talented friends. Reward if returned.