Customer Reviews

Angry Candy (Plume)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've read several Ellison collections and this one has the best survey of his most thought-provoking and gut-wrenching work. Ellison is often misrepresented as a straight sci-fi writer, but any cursory glance at his diverse offerings will immediately disprove this stereotype. However, Ellison occasionally does tackle sci-fi. When he does, he's one of the best, as in this book's centerpiece: the mind-shattering and intellectually overwhelming tale "The Region Between", which is one of the best short stories I have ever come across.

The diversity of Ellison's work can be seen in the next story, the hysterical "Laugh Track" (I read this story on a plane and made the person next to me think I was mental, trying desperately not to laugh out loud). Ellison tackles many topics with a keen eye on social observation and a deadly sharp tongue, like race relations in "Paladin of the Lost Hour" and fraud and deception in "On the Slab." Of special note in this book is the introduction, in which Ellison laments the deaths of 44 of his friends within a two-year period, and gives one of the most unique interpretations of life and death you're likely to ever see.

"Angry Candy" is possibly Ellison's strongest collection of stories to date. Virtually every entry in the table of contents is a gem. For myself, highlights include "Paladin Of The Lost Hour" (a beautiful tale of friendship, time lost, and time found), "Laugh Track" (an uproarious parody of the television industry), "With Virgil Oddum At The East Pole" (a meditation on art and redemption) and Eidolons (a series of related koan-like vignettes which will require very thoughtful reading). The whole book resounds with Ellison's characteristic mix of horror and beauty, humor, anger, and wonder, along with a generous dash of spleen. Whether he makes you laugh, or weep, or just pisses you off (or all three!), you will not remain unmoved.

There are only a few authors who I'll seek out and read short story collections, my preference being full novels. Theodore Sturgeon is one. Harlan Ellison is another. After whetting my appetite with The Essential Ellison, I moved on to this and was kept just as pleased, though not pleased in a happy sense, pleased in a sense that each story picked at some part of my brain, making me confront my ideas about death and life and living and souls, made me look at it from my perspective and his perspective to see why we thought the way we did. These stories seemed to be written in anger, helpless flailing anger, as Ellison writes in the introduction (and hints at emotionally in the haunting closing story "The Function of Dream Sleep"), at the time these were written people who were close to him in his life were dying almost every month (there's a list going down the side of the intro detailing who died when . . . morbid), and that intro is almost worth the price of the book itself, for it sets the tone for all the other stories, heartfelt and emotional, unflinching and passionate. To go by names would be unnecessary, to name favorites would be useless. You have to read them all, experience them and wonder yourself as Ellison dances from genre to genre, from mystery to science fiction, effortlessly, stamping his print on each story, marking it with anger and sadness. He bared his soul in these stories and while it makes for a gripping and sometimes harrowing read, it doesn't make the reading any less necessary. He didn't turn away from his fears and sorrows and you shouldn't turn away from them either.

Funny how you can buy a book and put it on your book shelf and not read it for years. Then once you read it, you realize you should have read it when you first bought it. If I had read this book 20 years ago, it would have been further proof that Harlan Ellison is the single greatest writing alive. And I still like his stories. Sadly, it's impossible to separate Harlan Ellison the person from his stories. I can love Cat Stevens' music despite his anti-semitic blather. Orson Scott Card is a Mormon homophobe but Ender's Game (Ender, Book 1) was an excellent story. With Harlan, everything is about Harlan. He has to introduce every story and give interviews that are longer than his stories. And a lot of the key to liking Harlan Ellison's stories is liking Harlan Ellison.

And I'm no longer a surly teenager. As Nathan Rabin wrote in The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture, one shouldn't trust someone who never went through a Holden Caulfield phase, but one should fear anyone who never got out of that phase. Almost everything Harlan Ellison writes makes him sound like a whiny teenage smartass.

Now this still wouldn't be a deal breaker except for the fact that the stories are so average. They are good stories, but I expect more out of Ellison. His take on racial politics is stuck in the 60s. His characters aren't as fully realized as they can be. There are some good solid stories in this one but there are also a lot of stinkers - mostly stories that copy "The Deathbird" where there's a tale in the thing but you have to get through Harlan talking about his dead dog and a couple of paragraphs expounding on the Ellison "philosophy" which is mostly "everyone is a whackjob".

It's an ok anthology and definitely buy if you are a hardcore fan; but if you've outgrown your Harlan Ellison (or Holden Caulfield) phase, best go with another Harlan Ellison collection (Death Bird Stories is pretty good)

Angry Candy is considered by some to be Harlan Ellison's best collection of short stories. I think Slippage is a tiny bit better, but Angry Candy is powerful. The collection starts with an essay Ellison wrote after the deaths of many friends in a short time period (A list is provided; organized by month of death; human mortality is truely freightening). The common thread throughout these stories is death. Death shows up everywhere: from the Titanic to werewolves in Paris to an Aunt trapped for eternity on a "Laugh Track". The stars of the collection are "The Paladin of the Lost Hour," which was an episode of the New Twilight Zone. "Paladin" is a beautiful tale of race relations and human emotions. "Soft Monkey" is a tale of a New York bag-woman who chooses the wrong place to sleep one night and the relationship she has with a doll. "The Function of Dream Sleep" was written last and deals with Ellison's loss of friends. It seems it was written as a release from the pain of loss. All of the other stories in this collection are sound and most importantly entertaining. Ellison knows how to tell the story.

As I am trying to catch up with my reviewing, I came to the unpleasant realization that while I had finished this book less than a month ago I couldn't remember ANYTHING about it off the top of my head. Thankfully the description from Amazon jogged my memory about the stories presented, but it also pointed out something about the book to me which I wouldn't have otherwise realized.

I like Ellison's writings quite a bit, and I have been trying very hard to catch up on reading all the short stories that he has written over the years. It is thus somewhat of a disappointment to say that - once I could remember the stories from the collection - they didn't make any lasting impressions on me one way or another. This isn't to say that they were badly written; there was just nothing about the stories that really grabbed hold of my imagination or thoughts that would keep me remembering them.

I would strongly recommend it to just about anyone as the stories were good, but I wouldn't expect this collection to be remembered anywhere near as well as some of Ellison's previous.

I bought this book after hearing "'Repent Harlequin', Said the Tick-Tock Man" on tape. I was NOT dissapointed! It is so good! The collection is a great example of Ellison's writing. In short, READ IT!

This collection is, according to Ellison in his introduction, "the twenty-second or -third or -fifth book of stories I've done." With no disrespect to his fiction, the introduction is the best part of this collection. It opens with death of his friend, Emily (whose death also appears in a couple of the stories) and Ellison's "insensitive" but honest eulogy. Listed next to the text on two pages are 44 deaths which touched him in a two-year period. In some cases they were close friends and in other cases acquaintances, but the overwhelming amount of death clearly shook the hardened writer. He is angry about the deaths and the pain the losses create and this book is his attempt to come to grips with what he has experienced.

Which brings us to the last story, "The Function of Dream Sleep," in which the main character momentarily sees a mouth with teeth open near his stomach. When he goes to get help he eventually ends up with a group of people who take on the pain of others, but the character's pain is so great he actually kills several of them. Where does his pain come from? The loss of friends (including an Emily) which he has not been able to deal with in a positive way. He eventually seeks out a guru type figure who informs him the pain is from the dead whom he will not let go. He is told to "Let the mouth open...let the wind of the soul pass through, and take emptiness as a release." We end the book with "when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye." The process is complete and Ellison seems to have worked through his anger and let his friends go.

The stories in between the introduction and final story hit a range of topics, times, and creatures, but they all deal with death. The problem with prolific writers is usually that the quality ranges as well, and Ellison is no exception. Some of these are forgettable ("Escapegoat") and Ellison is prone to the last sentence surprise ending, like the ending of some bad jokes. But when he hits a story well it is well worth the effort. "Laugh Track" is a creatively written story in which a man follows his deceased Aunt through the years as her laugh shows up on laugh tracks over the decades. The twist is that the laugh track keeps her alive and he is able to connect with her, setting her off in a new direction. The story not only has a interesting premise, but shows a sense of humor as well -- a welcome diversion in this heavy book.

The best story is the opening "Paladin of the Lost Hour," in which human temptation is all that holds us back from chaos as one person holds the key to a lost hour in time. Should the hour be used for personal reasons the time will disappear and the world will disappear. Ellison manages to make the holder of time both human and other worldly as he finds a new person to protect time.

One of the more disturbing, yet most powerful, stories is "Broken Glass" in which a woman combats a rapist who enters her mind. Trapped on a bus she knows one of the men on the bus has entered her mind and raped her, but she does not know which person it is and he continues to taunt her. In the end she realizes she must use her mind to combat him. "On the Slab" is another standout in which a creature on display shows it is not yet dead, but there are those who want him that way. The "owner" goes from seeing this as a money-making venture to true compassion for the creature, and the relationship is touching.

Of the seventeen short stories here a good editor could have dropped eight of them to make this a stronger book, but I get the impression that at this stage in his career Ellison calls his own shots. There are a couple of Ellison "essential" collections on his 35th and 50th writing anniversaries, which may be a better place start. But Ellison is definitely a writer who should drop into most people's reading lists at some point.

I ready Angry Candy soon after my Father's death, and I'm sure the strength of my reaction to it was heavily influenced by that. But this book meant a tremendous amount to me in dealing with my grief. My Dad died well, he had time to make sure that there was nothing left unsaid. Perhaps that is why Angry Candy was such a great outlet for my rage that had no outlet and no real cause.

Rage will turn to despair and finally to peace; only the love of friends (and I consider Angry Candy a very close friend indeed) will speed and ease the process.

I strongly recommend Lou Reed's "Magic and Loss" as background music for Angry Candy. The medium is different but the emotion is the same.

Wonderful example of a great writer's work. Check out some of his essays in the Edgeworks series.