Angry Candy

Soft covered book came waterlogged and was super damaged to the point were bending the book scares me that it will fall apart. however the book itself it not my cup of tea, Harlon Ellison is not someone who i would recommend, this book had a lot of shock more then actual good subject matter was not impressed but who knows this might be for you.

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.

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.

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.

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!

"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.