Comes now the double-cross. If you’re reading these consecutively, Ellison follows Ballard like a double-shot of Jack Daniel’s after a whisky sour. He is about to punch you in the belly. His prose is as stark as a skull by Georgia O’Keefe and as steady <w a jackhammer. His themes are always different and always interesting. He never wastes a word, though he’s got a lot of them in him. Also, though ifs not why he’s here, nor intended to be intrusive, he’s one of the few people in the world I coninder a friend. So I’ll tell you a thing about him: unlike Norman Mailer, he need not refer to anything specifically as an advertisement for himself. Everything he writes fills this bill.

He writes the most beautiful introductions I have ever read for his own stories. Consider the fact that everything a man writes is really only a part of one big story, to be ended by the end of his writing life. Consider that, as so many have said, everything a man writes is, basically, autobiographical. Pick up any book by this man, and you will be entranced by learning precisely what went into the creative process. He tells you beforehand, then follows with the story. This one began in Las Vegas and ended with sickness and beauty. I tell you these things because every writer who has ever lived is unique.

Harlan, though, is so damned unique that most editors don’t know what to .make of him. If you ever meet him, you’ll know what I mean. There is no separation whatsoever between the subject and the object, the man and his work. When he writes, that’s what he is. I’d say intense, but that’s triteand if you know him, redundant, too.