Harlan Ellison has written a lot of great short fiction. Often stories that have scared me one way or another. Sometimes stories that made me laugh. Typically stories that forced me to look at something familiar in a new way. I’ve read quite a few of his stories, and count him among my favorite authors.

Of course, with an author so prolific, you know you won’t like everything, but I’ve generally admired the fearless risk taking behind even the stories that I haven’t particularly liked. Reading the fifteen stories in Strange Wine made me think that, somewhere along the line, he went from an author that writes stories that speak to me in a powerful way to an author who writes stories about what a great author he is. (Note that, from the plethora of laudatory quotes on the cover and within, there were obviously plenty of reviewers who didn’t feel that way about the book.)

None of these stories were great. Almost half of the fifteen stories in the collection were decent enough that I gave them a 6 out of 10 rating: “Working with the Little People,” “Killing Bernstein,” “In Fear of K,” “The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat,” “Seeing,” “Strange Wine,” and “The Diagnosis of Dr. D’arqueAngel”

A little more than half, then, left me disappointed enough to rate them a 5 out of 10 or less. I thought that “The New York Review of Bird,” a story about an avenging literary superhero who takes on the Publishing Establishment, was truly awful (and that a shared storywriting game that I participated in a couple of years back which touched on the same topic was in fact funnier, more creative, and more satisfying). “Mom,” a story about a recently deceased Jewish mother who comes back to haunt her son in a stereotypically nagging manner, was an utter waste of time. “From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet” did nothing for me, and wasn’t a story at all.

I would probably have liked this book more without the story introductions. I don’t really care whether he wrote a story after a adulterously impregnating a woman who had told him she was on the Pill, or sitting inside a bookstore window, or during a live radio broadcast, or at a Chinese restaurant, or winning a race with two other respected science fiction authors. I care about whether the story itself works for me, and more often than not, these didn’t.

One of the relatively decent stories in this collection, “Working with the Little People,” tells of an amazingly talented young writer of science fiction and fantasy who suddenly finds his creative genius has run dry. Looking at the stories in this volume, I can’t help thinking that Harlan Ellison was speaking from personal experience. ( )

A wealth of ideas, many wasted. "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" were the only good stories; the rest were slapdash and lacklustre. ( )

Excellent collection of Ellison stories including the legendary 'Croatoan.' The introduction alone is one of the best essays on the decline of the television generation ever written. ( )