[In the following essay, Cart touches on numerous aspects of Ellison's works and career, focusing on the author's views of modern science fiction, horror, and fantasy.]

Quick! What do Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Count Dracula have in common? Give up? It's their birthdays. Well, it's Mary's birthday, anyway; born in 1797, she turns a mature 200 this year. As for the count: since I'm not sure the undead actually celebrate birthdays, perhaps it would be more proper to say that 1997 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker's eponymous novel about the ever-dapper, always-thirsty Toast of Transylvania. If Dracula is one of the two most famous novels in the field of horror fiction, then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, Modern Prometheus is surely the other. Written when she was only 19, it wasn't published until 1818 (by which time she was a superannuated 21).

Despite the, well, monstrous stature of Frankenstein and the fact that it antedates Dracula by 79 years, it was not the first of its genre to appear. Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, published in 1765, is typically accorded that honor though it would seem to me that a pretty good case could be made for Beowulf which has been around since about 750 and costars a guy named Grendel, who is himself no slouch as a monster (the late John Gardner gives him his own say in his tour de force novel Grendel, published in 1971).

If the current popularity of horror fiction among young readers can be traced to the slasher movies of the early 1980s (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.), Walpole's work emerged from an impatience with a world that had been cut and dried by an imaginatively arid Age of Reason. Or, as he wrote in the preface to Otranto, “The great resources of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life.”

Would he be happy with what his resourceful fancy wrought in the form of the horror fiction that is being published these 230-odd years later? I have no idea. I do know, however, that Harlan Ellison, a modern master of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, is not. I know because I asked him. The author of 70 books (his latest, Slippage, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin), some 1,700 short stories, articles, and essays, and dozens of screen and teleplays, Ellison is a man of vivid opinions, many of which he shares as a frequent guest on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. He is also an enormously talented writer, some of whose stories—for example, “A Boy and His Dog,” “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”—are modern classics of imaginative prose. Though a list of his work is strictly sui generic, he often operates in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, and John Collier. And so I'm surprised that only one of his books, Deathbird Stories, has ever been named a Best Book for Young Adults.

Be that as it may, I was interested in his assessment of the state of the art. Here's some of what he had to say when I interviewed him earlier this week and invoked names such as Walpole, Dracula, and Frankenstein: “Well, the changes in these genres—horror fiction, the supernatural and fantasy, particularly postmodernist fantasy—are the same changes one finds in all of contemporary society. And while I don't mean to be the specter at the banquet, most of these are not salutary changes. First, consider that the rise in illiteracy in this country and the related miasma of television have turned an entire nation into zombies. And, then, consider that we now have an enormous number of amateurs writing in these fields—by that, I mean people who were brought up on television and have no literary tradition. Their writing I find to be just abysmal.”

“You mentioned Dracula, which is a very fine novel. There's also Suzy McKee Charnas' Vampire Tapestry (Simon & Schuster, 1980). Otherwise, what is there? I cannot figure out what it is about vampires that interests anybody. I mean, you suck a neck and that's the end of it. And yet, you have endless variations on the same bloodsucking theme; the tropes have become so concretized that only the most minuscule variations are permitted—and in language so lugubrious that it would put cardboard to sleep! And the same is true of fantasy: instead of the truly original work of people like Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm, and Thomas Disch, we now have these moron trilogies filled with fuzzy-footed creatures and [he shudders] unicorns: you know, The Search for the Sword of Zuchman. It's a very sad landscape to look out upon.”

When Ellison, who actually owns as many books as the Beverly Hills Public Library, turns his attention to the place occupied by online technology in this bleak landscape, you can almost hear the famous line, “The horror! The horror!,” echoing from the pages of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

“The Internet is nothing but a holiday for yentas,” he winces. “It's a forum for back-fence gossip and a place where ‘maroons’ and ‘ultramaroons,’ as Daffy Duck would say, who believe in UFOs and yetis and conspiracy theories, can have an absolute field day.”

A man who continues to write using a manual typewriter, Ellison also has harsh words for the personal computer, asserting that the ease with which it can be operated has resulted in “a lot of slovenly writing.” One of the funniest—and scariest—stories in his new collection, in fact, is “The Keyboard,” which is about a computer that turns into, yes, a vampire. There's a TV set in there, too. “Everybody calls me a Luddite,” Ellison says, “but I just want to work the way I want to work. Give me my manual typewriter and a piece of paper, and I'll boogie!”

Clearly, Ellison is a man who has a mouth and occasionally screams. But he also has a lot of thoughtful things to say. He voices his regret, for example, that the books that are the most successful in his field these days are “the media tie-ins; the Star Trek, the Star Wars, and the Hercules novels.” “But then,” he continues ruefully, “the publishing industry has become almost a clone of the movie business, in which good writing has almost no value and good writers even less.”

He also regrets that the writers of genre fiction are ghettoized. “In truth,” he says, “fantasy is the oldest form of literature. I mean, the first writings we have are the Gilgamesh legends from Mesopotamia. Mimetic [i.e., realistic] fiction is a fairly recent development. I always perceived fantasy as the larger sphere within which realistic fiction operated. And so to mix fantasy tropes in my own writing with real-time people and situations is a very great joy for me. After all, if you turn the lens of fantasy only slightly, it reflects the human condition in a much more invigorating way than straight fiction.”

Maybe it was all the writers who work in the wake of Walpole whom Joseph Conrad had in mind when he wrote, “They speak to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.”