DATE: Sunday, November 9, 1997              TAG: 9710300648

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY SORRELL TOWNSEND 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

ELLISON PROVES HE'S NOT SLIPPING

SLIPPAGE

HARLAN ELLISON

Houghton Mifflin. 303 pp. $22.

It is sometimes said that most of the good writers are dead. In the introduction to Slippage, his latest story collection, Harlan Ellison reveals that this statement almost became truer by one.

Ellison, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Award, the Horror Writers of America Bram Stoker Award, Science Fiction's Nebula and Hugo awards and journalism's Silver Pen Award, and author of such powerful tales as ``A Boy and His Dog,'' ``I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream'' and ``Jeffty is Five,'' has been regarded as a fiery, formidable, socially conscious pillar for so long that he acquired an aura of immortality. It was an aura subscribed to even by the author himself.

But the former ``angry young man'' is now in his 60s, and two events, getting trapped in a devastating earthquake and undergoing a quadruple heart bypass, have altered Ellison's view of the world. Gone is his sense of permanence and security. Replacing it is ``slippage,'' a sense that things change unexpectedly, history is forgotten and previous constants are unreliable. The only defense is to ``pay attention,'' a warning to those who are aware as well as advice to those who are oblivious.

With that in mind, Slippage presents 21 short pieces of fantasy, horror, suspense, humor and memory. The centerpiece of the collection is ``Mefisto in Onyx,'' an award-winning novella about an African-American telepath sent to probe the mind of a racist, vicious serial killer and driven with such a downpour of words that it conveys the sensation of reading the story aloud and becoming breathless as a result. It is a story of intrusion and manipulation, and perhaps its most disturbing aspect is the ending, which seems so happy and victorious after all the other alternatives, but is actually shockingly deceptive and manipulative.

If ``Mefisto in Onyx'' dominates the collection in length and prestige, it shares equal billing with many other stories in quality.

``The Museum on Cyclops Avenue'' is an atmospheric visit to a repository of stuffed and mounted mythological beasts. ``Go Toward the Light'' is a romp of a time travel tale that attaches a science fiction explanation to the miracle of the lamp worshiped at Chanukah. And ``The Few, the Proud'' is a ripper of an anti-military piece that not only condemns war but also the minds that conceive and continue it.

``The Dragon on the Bookshelf,'' written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg, is a fantasy about the power and obsession of love, to the exclusion, literally, of the rest of the world. ``Keyboard,'' a cautionary tale of how technology is taking over our lives - Ellison proudly admits he still uses a manual typewriter - begins when the protagonist's computer grows a fang on its keyboard and bites him. And ``Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral,'' a lyrical journey into the Bermuda Triangle, does a better job with ``Contact'' than Jody Foster managed in two hours-plus on film.

Almost lost in the collection is a seven-page story positioned near the book's front, titled ``Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You.'' In this Kafkaesque tale, a seemingly happily married man comes home from work to discover the power cut off in his home, his wife nowhere to be found, and a strange man sitting in his living room. The stranger tells him that his wife is divorcing him and demanding that he immediately leave the house. The news is so unexpected, so unlikely that the man cannot believe the stranger, except that the stranger knows details that only his wife could provide.

What's the real story behind all this? It is never revealed. ``Anywhere But Here'' is perhaps the book's best example of ``slippage.''

In his introduction, the new mortal Harlan Ellison worries that ``This might be my last book.'' All we can do is hope that that will not be the case. MEMO: Sorrell Townsend is a playwright and science-fiction aficionado

who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Kitty Hawk, N.C.

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