Between reading another way better book I finished Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison, a short story collection. Here’s my review.
I mainly picked this up to get a sense of if I liked Ellison’s writing style when he was forced by format to keep it succinct and carve down to just the meat of the thing. Turns out, he’s just a baby with a poopy daipey about everything he writes about. There’s occasional sentences here and there that had a nugget of potential, but nothing made up for entire stories being naught but misogynistic rants and paper-thin one-sentence gags stretched like an SNL sketch. This felt like he was just trying to get words on the page for some magazine or publication, and this meant any annoyance he’d encountered recently would be tortured into a shitty monster story. Uggghhh.