I suppose you’re entitled to a warning.
This is it.
None of these stories are meant to be taken seriously.
Sometimes I sit down at the keyboard and the sentences just start rolling out. I rarely know what’s going to happen next. I sit, appalled, watching the bizarre progression of character, incident, and idea that assemble on the computer screen. It astonishes me to see how the most sparkling of sentences can contain no real semblance of appropriate social decorum.
Nevertheless, every story in this collection has been purchased by an editor who probably should have known better.
Several of these stories were submitted (and sold) to the magazines. Others came into existence because some desperate anthologist offered me money and I was foolish enough to take on the challenge. Maybe it was the excitement of the idea, or maybe I didn’t have anything else to do that week-but it was probably the money.
I make no apologies, I make no excuses. These stories are best consumed in small doses-like maybe when you need something to read while sitting on the toilet. I do not recommend trying to work through this collection the same way you would read any other book, turning pages to see what happens next. On the contrary, I suggest restraint, proceeding through the pages carefully and with a justifiable mixture of caution and dread.
To be fair, a couple of these stories are here because they are funny.
The rest of them are here because they refused to lie quietly in the drawer. They escaped. They crawled out of their file folders and demanded to be included without any regard to their obvious lack of substance. Those stories-the ones that I am embarrassed to admit authoring-should be obvious. Please do not encourage them by laughing out loud, or even smiling in their presence. They do not deserve even that much acknowledgment.
If there is any kind of theme to this collection, it is that all of these stories have little or no redeeming social value. They were written as an explosion of peripatetic fragments in a delirious attempt at satire-except for a couple that were written for cathartic revenge on things (or people) that annoyed me.
There are thirty stories in this collection, nearly 120,000 words. Some of these tales might be worth your time. Others might be unforgivable stinkers, meriting only of an angry trajectory at the nearest brick wall-but which stories fit into which categories will be a subjective experience for every reader.
But let me put it this way-I suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.
Including:
The Great Pan American Airship Mystery Or Why I Murdered Robert Benchley
Actual Comments From Lunar Tourists
Afternoon With A Dead Bus
The Baby Cooper Dollar Bill
The Fabulous Marble
Crystallization
The Kennedy Enterprise
A Shaggy Dog Story
The Honker Sting
The Trouble With Hairy
The Killing Croak
The Ghost Of Christmas Sideways
Franz Kafka, Superhero
Through Time And Space With Ferdinand Feghoot
The Spell
The Schwarzchild Radius
A Brief Explanation Of How Budapest Became The Taco Capital Of The World
Two Meditations On King Kong
Why There Are No Type C Civilizations (with Marvin Minsky)
The Feathered Mastodon
F&SF Mailbag
The Strange Death Of Orson Welles
Michael Thinks The House Is Haunted
The Fabtastic Four
Dangerous Virgins
The Great Milo
The Old Science Fiction Writer
When The Martians Returned
Follow The Other Brick Road
A Mild Case Of Death
The Shadows Of Alexandrium
