Episode 460 - From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet

valens999, not on Ur life! Ummm, if this is good, then Strychnine is HEAVEN! And to think, Ellison was actually paid for such as this?!

Sweet Mother of Mercy! Please, God, stop the Merry-Go-Round! I wanna get off! What a pretentious pile; what a waste of talent! Harlan was over-rated & musta used an Nawful lotta drugs! If only I could buy back the time I just wasted listening to this Ellison garbage!!

Uh... people think this is good?

I can imagine creepy kid voices reading this set aloud.

Ten bucks says Jordan Peele turns "The Elevator People" into his next movie.

The Elevator People and the 5 O'clock People remind me of what I call Rain Drivers. People who only go out driving when it rains or snows, causing traffic to always quadruple when the weather is bad. But they are never on the roads when it is sunny. I think they sit at home everyday staring out the window, just waiting for the first drop of rain or flake of snow. Then they rush out to their cars and start driving. They are not going anywhere, just getting in the way of everyone else and slowing down traffic to a crawl.

I knew the elevator people were tugging at something in my brain. Just a few weeks ago I listened to your 2 parter on the Shaver Mysteries. btw. was that sponsored by Gillette? Or Norelco?

I think my favorite story of this episode was S is for Solifidian the Sorcerer. I love it when the more grandiose and self-serious tropes are brought down to the level of the mundane and have their faces rubbed in the mud with the rest of us. The Venture Bros does a great job of this for example (what happens to child adventurers when they grow up and how do super villains afford the health insurance premiums on all their minions?) and Harlan Ellison also had a flair for it - it's a theme that comes up again and again in this collection. I think it's also my favorite thing about What We Do in the Shadows. In S is for Solifidian the Sorcerer the sorcerer spends his time performing miracles about menstrual cramps and baldness and he has to stop when his wife makes him get a real job. I also really liked the Elevator People. It reminded me of Stephen King's The Five O'Clock People. Working in high rise offices, and in city centers in general, sometimes there are whole groups of people you see that you can't believe are real humans. They're too businessy or too sales-persony and you just know that at the end of the day they take off their human disguises and hang them up in dank holes under the city somewhere to scuttle around on all their many pedipalps. But really, there's not a story in this collection that I don't like (other than the one about the baseball player. I'm so bored by baseball).

Besides, some people *like* more arms. A lot of people. ...The internet is a strange, wondrous place.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

As a body positive feminist, I believe no being should be required to wear muu muus no matter how many or few arms they have.

Half of us want to eulogize him, the other half wants to just discuss the story already!

My Husband got all his Harlan Ellison books signed from A Change of Hobbit. He wasn't in the window, just signing books about 1977. By the time I knew it it was beginning to struggle and was going under.

My Husband has found several silver coins in the kick-out depository on one of those Coinstar machines in our grocery store. Unfortunately we think this is probably from people cashing in collections that they don't realize the worth of (kids, thieves, the clueless)

The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore is another Ellison story with a similar structure.

Ben Gilbert

Well so now we know how to deal with the Deep Ones. Torpedos are for amateurs.

I collect silver coins, and if asked why, I joke it’s so I can melt them down in case of werewolf attack. That bit about modern coins having little silver had stuck with me, but I had forgotten it was from this Ellison collection. And now I know.

Joe Webb

Eye contact and social interaction in general are hard. Especially with strangers. Some days, the best you can muster is to keep silently looking forward and pray the weirdo harassing you catches on and shuts up.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

"Run, Wilbur, run!"

Mama always said life was like a box of chocolate alphabets. You never know what you're gonna get et by.

Not sure if you guys were being sarcastic, but I loved “The elevator people” I often have elevator rides with those who refuse to make eye contact, a grin or even a head nod. Staring at their phone or just at the ground or walls. And I found it very striking and almost a critique of office culture where after visiting a certain floor they become husks that ride the shafts all day long mindlessly. Maybe I’m old fashioned with my idea of politeness.

The first story, about the Atlanteans, identifies the location of their city as "in the Maracot Deep", which is not a real place, but rather the title of a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle about a Professor Maracot who finds Atlantis in "the deepest trench in the Atlantic".

Darth Pseudonym

Also, on a more serious note, the Elevator People story in this collection is straight up out of The Shaver Mysteries - which Ellison despised to the point of cornering publisher Ray Palmer in an elevator to demand that he come clean and admit the stories were fake. I can't stop thinking of 5'3" Ellison towering over 4' Ray Palmer - both titans and Science Fiction pioneers (even though Ellison would crinkle at being labeled such). A historic battle in an elevator over whether or not there were secret caverns under some Elevators... It gets weird and recursive fast.

At least with this week's story, there is less ambiguity. We know that the Cubans with chicken bayonets were Demeaning of the Story.

To clarify, rites to Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl that involved sacrifice were purely autosacrifice. The person would take a stingray spine with a thin chord tied to it--a chord braided around jagged pieces of glass, obsidian, or coral--and jam it through a part of them, dragging it through so the chord would split the wound wider and spill more blood, for the blood would be dabbed up with ceremonial paper for burning. If the practitioner had a penis, the spine would get drawn through the middle of that member. Otherwise, it was dragged through the center of the tongue. The reason for the blades was because people who did this tended to do it seasonally; the area would build up with scar tissue and toughen, so the chord needed help making its way through. The Gods gave up Their blood to move the Sun, and thus had to be replenished--but Quetzalcoatl insisted that His supplication did not involve the loss of His supplicants' lives.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

Yeah, Ito's "Uzumaki" is pretty great! "Hellstar Remina" is possibly his most Lovecraftian story of any length but I don't think it's been legitimately (i.e. non-fan-) translated. Most of his other stuff is short stories. The "Tomie" stories have ups and downs but they're a little bit like something a 1990s Arthur Machen would have come up with.

Jason Thompson

The title of this episode sounds more like the title of one of the comment shows than an actual wryd tale.” Dikh” might be a stab or a joke against Phillip K. Dick,eventually I hope you guys go over their feud.I remember reading Dick’s exegesis and seeing some things about Ellison.

Oh, for GODS' SAKES. Quetzalcoatl was the God who HATED human sacrifice! He wanted voluntary, non-lethal sacrifices! The rest of the tale is great, but I can not STAND when people regurgitate half-baked, unresearched versions of what they *think* pre-hispanic Mesoamerica was.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

I’d love it if you two looked into Junji Ito’s work (it doesn’t have to be a episode on it as it’s a format you don’t regularly have).

Rick Hound