This book has been in my collection for well over a decade. Until recently, I had only flipped through it to read excerpts from the script.
Two days ago, I was inspired to pull it from my bookshelf and read the surrounding material—preface, foreword, introductions, essays, and reviews—by such notable names as Ralph J. Gleason (renown music critic and founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine), film scholar Richard Brown, Charles Champlin (retired arts editor and columnist from the LA Times), Roger Ebert (practically a household name as film critics go), TIME magazine film critic Richard Corliss, author and historian Aljean Harmetz, and Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics at University of Bologna.
Eco and Corliss provide the most in-depth analyses of Casablanca with Eco delving into the myriad symbolisms and subtexts of the film, while Corliss focuses on the characterizations, relationships, and dialogue.
All of that—in addition to the brilliant script started by Julius and Philip Epstein and finished as breakneck speed by the then untried Howard Koch—and the scattered still shots from the film, make this 50th anniversary edition a treasure for any Casablanca fan and/or film scholar.
Harlan Ellison didn’t care much for personal computers and despised the Internet. He used an Olympia manual typewriter throughout his enviable writing career, which spanned approximately fifty years and over 1,700 stories, articles, scripts, comic books, and novels.
I was nervous yet exuberant when I stepped up to the autograph table and placed my stack of books before the master. Harlan began signing them and restacking them… until he came to Doomsman. He offered to buy it. I said No.
Then one of us, either Harlan or I, came up with the idea of trading Doomsman for another book on his table. This was how I ended up with Ellison Wonderland. Once the deal was done, Harlan held his treasure high over his head and yelled, ” I got a Doomsman!” That seemed to break the ice. He signed the rest of my books, took a photo with me, and that was it—all in the span of maybe 5 minutes.
Apparently, the publisher (Belmont) had reprinted an early Ellison story, “The Assassin,” and retitled it Doomsman without Harlan’s knowledge. Remember what I said about pulling the pin from a grenade?
Through a gaping hole in one of the lowest tunnels of the New York City subway system emerges a horde of bloodthirsty reptilian creatures from another realm who begin terrorizing and slaughtering everyone from the city’s homeless “Mole People” to subway passengers and finally, the transit police and even the city’s Emergency Services Unit. In addition to the attacks, strange glyphs are carved into the stone and metal walls of the subway system seemingly by incredibly sharp blades… or possibly claws.