Paingod and Other Delusions by Harlan Ellison

Next time, it'll be your turn to help us. “Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. At least the four of them are safe at last. Robert Heinlein: This book is raw corn liquor-you should serve a whiskbroom with each shot so the customer. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Pyramid reissued the collection four times over the next fifteen years, with a new introduction added for a uniform edition of Ellison books in 1975. It was originally published in paperback in 1965 by Pyramid Books.

Rubbery appendages that were once my arms bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. Paingod and Other Delusions is a collection of short stories by American writer Harlan Ellison. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be.

Paingod and Other Delusions by Harlan Ellison