Reviewed by Paul Tremblay
It pleases me to no end to see one of speculative fiction’s most important and famously recalcitrant authors, Harlan Ellison, included in The Best American Noir of the Century.
Rudy Pairis was raised by two foster parents, he’s been down on his luck since birth, and he’s telepathic. He refers to reading other minds as going into somebody’s landscape. These trips always leave him disturbed as the landscapes of the other (the other as us, all of us) is invariably filled with grotesque thoughts and hateful images, many of which are directed at Rudy and his dark skin.
Mind reading is such a life-alteringly miserable experience for Rudy, he avoids it at all costs, particularly with his friends. Or friend, singular. Ally Roche works for the DA’s office and she just helped put notorious serial killer Henry Lake Spanning on death row. Only problem is, she’s fallen in love with Spanning and now believes he’s innocent. She wants Rudy to go into his landscape and make sure that Spanning is innocent.
Ellison opens “Mefisto”, arguably one of the last of his great stories, with a deceptively simple line: “Once. I only went to bed with her once.” Nine words, and it sets up a hybrid hardboiled voice that is full of Ellison’s trademark wit and rage, a voice that carries the story. If one were to story board “Mefisto” there’s very little action. Much of the story is comprised of two characters talking, or Rudy ruminating, but given who Rudy is, and how much time he spends inside his own mind and others, it has to be told this way. And, Ellison masterfully builds the tension for Rudy’s first live jump into a landscape. Rudy spends pages hammering home how horrible it is to see another’s mind, and by the time it finally happens, we the reader are begging to see to it, no matter how terrible it might be. Because Ellison knows that’s why we’re there in the first place, right?
With that opening line, Ellison sets up the complicated relationship he has with Ally one of the only people alive he trusts. The line also sets up the inherent unreliability of his narrator Rudy, and unreliability of the whole story. Rudy’s almost begging us to believe that they only went to bed together once. And the word ‘only,’ tells us that despite protests to the contrary, perhaps he wished it wasn’t an only situation.
Rudy really is an ultimate noir protagonist. He’s witty, sharp, paranoid, damaged almost beyond repair, and alone, painfully so. But for Ally, the rest of humanity disgusts him.
After much recrimination, Rudy reluctantly agrees to Ally’s request. She manages to get him a death-row meeting with the handsome, charismatic Spanning. Rudy goes into Spanning’s landscape and finds an innocent man. Upon returning to his own mind, Rudy finds a revelation in his own mental landscape that sends Rudy and the story spinning through despair, paranoia, and a classic double-con that is sure to please even the most jaded connoisseur of noir fiction.
“Times change on the outside, but the inner landscape remains polluted.”
Paul Tremblay is the author of The Little Sleep, No Sleep till Wonderland and In the Mean Time.
