SOURCE: A review of Slippage, in New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1997, p. 25.

In the review below, Nash offers a positive appraisal of Slippage.

Harlan Ellison, the reigning bad boy of science fiction for more than 40 years, has mellowed—somewhat. Like Stephen King (who took more than a leaf from his stylebook), Ellison writes with a relish for gutter slang, veins-in-the-teeth violence and brand-name pop culture, and his work hums with a relentless narrative drive. Many of the stories in Slippage, are light fables. Another, “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich,” about a modern-day demon, reads like a script for one of the more whimsical episodes of The Twilight Zone. (And it was, in the reprised series of the 1980s.) But the horripilating centerpiece novella, “Mefisto in Onyx,” which describes a black telepath's meeting with a white serial killer on death row, is a reminder that Ellison has not...