Harlan Ellison's fiction has been influenced by everything from the Bible — the Old Testament in particular — to The National Enquirer. The prefaces which he has taken to writing for his later short stories not only blur the lines between autobiography and fiction but also warn the world of impending doom. His social criticism often becomes jeremiad, and he does indeed sound like a latter day Job crying in a wilderness. Although Ellison is clearly an extreme agnostic, if not an atheist, his stories frequently draw on Christian symbolism, and he is much concerned with the illogic of religious behavior. Like Mark Twain's dark vision, Ellison sometimes envisions a cosmos in which man is essentially the victim of some sort of cruel, cosmic joke. Twain's later, more despairing stories, such as "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1900), and "The Mysterious Stranger" (1916), anticipate both the tone and...