"The Jam" (1958)

[spoilers] Henry Slesar was a native of Brooklyn born in 1927 and a Madison Avenue ad man who started writing copy at 17—legend has it he invented the term "coffee break." But his real love was writing short (usually very short) genre tales with hard twists. "The Jam," with its heavy-handed modern details like heroin addiction and bad freeway traffic, feels pro forma in many ways: setup, misdirection, twist. Over and out. It could be an inflection point itself from one phase of horror into another, from the grandiloquent literary huffing of H.P. Lovecraft and his crowd to the zip and punch of TV consumed between commercial breaks, where Slesar eventually made a career contributing scripts regularly to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, while writing literally hundreds of stories. This little 5-pager, which appeared originally in Playboy, takes place in a car traveling one of the tunnels from New York to New Jersey. Our driver and his passenger are at the end of a long wild weekend and the passenger is starting to go into withdrawal. He needs a fix. They're in a big hurry. The premise actually surprised me more than the twist ending. I don't entirely believe this premise. It feels based more in drug lore—Allen Ginsberg's "starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix" comes to mind—but it's garish and daring for 1958 and the story is very short. It's not that hard to suspend disbelief. Brevity saves the day again. The premise is there for the shock value, but it's also shocking. The driver is a madman, switching lanes, riding the white lines between cars, scraping paint from the sides of them. These miscreants emerge from the tunnel into a massive traffic jam, the kind where your progress is measured in yards per hour, and engines are overheating all over the place. Perhaps obviously—it certainly seems like an obvious twist now but maybe it was a good one then—they are dead, having died in an accident in the tunnel. There's some nice misdirection here, we see the accident but don't recognize it for what it is in the chaos of the crazy drive. Dead, yes, and in the hell that heroin addicts and bad drivers deserve, as we can all certainly agree, right? The drugs are a little on the nose even for 1958, though it probably seemed pretty hip then with Howl still so relatively recent. But the traffic jam—Slesar was clearly familiar with the look and feel of a hell commute, which sadly for us and our life on this planet we still know too well all these many years later. For the mere paragraphs it goes on, "The Jam" captures all the soul-consuming claustrophobia, frustration, and death wish of bad traffic endured 10 times weekly. Slesar's details are just right, such as the eager gobbling up of a few feet when the car ahead of you finally moves, or the sight of a snaking parking lot that goes as far as you can see: "hopping out of the car to stare at the sight again, at the ribbon of automobiles vanishing into a horizon 10, 15 miles away." If you've ever had a hell commute, this story will bring it all rushing back. It's a good thing the story is so short because I think that might make it just a little bit easier to shake off. On the other hand, I'm still thinking about it.

Masters of Horror and the Supernatural: The Great Tales, ed. Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Read story online.

"Ersatz" (1967)

You and I may know Henry Slesar's work better than we suspect. At the time of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology he had been an "advertising man" for many years. From there he moved on to head writer for a daytime soap, The Edge of Night. And all along he wrote stories, novels, and screenplays. In fact—and this is probably my own best chance for knowing his work—he contributed lots of scripts to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and even Batman and 77 Sunset Strip. He also collaborated with Ellison on various projects, which brings us back to this collection. In his introduction Ellison says Slesar was one of the collaborators he most enjoyed working with, by way of noting how unsatisfying it often can be for both parties. "Ersatz" is a short short—Ellison not only labels it that but also notes the word count (1,100) and points out that his introduction is nearly twice as long. Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles around this joint. Slesar is obviously comfortable with the compressions, tight corners, and twist endings of the form. But the story idea itself is not that imposing or inspired. It's a post-apocalyptic future with a dwindling population and harsh conditions. Endless war and severe privation—that kind of thing. A wandering soldier finds shelter in a "Peace Station," erected systematically for the purpose as part of the war infrastructure. All the amenities found there are artificial: chemical beef, cigarettes made of "treated wool fibers," bread made from seaweed, etc. A woman serves him food but now he has a new hunger—for her. This story is a short short, it has a twist ending, and I am now about to reveal it. She is not a woman but a man in a woman costume. Thus the story ends badly dated—homophobic, transphobic, or both, we would say. Slesar is a good writer. The language is clear and brisk, setting out its ideas and concrete details with economy and clarity. But its assumptions—gay sex as a telltale symptom of a blasted and ruined society, or something like that—strike an irredeemable sour note. That makes it much more an odd story of the past than one with anything interesting to say about the future.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison