Retrieve Mirror, Mirror On The Wall By Stanley Ellin Available As Textbook

bold exploration of the madness that comes when life is lived according to the flesh, Incredibly trippy. I went into this with absolutely no preparation, so it took me a while to understand what was going on, But I loved the language and style beautiful and tragic noir, What a strange story, told with the most fluid word use, This is an outstanding book by an outstanding author, As a writer myself, I can only gasp at the brilliance of the structure, and the way in which Ellin allows the narrator to tell us a story which is quite the opposite of the one he thinks he is telling us.

I can also recommend as equally but differently brilliant, VERY OLD MAN and STRONGHOLD, Synopsis: there is a dead whore lying on the bathroom floor of Peter Hibben's locked apartment, He's having nightmarish glimpses of erotic horrors, The first Ellin book to leave me cold this novella, despite its fairly wellcontructed twist, doesn't quite seem to capture the 'dreamworld' of the subconscious that it attempts to over the course of the novel.
This isn't to say that the narrative device doesn't work, it does, but that dialogue and interactions within this space seem hammy and fake, particularly in those of Ira Gold and the Doctor.




The interplay of sexuality and memory was excellent yet the shifts between each memory, with the grand inquistor of Dr, Ernst, felt like an unecessary connector that stilted the process of selfdiscovery, Because of the odd size of the story, I felt at times that it should have just been shortened to the length of a slightly longer story than those in The Specialty of the House because this didn't seem to pack the narrative weight of his novels.


The best part of the novel though, in relation to its twist, was the ending, Ellin always seems to have a stick of dynamite up his sleeve when writing I'm thinking in particular of Dreadful Summit here and the last few pages of this hit you with a gut punch.


I've always found the midcentury neurotic Jew novel annoying as hell, so just the fact that I waded through this one to the end says something for Ellin.
A highpowered publishing exec finds a murdered whore in his bathrooom and dreams/hallucinates his sex life is on trial with his analyst presiding.
Let the Freud roll! Plenty of kink, but the ending is only surprising because the narrative device is inherently confusing, Ellin remains a shortstory writer, and a masterful one, to me, Stanley Bernard Ellin was a mystery writer of short stories and novels, He won the sitelink Edgar Allan Poe Award three times and the sitelink Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere once, and inhe was awarded with the Mystery Writers of Americas highest honor, the Grand Master Award.
Stanley Bernard Ellin was a mystery writer of short stories and novels, He won the sitelink Edgar Allan Poe Award three times and the sitelink Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere once, and inhe was awarded with the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award.
sitelink.