Angry Candy was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1988, and it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. It is Ellison’s most personal book — written in the shadow of the deaths of several close friends in rapid succession and suffused with a grief and rage that even by Ellison’s standards is raw.
“Paladin of the Lost Hour” is the collection’s most celebrated story (it won a Hugo Award and was adapted for the revived Twilight Zone): an elderly man carries a pocket watch that contains the last hour of the universe — if the watch runs down, time ends. He must find someone trustworthy enough to pass it to before he dies. “The Function of Dream Sleep” imagines a man who can enter the dreams of the dying and ease their passage — a gift that costs him his own rest. “Eidolons” depicts a man haunted by the ghosts of friends who died before he could make amends.
The collection’s unifying theme is the inadequacy of love in the face of death. Ellison, who spent his career raging against injustice, complacency, and mediocrity, here confronts the one enemy that rage cannot defeat. The stories are not resigned — Ellison was constitutionally incapable of resignation — but they acknowledge, with a honesty unusual even for him, that anger is not enough, that art is not enough, that nothing is enough against the fact of human mortality.
Collecting Angry Candy
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $50–$150