Rating: 
Summary: Bye This Book!!!!!
Review: This is some of the greatest art I have ever seen and along with feeling mystified at the different emotions I feel when I see this art, I become angry at inability to properly articulate how incredible Yerka's art really is. You've got to check this book out!
Rating:
Summary: A Mind-Blowing Experience
Review: This is the most incredibly entertaining book I have ever read. You will pick it up years later, and see new details. The strange, surreal landscapes depicted will entertain you and open your eyes to new sensations. Ellison's commentary is often effective in showing you a new perspective, but don't buy the book for the literature: buy it for the art. The detail Yerka uses with his art will create an indellible mark upon your conciousness. Highly, highly recoommended!
Rating:
Summary: A Mind-Blowing Experience
Review: This is the most incredibly entertaining book I have ever read. You will pick it up years later, and see new details. The strange, surreal landscapes depicted will entertain you and open your eyes to new sensations. Ellison's commentary is often effective in showing you a new perspective, but don't buy the book for the literature: buy it for the art. The detail Yerka uses with his art will create an indellible mark upon your conciousness. Highly, highly recoommended!
Rating:
Summary: Stimulating combination of two arts.
Review: Yerka and Ellison make an unstoppable team of creativity in this book. The only suggestion I'll make is look through and enjoy Yerka's paintings before reading Ellison's fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Stimulating combination of two arts.
Review: Yerka and Ellison make an unstoppable team of creativity in this book. The only suggestion I'll make is look through and enjoy Yerka's paintings before reading Ellison's fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps a good one for Ellison fans
Review: Yerka's paintings capture many things. In the most literal sense, one (e.g. Afternoon with the Grimm brothers) might include a cat, antique block planes, what looks like an old tube TV, a workbench-turning-piano, and possibly the monster under the bed. The detail goes on, and many of his paintings present the same collections of oddities, neatly arrayed like words on a page. Others (including Please Don't Slam the Door, Foraging in the Field, and Eruption) suggest an uneasy truce between the things of man and the forces of nature. Yet others (Susan, for example) imply intimacy between people, and with the world.
In too many cases, though, I see the catalog of Yerka's personal icons arrayed across the page, and feel as if the picture's meaning is not meant for me. Perhaps his personal language is too personal. For whatever reason, the imagery says very little to me.
Harlan Ellison, on the other hand, says far too much. Most of this book alternates pages, Ellison's writing on the left and Yerka's painting on the right, plus commentary by Ellison at the end of the book. Long ago, Ellison's favortie topic became Ellison, and I was no longer able to enjoy his writing. I would have liked the book better with Ellison's part missing.
Yerka's work is competent; some people may find it legible. Ellison has a following, and those readers are sure to find something here to like. Unfortunately, I am not in either group.
//wiredweird
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