Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Deathbird [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the entire story.]

"The Deathbird" is a short science fiction story written by Harlan Ellison. It was published in 1974. It took me a bit to get my thoughts together on this strange, mysterious, and often annoying story to read.

It is well documented that Harlan was known for being a bombastic writer who did not give a damn about the way he wrote stuff. In many ways, that's one of his best qualities. But this story was structured in a way that I don't consider very good. It has features in it that I dislike even in more modern stuff. Basically the story goes out of its way to educate you in the slant of his own personal atheistic views.

The story itself has to do with a man named Stack that turns out to just be Adam, the first human, who is alive at the end of the world. It's somewhat prefaced throughout the story that he was living various lives throughout the history of the world. This story also has it canon that his first lover was none other than Lilith, not Eve. That's a stupid reference that I don't really want to explain right now. It might make some good reading material for you, or you might already know about it. It's dumb though, and it was a hateful thing for Harlan to put it in this story.

It is the end of the world, and Adam wakes up to find that the days of the earth have ended. There's nobody left. And his only friend is the Snake who he once thought was the bad guy. Yep. Satan is now his good ol' buddy. He goes on a brief adventure to find that God is just some pitiful old man that just won't admit that he made a bunch of mistakes. Interestingly, the author compares God to the humbug wizard from "The Wizard of Oz," citing the burning bush as one of his parlor tricks. Ultimately, Stack (Adam) had just enough time before the earth ends to reject God in his madness and die peacefully with the earth.

Harlan uses some extremely pretty imagery of a large bird, called the Deathbird, that envelopes things when they die. It does this to the entire Earth, which I do admit to being rather pleasing in its presentation. But that's about the only compliment I can give this one.

The most annoying thing about this story are the brief interludes that interrupt the story. They make you feel like you're in an atheist class at school, giving you actual assignments that have a serious bent to them. They even make you read some of "Genesis" with some of the verses omitted and then ask you to consider whether or not the Serpent was really doing anything bad. I hated this so much. He couldn't just tell his story. He had to try and shove his beliefs down my throat in such an overt way.

Weirdly, the final chapter of the story is just a dedication to Mark Twain. This is something I do understand. Harlan very likely read "The Mysterious Stranger" before he wrote this. There were similar themes in that one, but they were far more subtle, and I actually consider that a great book.

I do not recommend this book. For everything good about it, there are a hundred things bad about it. It's just an annoying read by someone who had become so hateful of God that he actually joined up with Satan to create an artificial mockery of Him. Steer clear of this one.

This blog was written on June 27, 2024.

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