Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company            
                      The New York Times                  September 21,
1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final  SECTION: Section 7; Page 25; Column
1; Book Review Desk  LENGTH: 228 words  HEADLINE: Books in Brief:
Fiction  BYLINE:  By Eric P.  Nash    BODY:


SLIPPAGE  Previously Uncollected,  Precariously Poised Stories.  By 
Harlan  Ellison.  Houghton Mifflin, $22.

     Harlan  Ellison, the reigning bad boy of science fiction for more
than 40  years, has mellowed - somewhat. Like Stephen King (who took
more than a leaf  from his stylebook), Ellison writes with a relish for
gutter slang,  veins-in-the-teeth violence and brand-name pop culture,
and his work hums with a  relentless narrative drive. Many of the
stories in ''Slippage'' are light fables.  Another, ''Crazy as a Soup
Sandwich,'' about a modern-day demon, reads like a  script for one of
the more whimsical episodes of ''The Twilight Zone.'' (And it  was, in
the reprised series of the 1980's.) But the horripilating centerpiece 
novella, ''Mefisto in Onyx,'' which describes a black telepath's
meeting with a  white serial killer on death row, is a reminder that
Ellison has not lost his  capacity to convey stark, staring psychosis.
He gets a little deeper into the  killer's mind than is comfortable,
emerging with ''the scent of the blossoming  Yellow Lady's Slipper . .
.. the odor that rises from a human body cut wide open,  like a mouth
making a big, dark yawn.'' This is the Ellison we know from earlier 
collections like ''I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.'' Who else could
end a story  with ''The television licked its lips and winked at him''?