It’s true of the rest of the tales herein. They remain relevant; the only thing in the anthology that feels dated is the introduction, as Harlan grooves to Jimi Hendrix and points to Piers Anthony as an underground writer. But hell, no one reads introductions anyway. (Admit it. You’re not reading this, are you?)

And along with Spiro Agnew and A. Hamilton Gibbs and Howard Stern, the anecdotes and tales and the Legend in His Own Lifetime stuff about Harlan (most of which is, more or less, true-ish) and all the Gutzon Borglum stuff (and I ought to have given Gutzon, who carved presidential faces into Mount Rushmore, his own footnote), will also be forgotten.

But the stories last. The stories remain.

“To be eccentric,” says Miss Webster, dead for fifteen years, in the back of my head, her voice dry, her elocution perfect, “you must first know your circle.” Know the rules before you break them. Learn how to draw, then break the rules of drawing, learn to craft a story and show people things they’ve seen before in ways they’ve never seen.

That’s what these stories are about. Some of them are quite brilliant, and they sparkle and glitter and shine and wound and howl, and some of them aren’t; but in all of them you can see Harlan experimenting, trying new things, new techniques, new voices; craft and voices he’d later refine into the calm assurance of Deathbird Stories, his examination of the myths we live by; into the stories of Shatterday, in which he took apart, hard, the cannibalistic relationship between the writer and the story; or the bitter elegies of Angry Candy.

He knew his circle; and he dared to go outside it.

Being a preamble to Harlan is a strange and scary business. I take down the battered and thumbed and treasured paperbacks from the bookshelves and look at them and there’s Harlan on the back cover, with a pipe or a typewriter, and I wonder at how young he looks (it would be foolish to remark that Harlan is the youngest a-whisker-away-from-sixty-year-old I’ve ever met—it’s patronizing and implies that it’s a wonder that he’s still in full possession of his faculties and capable of telling the mah-jongg tiles apart; but he has a sense of wonder that’s been beaten out of most people by the time they hit their twenties, and a certain cyclonic energy that puts me in mind of my eight-year-old daughter, Holly, or of a particularly fiendish explosive device with a ferocious sense of humor; and more than that, he still has convictions and the courage of them): and I then realize the company I’m in, and I reread Stephen King’s introduction to Stalking the Nightmare and watch Steve making the same points I’m trying so haltingly to make, that it’s not about the personality, or the tales about Harlan, or even about Harlan the person. It’s not about the pleasure it gave me to hand Harlan the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, nor is it about the stunned expressions on the faces of the assembled banqueters, as they listened to his humble and gracious acceptance speech. (I lie through my teeth. Not humble. Not even gracious. Very funny, though. And they were stunned.)