Store of the Worlds in Bookforum
…Sheckley’s work is unabashed termite art. He illuminates standard sci-fi’s cutout characters and quasi-magical contraptions with a hallucinatory, Technicolor vibrancy, spinning yarns more fabulist than plausible, banged out as permutations of his own pet obsessions, among them mind control, extraterrestrial psychology, and the cruelties of love. Writing in 1956, his contemporary Damon Knight criticized ‘the stripped quality of his … work, and its utter divorcement from fact and logic’—aspects that today read more like pleasurably conscious choices than defects. And indeed, Knight conceded that, ‘like it or not, what Sheckley does is art.’
—Ed Halter reviews Robert Sheckley’s Store of the Worlds in the current issue of Bookforum. If you think the prose of the review is weird and wonderful, you should check out Sheckley’s stories.
