THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #67: A review of "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad

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What’s this? Yet another SF writer making it into this volume? What gives? Well, even Pelan knows he’s stepping on toes with this one, but he makes a very good argument for its inclusion. When you get right down to it, cancer is a pretty scary thing. Not only that, but the ending has a lot in common with Aleister Crowley’s early story in this anthology.



Harrison Wintergreen is a genius. At a very early age, he figures out how to make the world his bitch by cornering the market on Yogi Berra baseball cards in his neighborhood. He uses his ability to manipulate people and money to make millions upon millions of dollars, even at the expense of others. (This is actually the funniest part of the story. Read it for yourself to see how he got to be so Filthy Rich.)


Sadly, after getting his own way for much of his life, he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. After he consults the biggest minds on the subject, he realizes that they can’t help him. The only person who can save his life is himself. He pumps millions of dollars into a cure for cancer, and he actually finds it . . . with a few drawbacks.


SPOILER ALERT: Wintergreen concocts this amazingly insane cocktail of drugs in order to cure him. He finds a bunch of poisons which, when combined, rob him of all of his senses. Literally. It takes away his sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Then, to counter all of it, he throws in a bunch of hallucinogenic drugs to make his mind explode with visions.


He finds himself trapped in his body at first, but then, when the Carcinoma Angels show up . . . holy fucking fuckshit. Winterbottom soars through his own body, hunting down cancer cells and mercilessly killing them all, crushing them to dust. They come in all shapes and forms, including Hell’s Angels bikers and chitinous bugs, and he kills them all. By the end of the story, he has defeated the cancer within him, but . . . now he’s trapped in his own body, waiting for the drugs to wear off.


They don’t. There is never any relief for him. Instead, his physical body is brought to the nuthatch, where he will spend the rest of his meaningless life. END OF SPOILERS.


This is the trippiest story in here since Crowley’s, and you can see there are a lot of parallels between the two. Because even though it is incredibly clever and funny, it has a hard and nasty core. This is another one of those stories you’ll never forget. Not only that, but Spinrad’s the first writer in volume two of the anthology that is actually still alive. Unlike Bradbury and Matheson, he keeps up a pretty good online presence and is very accessible. Look him up here.


[This story first appeared in Harlan Ellison's game-changing anthology, DANGEROUS VISIONS, and it can be read here.]