Barry Malzberg

Anyone read much of him? I've been reading a bunch lately. Still can't decide what to make of him though, he seems to cut a line right between being amazing and just being tossed off garbage. He's entertaining anyway for sure and I get a kick out of how his books are like barely over a hundred pages long. My favorites have been Beyond Apollo, Destruction Of The Temple, Horovitz's World and Overlay but I don't way prefer those to the other ones I've read... like I said, I'm not sure what to make of him!

Should maybe elaborate a bit and say I feel like I should love him, he deals with a lot of the same stuff as Dick and other SF writers I can't get enough of, focuses mainly on total losers having awful relationships, everything feels domestic, like what does this mean for my breakfast, and his worlds are familiar, he can be totally hilarious, super pesimistic, really strange and surreal at times. But yeah, with that comes this feeling like he completely doesn't care or is just desperately trying to churn something out so he can get paid (Horivitz's World is explicitly about that), sometimes Dick reads that way, where the books suddenly end when he hits his minimum page count but somehow with him it always seems more like someone yanking out a cable suddenly, it's shocking, but that's how it ends. It's not a part of the whole experience the way it is for me with Malzberg. He's not consistantly great, but his high points rival most.