Time for me to ramble incoherently about my favorite horrible thing!!! I mean "horrible" in a mostly good way, since the horrible comes from horrible things the narrator thinks and that happen to the characters (including the narrator).
I do not think I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is a full-on masterpiece. Like, I have yet to venture out into Harlan Ellison's larger catalog of works, but I'm sure there's something better written or more evocative or whatever in there than IHNM. I know for a fact that there's better stories in general out there than IHNM, and I've read a decent amount of things that I'd consider to be in that category. I do, however, think I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is irreplaceable. Whether it's the short story or the point-and-click game, I don't think that if IHNM wasn't made there'd be something that would have slotted neatly in as a replacement work. It's just so starkly itself that it's inconceivable for me.
A work that I think is better and that I generally like more than it is Uzumaki by Junji Ito. Uzumaki is absolutely wonderful, and imo it is probably the best piece of written cosmic horror that I'll ever read in my lifetime, whether graphic novel or just normal book or anything in-between. I do think that had Junji Ito decided not to write a book about spirals that indifferently mess up a town real bad, someone would have created an equivalent work to take that specific slot. Maybe not about the exact same thing, maybe better or worse than Uzumaki in terms of writing or illustration, but definitely something that would have slotted into that little place in existence that Uzumaki currently inhabits. I don't think that could've ever happened with IHNM. Either it exists, or it doesn't. No equivalent fill-in for the hypothetical alternate reality where it was never written, that universe just wouldn't have anything in that specific spot where I Have No Mouth exists for us. It'd just be empty forever. I do still think the trope named after the work would exist and be used in stuff, but it'd be called something else.
Does any of what I'm saying make any sense? Probably not. It's 1:30 in the morning and I'm having emotions about one of my favorite things ever, I have a right to be incoherently philosophical about it on my Tumblr Dot Com blog, get off my back.
