Bud Webster’s extraordinary appreciation of R.A. Lafferty — Secret Crocodiles and Strange Doings (or Sometimes the Magic Really Works) – for Grantville Gazette is well worth your time. Webster says —

Lafferty wasn’t a science fiction writer, regardless of the section of the bookstore in which his titles may have appeared; rather, he was a mad fantasist, a maker of mythologies, a Wizard of Oddities.

Quite right.

Lafferty’s short story “Slow Tuesday Night” is most memorable to me. The pace of human life has accelerated to such a degree that civilization has split into three shifts, the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops. People, laughably, still have the exact same superficial attitudes towards wealth, celebrity and love.

“Slow Tuesday Night” is available at this link on the Wayback Machine although to get it to load I had to spit in the back and kick it a couple times, which is to say, click on the “Impatient?” link.

Webster looks at many aspects of Ray’s life. None is more troubling than his heavy drinking, painfully evident when he went to conventions. Seeing that myself made it impossible to laugh anymore at the point-of-view character in “Slow Tuesday Night” who claims to put himself to sleep using the “Natural method. And a bottle of red-eye.”