I honestly don’t know why this book was in the Top 50 Science Fiction books list. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison is a collection of short stories that wrestle with gods and worshippers, both new and old, and from different angles.
As is typical with Ellison, none of the characters in any of the stories are particularly nice people, and some of the stories seem to skirt rather close to allegory or are too didactic for my taste[Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes; Paingod] while others were a bit prophetic. Along the Scenic Route is about road rage, for instance. I got the feeling that Ellison would equate gods and demons as the same thing, so his premise in the introduction ended up confusing me later one when some of the gods seemed like nothing more than indulging internal and wholly human desires, instead of more obvious gods.
I’m pretty sure Ellison is an atheist, so his critical tacks on godliness are strong, but his gods themselves are so weak as to seem merely human. And at times I think his desire to be irreverent merely to seem rebellious overpowers his writing ability. That might have been his point I suppose, though it doesn’t do much for me. He throws around quotes from Nietzsche and other folks, which I guess were probably the impetus for writing some of the stories. There is a story about Jesus and Prometheus as lovers, a story about a land where gods go when they no longer have worshippers, a Cthulu-like story about murder and sacrifice in Manhattan, and a couple others.
The only one that really sticks out in my mind as a quality story is the last one, The Deathbird. It is probably the most polysemous story in the collection. The main premise is that history is written by the victors. The Christian God is the victor, but Satan and Mother Earth are against him, because he is mad. So way in the future, the last man, who was kept safe in Hell [at the core of the earth], is woken by Satan, who is a one-eyed shadow, and who takes him through the trials of the desert and up the metaphorical mountain where the man is tested by God. The man withstands the tests of God, realizes he is stronger and more powerful than God [or Satan, who becomes man’s friend and worshipper] and then since Man art God, the man ends the world and [apparently] the universe. And everyone is glad. Now, that sounds pretty didactic, but the story is written well enough that you don’t realize you’ve learned a new angle of looking at things until the end. If subversion was what he was aiming for, he did it best in that story.
The rest of the book… meh.