In the Deadlands by David Gerrold

First published in his debut collection, With a Finger in My I, now titled, In the Deadlands. Up for Nebula award.

“In the Deadlands” is a curious beast, written in lines and prose. Does that make it a poem? Sort of. The lines are cut in how it is meant to be read. There are rare recasting of meanings, some verbal repetition you’d find in speech, and lines endings and breaks aren’t that revelatory, so it seems more like experimental prose.

It’s the story of 23 men on patrol in the Deadlands—an apocalyptic, horror land where no green grows and rocks look like tortured people the patrollers used to know. 

While the tale is atmospheric, the land strange, and typography intriguing, the story is a wafer. The talk of thatched huts and the concern about war (published during the Vietnam War era) may have caught the eye of some. Moreover, the experimental nature of the prose may have sparkled in the lenses of New-Wave readers. It was written for Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions, which Ellison rejected (and mercilessly panned in his anthology) but apparently later said he wished he’d accepted it instead of “With a Finger in My I” although the latter may be the better tale (see link).

In the collection, it takes up seventy pages due to the poetry spacing. Even with smaller font, it would difficult to compress that length. So that would be the equivalent of about four average-length stories.