Eliot Fintushel             A wonderful writer.  Definitely a comer.                                                -- Harlan Ellison

Eliot Fintushel is one of the most exciting, wildly inventive, and extravagantly pyrotechnic new writers to enter the field in many years. His work is madcap, bizarre, biting, brilliant, totally gonzo, and unlike anything else you've ever read. He is often very funny, and sometimes surprisingly profound. No one in the field, in fact, is producing work any more daring and totally original than Fintushel.  His work goes beyond the Cutting Edge to what tomorrow's Cutting Edge may well turn out to be.
                                                                                -- Gardner Dozois

Eliot Fintushel was born in rural Tennessee where he killed him a bear when he was only three.  Eliot, Eliot Fintushel, King of the Speculative Fictionalists!

The Grand Canyon was formed when he dragged his Schaeffer behind him at the end of a hard day of novelizing. Big Eliot! Big, bad Eliot!  He wrestled Inkadinkadoo, erstwhile Jimmy Durante sidekick, to a standoff, thereby achieving integration with his interior wildman self.

Eliot Fintushel, who will appear at the Right Hand of God on the Day of Judgment!  He ascended the tree and was killed to spare a thief.  Eliot, in whom our transgressions are redeemed!  Praise him, o fortunati, o hypocrite lecteurs, oleomarjarine, o suzannah,  Oh won't you cry for me,  He who from Alabama cometh, with a banjo on his knee.  Datta, dayadvham, damyatta.  Shantih shantih shantih.  Hey nonny nonny and a hotchacha.

A Few Words from Fin's Work

Dog shit and mud.  The trees are as bare as a geezer's gums.  No sun since early autumn.  The clouds haven't heard that silver lining jazz; the only thing they are lined with is each other.  Sky the color of pig iron.  Too cold to snow.
         I am not partial to December.
         I am brooding by the dark casement, dreaming of the dome that used to regulate the city's weather before NY went bankrupt.  My Martian cocoa -- zoot-spiked, of course--is warming me from the inside out but cools at the epithelium.  I glance at my wristwatch.  Old habit--I had a job once.  The prochrono is glowing.  Someone is about to arrive.
         "Chuck?"  Cecil has a voice like dry heaves.  I haven't seen him since before the sun--when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was still married to Agnes.  At seven foot two with an executioner's build and a face like a pit viper's, he doesn't have to take much guff.  Used to do inquiries for me (Read: knucks and bucks) when there was still some percentage in the law maven trade, before the slime (Read: Cecil's ilk) sucked my dogs to the kneecaps.  We won a case or two--but not the one that counted.  "Arnby, you in there?"
         I hit CURRENT on my watch to cut to where Cecil and I are having cocktails.  I hate salutations.  I don't wear no cologne.  I still have a fifth of Venusian zoot rot: 2018, a very good year.  We pass the bottle back and forth--no clean glasses in walking distance.  He is nattily dressed in codpiece and suspenders, his tubulars in a heap on my sleep unit.  I am at ease in my cheek pin.  Cecil is in excellent spirits--cause for suspicion.
         "I want you to see something," he says.
         "Cease-fire," says I, "the last time you had something to show me, he was dead, you had a hot gat minus one slug, and I was disbarred, pending.  I ain't stepping outside till midsummer."
         "For this you are," he says.  He reaches over to punch my watch.  We are old enough buddies, altercations despite, that I do not impede him; I cried on his shoulder when Agnes left me, though I needed a stool to do it.  And he kept me in zoot rot when she didn't come back.
         He punches CURRENT a couple of times.  We are out on the street in our tubulars; then we are jumping down the rusted-frozen escalator at his tenement, buns thawing after the transit; and finally we are in his basement crib, in his cold-as-a-dookil's-pizzle basement crib, eyeballing a closed wooden door, from when trees were being cut to build things.  It has peeling whitewash, like in Tom Sawyer.
         "You'll never guess what I got in there, Chucky."
         I am not sure what is in store.  Knowing Cecil, this may be some Casque of Amontillado action, and I am not partial to mortared stiffs.  I sneak a glance at my wrist.  Cecil reaches to cover the watch, but he is a little late.  I see on the prochrono who I'm going to see in there.  "Holy dookil scats!"
         "Damn!  I wanted to surprise you."  Cecil throws open the door, and there he is, just like my watch said --
         "Ho! Ho! Ho!"
         -- shackled to the brick wall, the white fur trim on that apple-red suit torn and muddied, one foot bare, the boot lying just out of his reach, the sock under my heel, as it happens.  Beside him lies a torn sack.  Little toys, cheap thingies--"Made on the Moon"--are flung about the floor, smashed. There is only one thing I want to do, the thing any reasonable adult would want to do, something I've been aching to do so long and so hard, Christmas after Christmas, that I've put it clean out of my mind just to be able to carry on.  But it's back in my mind -now-, boy!  It's in my eyes when I turn to Cecil.
         "Go for it, Chuck!" says the Seesaw.
         I cock my good right arm and bash Santa square in the old kazoo.  When he groans, I smile.
         It's wonderful how fast an eye can blacken when a sucker's circulation is good.  It's all in the contrast, really.  On jowly, pink Santy, brow and whiskers the color of snow blindness, the shiner sprouts like mushrooms in manure.  I rub my paw and think of Agnes.  (Not that I've ever gotten to use it on her: she has a left hook like an air hammer, and I have a glass jaw.)

         "Good one!"  Cecil grins.  "The boys and girls in Toy land are gonna have a funeral."