Books by John Shirley and Complete Book Reviews

J. Shirley, Author, John Shirley, Author . Infrapress $29.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-9742907-3-7
The insectoid monsters in this visceral horror novel may seem like the stuff of '50s drive-in B-movies, but Shirley (Crawlers, etc.) gives them a modern spin that speaks to contemporary concerns. Gray Pilots, as they are called, are physical...
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John Shirley, Author . Night Shade $27 (240p) ISBN 978-1-892389-13-8
A semi-talented television actor is an unlikely channel for gnostic mysticism and pop phenomenology in this loopy dark fantasy from Shirley (From Hell; Darkness Divided). Max Whitman, star of a hit soap opera, is poised to claim his first serious...
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John Shirley. Prime (www.prime-books.com), $14.95 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-60701-292-4
In this slim, grim, and powerful novel, Shirley lets his imagination loose on the frightening possibilities of a massive natural disaster striking a small American town. A tidal wave transforms Freedom, Calif., from seaside idyll into a broken and...
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John Shirley. Underland (PGW, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-0-9826639-4-3
Shirley (Bleak History), a prolific and genre-spanning author, delivers a grim collection that manages to be weaker than the sum of its parts. Focusing on Shirley's "extreme" stories, many of which have undergone minor rewrites and been updated with
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John Shirley, Author Subterranean Press $35 (190p) ISBN 978-1-931081-09-2
Less than six months after the publication by Cemetery Dance of his mini-masterpiece Demons, Shirley returns with another small-press offering that pushes the envelope of fantasy and horror and strengthens his reputation as one of today's most...
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John Shirley, Author Cemetery Dance Publications $30 (150p) ISBN 978-1-58767-002-2
Horror fiction that traffics in the supernatural perforce sometimes deals with matters of psycho-spiritual import. Rarely does it tackle them as directly as in this exciting, vigorously original novella from Shirley (Black Butterflies, etc.). The...
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John Shirley, Author Scream Press $25 (304p) ISBN 978-0-910489-26-3
Shirley has been writing SF, including a dozen novels ( City Come A-Walkin', A Splendid Chaos ), for over a decade. His first collection of short fiction contains 19 selections, three of them previously unpublished, that display Shirley as a...
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John Shirley, Author Babbage Press $19.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-930235-00-7
Like many works defining the wild cyberpunk fringe in the 1980s, this depiction of a near-future dystopia, here revised and updated since its 1985 debut, seems almost acceptably mainstream today. But Shirley's spiky prose and edgy attitudes, which...
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John Shirley, Author Mark V. Ziesing $16.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-929480-86-2
Best known as one of the founders of cyberpunk for his novel City Come A-Walkin' (1980) and as the principal screenwriter of the cult classic film The Crow, Shirley (Silicon Embrace, 1996) has a reputation as one of the darkest, edgiest, boldest...
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John Shirley, Author Mark V. Ziesing $29.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-929480-44-2
Angels and aliens alike figure in this metaphysical SF novel from proto-cyberpunker Shirley (Heatseeker), who here throws UFOs, black helicopters, several major biblical figures and spiritual transcendence into the early 21st century. The U.S. has...
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John Shirley, Author Franklin Watts $17.95 (357p) ISBN 978-0-531-15065-8
Kidnapped by the alien Meta, college student Martin Wirth (nickname: ""Zero'') wakes up on another planet. The previous abductees call it ``Fool's Hope'' for its combative population of shanghaied extraterrestrials (31 different races) and its own...
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John Shirley, Author . Pocket $15 (370p) ISBN 978-1-4165-8412-4
This urban occult fantasy from cyberpunk author and screenplay writer Shirley (Black Glass ) reads like the script for a bloated summer blockbuster, loaded with action, expository dialogue and stock characters. Like other members of the Shadow...
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John Shirley, Author . Prime $14.95 (351p) ISBN 978-0-8095-5786-8
In this collection of new and reprinted stories, Blue Öyster Cult songwriter and cyberpunk pioneer Shirley (The Other End ) demonstrates his talent for blurring genre boundaries. The first section contains nonfantastic accounts of the darker...
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John Shirley, Author . Cemetery Dance $40 (292p) ISBN 978-1-58767-150-0
Veteran horror writer Shirley (Cellars ) swaps gory for glory in this inventive if politically heavy-handed left-wing answer to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's evangelical Left Behind series. Child slavers, genocidal soldiers and corrupt...
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John Shirley, Author . Penguin/Tarcher $14.95 (301p) ISBN 978-1-58542-287-6
"He was a startlingly rare bird. He was like no other," writes Shirley of G.I. Gurdjieff, one of the most influential and most enigmatic spiritual masters to appear in the West. Born, he said, in 1866 in the Russian-Armenian city of...
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John Shirley, Author . Ballantine $14.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-345-44652-7
In Shirley's frightening new novel, he extends the smart work he did in Demons (2002), investing a fierce genre tale with spiritual import. Here Shirley reaches back to the classic pulp scenario of a small town beset by an alien invasion. In...
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John Shirley, Author . Cemetery Dance $35 (170p) ISBN 978-1-58767-054-1
On the eye-catching cover of Shirley's latest, a full moon radiates light over the head of a young woman, probing beneath her skin to trace her veins and bones. That image captures this slim and stinging novel's effect, as Shirley (Demons)...
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John Shirley, Author . Del Rey $25 (384p) ISBN 978-0-345-44647-3
To a novella of the same title, Shirley (...And the Angel with Television Eyes) adds a lengthy aftermath that, though it couples clunkily, offers a crafty elaboration of the dark metaphysics in the original parable about corporate greed. Nine years...
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John Shirley, Author . Stealth $24.95 (337p) ISBN 978-1-58881-016-8
Spiritually undernourished souls adrift in denatured worlds of anomie and isolation are the focus of these tales of contemporary horror and near-future speculation. Though uneven in execution, the 17 reprints and four originals in Shirley's...
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John Shirley, Author, Alan M. Clark, Illustrator Night Shade Books $16.95 (388p) ISBN 978-1-892389-02-2
The 37 stories in this mind-shaking collection are grouped into four sections of ascending weirdness, from Really Weird to Really, Really, Really, Really Weird. Considering that the first entry, I Want to Get Married, Says the Worlds Smallest Man,...
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Edited by Paula Guran. Prime (prime- books.com), $16.95 trade paper (480p) ISBN 978-1-60701-450-8
From the seemingly bottomless reservoir of Lovecraftian pastiches and homages, Guran (New Cthulhu) has sieved 19 above-average reprints, all published between 2010 and 2014, and most tailoring their terrors to contemporary times. The monstrous...
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John Shirley. PM (IPG, dist.), $12 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-60486-761-9
Lyricist and “Dread Lord” of cyberpunk Shirley (A Song Called Youth) releases a full-throated howl about the twinned perils of corporate hegemony and citizen apathy. The latest in PM’s Outspoken Authors series matches up an original novella, “A...
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John Shirley. Hippocampus, $20 trade paper (254p) ISBN 978-1-61498-178-7
The highlight of this uneven collection of 10 stories from Stoker Award–winner Shirley (In Extremis) is the amusing "The Witness in Darkness," which is told from the perspective of one of the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft's novel At the Mountains of...
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Edited by Paula Guran. Prime (www.prime-books.com), $15.95 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-60701-354-9
Fall is the traditional time for ghost stories, and readers will find a wealth of unnatural shades and haunted places in this far-ranging anthology of 29 reprints and Stephen Graham Jones’s grim original “Uncle.” Richard Bowes’s “There’s a Hole in...
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Edited by Paula Guran. Prime (www.prime-books.com), $15.95 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-607013-15-0
This collection of 24 stories, ranging from new works to decades-old Hugo nominees, unevenly evokes rock music’s legacy of pushing boundaries and railing against the establishment ethos. In Lawrence C. Connolly’s evocative “Mercenary,” sniper and...
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John Shirley. Blackstone, $26.99 (368p) ISBN 978-1-09-401782-2
With this gripping dystopian novel, Shirley (Eclipse) extrapolates a grim vision of a late-21st-century U.S. wracked by climate change. Former U.S. Marshal Darryl Webb is now a world-weary freelance tracker hired to find a missing serial killer...
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John Shirley. Hippocampus, $20 trade paper (306p) ISBN 978-1-61498-332-3
In A Sorcerer of Atlantis, the diverting short novel that’s the centerpiece of this fantasy pairing from Shirley (In Extremis), Brimm, a would-be sorcerer, and his companion, Snoori, are lured to Atlantis by Princess Cleito’s promise of gold to...
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John Shirley. Titan, $16.95 paper (336p) ISBN 978-1-80336-382-0
Shirley (Halo: Broken Circle) veers from gaming fiction to near-future military techno-thriller in this competent, straightforward novel of U.S. Army Rangers in space. Lt. Art Burkett’s marriage is failing due to his wife’s worries over his...
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