Living Shadows

One of the darkest, edgiest, boldest writers around, John Shirley lays down an adrenalized yet artful prose that fairly skids across the page, dragging the reader along into shadowed corners of terror and desire. Yet while it's thrilling, there's psychological depth, too, as Shirley bores into the brains of his characters, revealing the motivations of those who walk on the wild side. Many writers extrapolate from peripheral observation and research, but John Shirley's stories come from personal experience with extreme people and extreme mental states, and his struggle with the seductions of addiction. On the streets, in the midst of darkest suburbia, or just beyond consensus reality – Shirley brings the shadows to vivid life.

"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 side of humanity, including the quietly creepy The Sewing Room, in which a woman discovers that her husband is a serial killer and is tormented by her conflicting responsibilities to her family and to justice, and Seven Knives, a brutal tale born from the author's experiences of moral bankruptcy and narcissism in Hollywood. In the second section are stories with fantastic elements, including Blind Eye, a continuation of a Poe fragment in which a lighthouse lamp reveals the hidden sins of the villagers living below, and the Lovecraftian novelette Buried in the Sky, about a skyscraper complex built upon a pre-Aztec foundation. In Shirley's world, solitary characters go to desperate means to connect with others, never quite succeeding but still recognizable and poignant in their humanity." – Publishers Weekly