Living Shadows

Living Shadows

Written by: John Shirley
Published by: Prime Books (May 1, 2007)
Page Count: 351
ISBN-10: 080955786X
ISBN-13: 978-0809557868
Where to buy:
Amazon

Publisher’s comments:

John Shirley has been called a “genre outlaw,” and there’s a good reason for that: he was never really a genre writer to start with. In a Shirley story, a movie producer can be haunted by the violence he creates…a man can turn into a mosquito…a couple can yearn to touch even knowing they’ll kill each other if they do. Shirley’s adrenalized yet artful prose takes you from the jungles of darkest suburbia, down mean streets, and just beyond consensus reality…where the shadows take on their own vivid life.

“Readers who enjoy living a little dangerously are likely to appreciate the sheer, headlong exuberance of Shirley’s imagination.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Vivid, dense, powerful imagery…hard to put down!” – The Washington Post

“With his electric intensity, elegant prose, and eye for details both sleazy and tender, Shirley is one of the most original voices in fiction today.” – Poppy Z. Brite

Hello Ghouls and Boils,

Tonight we have a phantastic collection to tell you about – Living Shadows by John Shirley. This is a set of gritty, unsettling, dark tales that has received a lot of praise. After reading our minion Joe’s thoughts on the book, I am certainly going to have to get my own copy! I will just let him tell you about it in his own words… Enjoy, my fiends!

Abstrusely,
Sarah L. Covert

The typical genre fan will more than likely be nonplussed upon confronting a John Shirley story. Sure, there might be familiar science fiction tropes or monsters of both the human and supernatural kind present. Characters might face familiar situations where order is overturned, and they have to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to right that order. The heart of the matter though is that Shirley is not really a genre writer. The elements of science fiction and horror are used as metaphors or landscapes to explore the horror of the human condition, of our willingness to, too often, turn a blind eye towards the pain and suffering of another, to disallow that suffering individual to impact the satisfaction of our own desires and interfere with our comfort levels. His stories don’t make for easy escapist reading, thus short circuiting the expectations of a reader looking to experience the more familiar and relatively conservative comforts usually found within the confines of genre fiction. Living Shadows, a personal “best of” collection, gives voice to the margin dwellers of Western society and explores the shadowlands of morality and ethics in a beautiful fashion.

The collection is divided into two parts. The first section, entitled A Few Blocks Down, Around the Corner, contains stories with no elements of the supernatural (with the possible exception of one story). The horrors are those found in the real, everyday world. In the Road leads off the collection with a chilling depiction of how an inquisitive child named Cecily, molded by a collection of formative events over the course of a short span of years, learns to disengage from her natural compassion. In one of the earliest stories in the book, The Gunshot, a movie director of ultra-violent fare seems to be dreaming the circumstances of his own demise. In The Sewing Room a wife uncovers incontrovertible proof that her second husband is a notorious serial killer, and then wrestles with her conscience as she weighs her social duty to save the lives of girls she doesn’t know by turning her husband in versus her duty to her family and the impact and possible ruin they will suffer with the public revelation of his guilt. Seven Knives finds a collection of Hollywood insiders tricked into a devilish and sadistic deal which reveals to each of them the ugly truth about how low they would stoop to acquire a hot property. One Stick, Both Ends Sharpened explores the disturbing connections between a crack addicted mother willing to sell her young daughter’s organs to her dealer in exchange for her fix and two Hollywood players looking to make a killing dealing a large shipment of cocaine.

The second part of the collection, titled Through a Laser-Scanner Darkly, contains stories that revolve “around something that connects it to the realm of the supernatural, or the slightly futuristic, or the wildly surreal.” Blind Eye the lead story, completed from a story fragment by Edgar Allan Poe, is a found diary of a lighthouse keeper who discovers that a mirror mounted behind the lighthouse lanterns acts as a window that allows him to spy into the houses of the villagers, revealing the dark secrets that are usually carefully concealed from their fellow townspeople. In the neo-Lovecraftian tale, Buried in the Sky, Yog-Sothoth bends time and space to invade a modern day self-contained high rise community. The fate of the high rise dwellers, and by extension the Earth, rests in the hands of two teenage misfits, Deede and Jorny. Isolation Point, California is a near future dystopia where citizens of the United States have been exposed to an unknown mutation known as AggFac (Aggression Factor). People can only come within nineteen paces of another human before a blind killing rage consumes them, which lifts only after one of them is killed. Under these conditions, Gage and Brenda explore the possibility of a budding romance, lending a new twist to the term “fatal attraction.” In Miss Singularity, an experiment with a particle physics accelerator goes awry, bestowing awesome powers on a suicidal teenage girl. Lani finds that she can transmute the world to match the images in her mind’s eye, remaking her parent’s sleepy neighborhood community into a dark gothic playground.

Throughout the entire collection, John Shirley displays a masterful command of language and subject matter, realistically depicting characters from all walks of life, from junkies to housewives, ex-cons to school teachers, Hollywood producers to Goths and ghetto dwellers. He has a sure eye for the telling detail that breathes life into character and situations. Shirley also possesses a restless imagination that is not content to linger on well-trod ground, but forges its own path into unfamiliar and oft ignored avenues of human experience and longing. These elements make for entertaining, thought provoking and surprising deviations from the generally conservative realms of genre fiction.

Final Thoughts:
For those who have a taste for dark, gritty and unusual tales imbued with compassion, Living Shadows will provide a thorough and entertaining introduction to the short stories of genre iconoclast and moralist, John Shirley. I give the collection 4 out of 5.

Joe Pettit Jr. – Minion (Reviewer)