Customer Reviews

Heatseeker

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Perfect starting point for those looking for where splatterpunk got its attitude. A dozen stories, polished like diamonds, cutting through the bull like a laser through warm butter. Like Hemingway on crank, Fitzgerald on bad acid, Shirley's heroes learn to kill with all the moronic glee of a gangster trying out his first machine gun

John Shirley has several short storiy collections. This is his first, and one of my favorite collections by any author. To call these stories "Splatterpunk" is a bit of a misnomer. The stories are often brutal, but not in the masturbatorial, silly way many authors are limited to. Heatseeker has science fiction, horror, cyberpunk, genre-bending oddities like a Quill Tripstickler story... it is truly a great sampling of the styles and substance of John Shirley's work. Gritty, smart, and sharp enough to cut a lasting place as a favorite of everyone I knoow that has read it.

I own a signed copy of this hardcover edition, and it is the most frequently read book of my college years. Heatseeker is an original, unforgettable, and highly influential volume of 19 short stories. With amazing illustrations by Harry O. Morris. The opening story, "What Cindy Saw" is the cyberpunk equivalent of Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Long before there was a Matrix franchise where the dead was harnessed for power, John Shirley wrote "Under the Generator" and "Sleepwalkers." My favorite is the subliminal flash fiction piece, "Silent Crickets." The maddening level of disquiet generated by this story alone will stay with the reader for a long time. Apocalyptic nuclear horror is the recurring theme of the collection. This is most evident in "Uneasy Chrysalids, Our Memories" and "Recurrent Dreams of Nuclear War Lead B.T. Quizenbaum into Moral Dissolution."