Customer Reviews

Living Shadows: Stories: New & Preowned

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Here is writing to sink your mind's teeth into. Shirley always delivers and this a compelling and riveting collection of short stories sure to bring reading pleasure again and again. When I received this volume in the mail was all dressed in heavy parka and boots to go outside and I stood at the door sweltering and reading. I just could not put the book down because the stories were so riveting.

"Blind Eye", The collaboration with Edgar Allen Poe is seamless between the old and new master's style. Shirley finished the tail in a way I think Poe would have wholeheartedly approved. A new Poe Story, and new Shirley story, what a combo!

Other pieces which were original, fresh and exiting were "Miss Singularity" a day trip into alternate reality, "The Gunshot" and "Isolation Point, California". Shirley's writing always titillates the mind as well as the senses. He is undoubtedly one of the best writers of our time.

Looking for something special? Try Living Shadows.

I've read all John's work (that I could lay my hands on) at least once, most of it twice and lots of it three & four times. His style is unique and many of his concepts prescient. He makes the street side literary. He takes the apparently banal & mundane aspects of peoples lives and shows the true personal depth that most others miss - or wouldn't dare jump into. At the same time he can pull back and reveal the broader cosmic strokes.

All the 'John the Baptist of cyberpunk' stuff aside, while reading this collection it finally occurred to me that John Shirley is the darkside streetwise compliment to Ray Bradbury (I cut my scifi literary intellectual teeth on Ray). And I really can't think of anybody else in the pantheon that's in Ray's particular ballpark except perhaps, to some extent, Phil Dick.

Anyway it was good to re-read these, hopping, skipping and stage diving across the years - as well as hitting the few I hadn't read before; War and Peace is a superb piece of mainstream writing, the Poe collaboration was both surprising and satisfying to the extent that I think Edgar himself would have dug it, and The Sea Was Wet As Wet Can Be trims the concept's of James Dickey's Falling to the essentials and gives it a more satisfying ending. Even 'preowned', the line-up allows the collection to speak with a new energy and urgency. It's almost as if John takes on the role of reporter in a world eating it's own tail. Dark, edgy, often crazed, but all excellent.

Living Shadows is a collection of twenty gritty stories spanning roughly 35 years of an exceptional career in speculative fiction. As well-respected as Shirley is in the business, he still isn't getting the recognition he deserves (i.e., his own dedicated shelf in every bookstore in the world), and he proves it with every tale in this book.

The first of the collection's two sections features twelve stories grounded in the horrors of reality: standouts include The Sewing Room, about a woman who discovers her husband's darkest secret; What Would You Do For Love?, about a disturbingly freaky illicit affair gone horribly awry; and Brittany? Oh: She's in Translucent Blue, a public-service announcement about why you shouldn't have a drug-fueled orgy while your kids are playing in the backyard. The second grouping is comprised of ten stories of a more supernatural bent: highlights include Sleepwalkers, a Dollhouse-esque (from 1988; I love you, Joss, but John was there first!) story of a man relinquishing his body in exchange for drug money; Skeeter Junkie, about a would-be rapist who gets in touch with his inner insect; and Isolation Point, California, about a man's attempt at romance following the outbreak of a disease that makes people kill each other when they get too close. Also of note is Blind Eye, a collaboration with Edgar Allan Poe born of an anthology of stories that each offered a continuation of an unfinished Poe story.

Shirley's skillful and lavish characterization and attention to detail make each story an unexpected (and unpredictable) delight, whether he's describing a vengeful director's suicide-by-proxy attempt or the twisted surrealism of a reality-warping teenager. This is quite possibly the strongest single-author collection I've read since Asimov's Nine Tomorrows, and one I know I'll be picking up again and again. 5/5 and I'm still kicking myself for not discovering John Shirley years ago.