H
ORROR FICTION IS THE LITERARY EQUIVA- LENT OF PUNK ROCK. And no one makes a better case for this than John Shirley, a punk rocker-cum-groundbreaking genre writer who has spent the last few decades trying to, as he
describes, encapsulate “the power of a loud, intelligent, but crazedly energetic rock concert” in book form. An apt pursuit, as much of Shirley’s work is inspired by the weird and wicked things he witnessed during his outsider years spent playing in bands such as Sado-Nation, Obsession and The Panther Moderns. He speaks of writing a letter to the late sci-fi/fantasy author Avram
Davidson once, during that era, describing how he’d been swept up in a Manhattan police raid and locked in a cell with a bunch of junkie transsexual prostitutes. “I described to Avram their getting more and more shrill,
more aggressive, as the night and their withdrawal wore on, and how one of them said she kept a razor under her tongue and used it on some trick who’d pissed her off. And Avram wrote back and said, ‘Why the hell are you telling me this when you should be putting it into your writing!’ And I did, with that incident and others.” Influenced by literary rebels such as Poe, Lovecraft,
William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison and even Charles Baudelaire, Shirley’s work is raw, pounding and vital. His new collection, In Extremis (out this month from Underland Press), mines a career’s worth of wildly imagi- native, and just plain wild, horror tales. The 326-page book revels in life on society’s fringes, and
the desperate dregs, demented junkies, sadists and sexually insatiable deviants you might meet there. There’s occasional interference from supernatural entities, such as the mysterious shadow beings who trick people into committing suicide in “Cul-De-Sac,” but mostly the hu- mans are the monsters. (Shirley atones for them in the book’s foreword, at- testing, “They are, in fact, human beings blindly trying to fumble their way out of their own special mazes.”) This is certainly true for the character of Perrick in “Just Like Suzie,” who
has a dead girl clamped onto his dick after a drug-fuelled sexual encounter goes bad; the newly deceased Cordell in “Paper Angels on Fire,” whose eternal
fate is to have his hope crushed repeatedly while being endlessly con- sumed by the mouths of hell; and the desperate woman in “Call Girl, Echoed,” who crudely amputates her sex organs with a folding jackknife because men only want to fuck robots nowadays. But the most affecting entry is “Faces in Walls,” about a lonely, mute paraplegic, who’s routinely abused by the staff at the care facility in which he’s been bed-bound for the last six years. It’s equal parts soul-shredding and terrifying – offering up an unimaginable degree of helplessness. “It’s more of a concept collection,” Shirley explains. “It’s an attempt to create
an experience that has a certain taste, that offers hope of breaking through the veil of sleep; it tries to wake the reader up in new ways. It uses some humour, absurdity – some of it is definitely absurdist – but much of it is dead serious.” Perhaps what really makes Shirley’s work so hard-hit-
ting, though, is his knack for description that practically places the reader within the hostile, seeping environs (crushed between ravaged, dying bodies in a wrecked com- muter train, for instance); the occasional seamless blending of science fiction with stark horror (a man practices sus- tainable taxidermy to exhibit living celebrities); and a dogged slavery to the language and flow of the stories, to the point of willingly breaking convention and even the rules of grammar (“Answering Machine” tells a tale of murder entirely through a stilted telephone message). And, just like a fearless musician, Shirley’s not afraid
to change the arrangement. Several stories in In Ex- tremis received minor edits and updates, as he feels his talent is much more honed now. Many writers consider
this a faux pas, that the work is sacred, but not Shirley. (His unapologetic cross-genre rule-breaking has served him well, most notably in the case of his dystopian future-themed A Song Called Youth trilogy, which proved key to the evolution of cyberpunk fiction in the ’80s and even inspired sci- fi heavyweight William Gibson.) “I think that’s just being a real writer,” he says. “A real writer is always trying
to make the writing purer, more potent, clearer, more communicative. ... I don’t change the story though, I just try to bring it more powerfully into focus.”
T H E N I N T H C I R C L E 55RM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72