John Shirley, Living Shadows (Prime Books, 2007)
According to John Shirley's website, Living Shadows is a non-genre collection. That both is and isn't the case. It is, in that roughly half of the stories in here contain no supernatural elements and the rest don't fit easily into any particular genre category. It isn't, in that here we have Shirley's take on Lovecraft, on finishing a fragment by Poe, on psychic powers and post-apocalyptic romance and a good half dozen other things, all of which fall squarely into genre territory.
Except . . . well, except to say that this is a John Shirley collection, and the best way to describe it is that Shirley makes his own genre, a roughly California-shaped playground inhabited by junkies and video game players and Hollywood mavens who really aren't that different from one another, and whose appetites are going to slide them into and just maybe out of trouble. It's a place of music, lots and lots of music, and of a thin veneer of normal over a deep, rushing river of violence and strangeness, one that we're all in danger of falling into at a moment's notice.
The subtitle here is "Stories New and Pre-Owned," which is a polite way of letting the reader know that some of these tales will be familiar to readers of Black Butterflies and the like. While normally this might be cause for a raised eyebrow, here it's simply a fact to be noted and moved past. After all, the tone of the collection so seamlessly integrates new and old material that the reprints (or revised editions) feel like touchstones instead of padding.
The book, as noted above, is broken into two rough sections, realistic and supernatural/science fiction, though the lines blur mightily in the last two stories in the prior section. Indeed, part of Shirley's talent is that the characters from the first half of the book would fit perfectly into the stories from the back half, and vice-versa. And so the tormented wife and mother of "The Sewing Room," whose husband's habit of making models hides something a little more sinister, could easily be one of the inhabitants of the tower in "Buried in the Sky," or live in the neighborhood occupied by the drug-addled swingers of "Brittany? Oh, She's In Translucent Blue" (though she'd probably have something to say about their parenting skills). The line between the savage Hollywood types of "Seven Knives" -- and the savage junkies of "Jody and Annie on TV" is effectively erased in the drug narrative "One Stick, Both Ends Sharpened," which puts the lie to the idea of harmless recreational drugs. There are no boundaries, these stories say. Whether the pressure that drives these tales is supernatural or merely human, or something in between is an accident of circumstance, and the human response to it is what matters. A cynic would also note that the atrocities perpetrated by monsters and mere humans aren't that different either, a question of detail more than anything else.
And make no mistake, these are vicious tales. Punches are not pulled here. Children die. A girl's mother is raped and murdered, though whether you choose to believe the agency behind it was the timeless horror of Yog-Sothoth or one man's depravity is up to the reader. Husbands kill wives, friends kill friends and business associates kill business associates. Nor is any of it in the service of capital-E Evil (except, again, perhaps in "Buried In the Sky"). This is just what people do, Shirley says. Watch at your own peril.
Nowhere is this made more clear than in "Sleepwalkers," in which supernatural and banal horror collide in the memories of a man who sells his unconscious body into servitude. Only one is real, though, and like the narrator, the reader will be simultaneously relieved and disturbed as to which one it is.
But there is hope here as well. The gentle ghost story "The Word 'Random', Deliberately Repeated" is a tender love story that allows the reader to ponder the possibility of horror before swerving into gentler, more satisfying territory. "Sweet Armageddon" posits personal salvation and parental love, along with a hint of something higher, against the backdrop of a mass suicide on an undreamed-of scale. And the closer of the first section, "The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be" is at once a tale of death and transformation, as hopeful a story as a piece of flash fiction about an airliner explosion can be.
In the end, the stories of Living Shadows refuse to leave the reader unmoved. While there are a couple of pieces that are less involving, perhaps, than the others -- "Buried In The Sky" and "My Victim" from the back half, "Seven Knives" from the front -- the collection as a whole is brutally strong. These are not stories that can be cast aside after reading on the premise that they're not real. Enough of them -- and maybe all of them -- could be, and therein lies their magic.
