Cover and text illustrations by Tim Ferret.
ISBN 0-932511-55-4 (US pbk)
short stories, crime, drugs, prostitution, violence, identity, avant-pop, cyberpunk, slipstream, postmodern, edge
Cover and text illustrations by Tim Ferret.
"I Want to Get Married, Says the World's Smallest Man" by John Shirley
"Equilibrium" by John Shirley
(also contained in the collection Heatseeker , 1988)
"Skeeter Junkie" by John Shirley
"Recurrent Dreams of Nuclear War Lead B.T.Quizenbaum Into Moral Dissolution" by John Shirley
(also contained in the collection Heatseeker , 1988)
"Just Like Suzie" by John Shirley
"In New Noir, John Shirley, like a postmodern Edgar Allan Poe, depicts minds deformed into fantastic configurations by the pressure, the very weight, of an entire society bearing down on them. 'Jodie and Annie on TV', selected by the editor of Mystery Scene as 'perhaps the most important story... in years in the crime fiction genre', reflects the fact that whole segments of zeitgeist and personal psychology have been supplanted by the mass media, that the average kid on the streets in Los Angeles is in a radical crisis of exploded self-image, and that life really is meaningless for millions. In 'I Want to Get Married, Says the World's Smallest Man', a crack prostitute's state of mind degenerates so far as to become entirely mechanical. These stories also bring to mind Elmore Leonard and the better crime novelists, but John Shirley -- unlike writers who attempt to extrapolate from peripheral observation and research -- bases his stories on his personal experience of extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle with the seductions of drugs, crime, prostitution, and violence." [jacket blurb, US pbk, 1993]
"John Shirley serves up the bloody heart of a rotting society with the aplomb of an Aztec surgeon on Dexedrine." --(ALA Booklist ).
"The stories in this collection have a haunted quality. Like the streets of any big city, they are defined not by what's right in front of you, but by what's reflected in liquor store windows, encoded in the graffiti on abandoned cars." --Richard Kadrey (in Covert Culture Sourcebook , 1993).
"A small book from a small press. Impossible to keyword. File under cyberpunk, avant-pop, slipstream, horror, identity." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1993).
Recommended.
Photo of John Shirley
(John Shirley in a punk-rock stance... courtesy of Eyeball Books)
|
|
|
