John Shirley is the author of numerous books and many, many short stories. His novels include Crawlers, Demons, In Darkness Waiting, and seminal cyberpunk works City Come A-Walkin', and the A Song Called Youth trilogy of Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. His collections include the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild award-winning Black Butterflies and Living Shadows: Stories: New & Pre-owned. He also writes for screen (The Crow) and television. As a musician Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others.

NEWS & EVENTS

• 01.01.09: Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel is now available.

• 12.30.08: Gauntlet Press will publish a new Shirley novel, Welcome to Freedom in late fall 2009 in three limited editions states. You can now pre-order from the publisher. What happens when you have real freedom--no rules--day after day? Is it heaven--or hell? After a disaster wrecks a long section of the California's northern coast, the town of Freedom--which has heretofore attempted to live without outside interference as much as possible--is beset by vicious human predators as waves of brutality roll through the area. One young newcomer must confront with what it takes to survive at any cost...

• 12.26.08: Hear Shirley's new Screamin' Geezers EP with four new songs: "Broken Mirror Glass", "You Deserve Me, Baby", "Pain in the Shade" and "They're Makin' Money"

• 05.06.08: John Shirley has turned urban fantasy novel Bleak History in to editor Ed Schlesinger at Simon & Schuster.

• 03.19.08: New Regency Productions (Mr And Mrs Smith) has optioned John Shirley's forthcoming dark urban fantasy novel Bleak History (Simon and Schuster) for development as the basis of a movie.

• 03.19.08: The option on John Shirley's novel Demons by The Weinstein Company (The Lord of the Rings) has just been renewed. A director, Jim Sonzero (Pulse) has been attached, and a script has been written and is now being revised.

• 03.18.08: John Shirley's "alternative apocalypse" novel The Other End has been optioned by producer Jeffrey Kinart.

• 01.27.08: Stellar review of Living Shadows: New & Pre-owned by Terry Rafferty in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW calling the collection "a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work....all his stories...give off the chill of top-grade horror. It's a moral chill, because Shirley's great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering.... And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained. The prose is attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. He writes about sensation unsensationally, with a particular tenderness toward those who manage, against the odds and by whatever means, to feel something....[quoting Coleridge:] "My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." That's exactly what good horror writers like Joe Hill and John Shirley do with the shadows of their imagination. And there's an explanation here, too, of the hope that can keep even the most skeptical, fed-up reader coming back to horror fiction. Watching vampires having sex may not strike you as an adequate reward for suspending disbelief. But the poetry of fear and mortality is worth all the belief you can muster." [Shirley section] [Full Review].

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