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With ...And the Angel with Television Eyes John Shirley redefines the region where fantasy meets reality in the context of 21st century pop culture and technology. A surreal journey of self-discovery and transformation mixing elements as disparate as Shakespeare, Nietzsche, online role playing games, soap opera, and classic mythology, ...And the Angel with Television Eyes follows the life of actor Max Whitman as his life begins to fall apart. Strange, murderous events suck Max into a maelstrom that leaves him questioning his own sanity and the very nature of reality. As he is dragged further into a battle between mythic forces that threaten to destroy him and his world, Max struggles to understand the nature of these forces and then find the strength to overcome them. A rousing adventure, an insightful metaphor for our times, and a fascinating exploration of metaphysical duality, ...And the Angel with Television Eyes is a not-to-be-missed novel from a wildly unique imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Nov 26 2001
A semi-talented television actor is an unlikely channel for gnostic mysticism and pop phenomenology in this loopy dark fantasy from Shirley (From Hell; Darkness Divided). Max Whitman, star of a hit soap opera, is poised to claim his first serious role on the New York stage when he's overwhelmed by visions of mythical monsters and voice-overs calling him Prince Redmark. A mysterious fan named Carstairs convinces Max that he's one of "the Hidden Race," whose souls are highly developed "plasmagnomes," capable of independent, invisible life after the body's death. The plasmagnomes, which have schismed into factions that either protect or exploit humankind, manipulate the course of human events to serve their ends. The revelation awakens Max to a sense of "tucked-away worlds, living alongside one another, intertwining, and struggling in secret places each to assert its own agenda," and Shirley enhances it with adroit explorations of dualism involving Max's screen persona, a sensory deprivation tank experience and a back-talking interactive computer game. Though clever, the story disseminates its philosophy in preachy monologues that read like college lecture crib notes and suggest there may be less here than meets the eye. Still, the riot of incongruous images that Shirley plucks from our cultural consciousness to incarnate his wispy plasmagnomes adds ballast to his glib satire and shows one of the most energetic imaginations in modern fantastic fiction rising to the challenge of the material.
LIBRARY JOURNAL
As a star in a popular soap opera, Max Whitman desires to expand his acting
abilities to include serious parts. A series of strange occurrences,
however, sidetracks Max's ambitions and sets him on an eerie path toward
insight or insanity as the boundaries of reality collapse and he receives
glimpses of a hidden reality populated with monsters and heroes. The author
of Wetbones and Dracula in Love continues his exploratory approach to sf and fantasy with a raucous modern fantasy that revels in the shocking and the explicit.
