Andy Fairclough, "Masters of Terror"
...it's not very often that a work of such quality crosses my path....short fiction of the very highest standard. Each story almost without exception is so involving and so memorable that I came away each time as satisfied as if I had just finished a damn good novel....When you are in these stories with Shirley driving, you're there living breathing and sweating with the meanest of the mean and the weirdest of the weird....each [story] holds its own special magic...

Dorman Shindler, in "Des Moines Register" and "Dallas Morning News"
Black Butterflies is a tour-de-force collection highlighting his strengths as a story-teller and stylist without equal.

Publishers Weekly:
...one of the darkest, edgiest, boldest writers around -- a reputation that will only be enhanced by this first-rate and fierce collection...laid down in adrenalized, jivey, yet extremely artful prose that fairly skids across the page, dragging the reader along with it into shadowed corners of terror and desire. Yet while it's thrilling, there's psychological depth in it, too, as Shirley bores into the brains of his characters, revealing the motivations of those who walk on the wild side. Shirley loses nothing when he moves toward the fantastic...Here, as throughout this blade of a book, Shirley casts a story in which the veil of normalcy and habit is ripped away and his characters, and readers, are invited to behold the fundamental mystery of life.

Brian Hodge in "Hellnotes":
...showcases Shirley's chameleon-like talents at their best and broadest. Not just his mastery of different genres, but his fluency in radically different voices from story to story...Each of Black Butterflies' sixteen stories is distinct and memorable in its own way, and it's a rare collection about which that can be said. And this one's a gem, easily among the year's best, no matter what else 1998 may bring.

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