Brian Hodge in "Hellnotes":

You've seen it in all the great old World War II movies: This wild-eyed G.I. goes gonzo and charges the enemy lines like a Viking berserker, and naturally he's cut down by machine-gun fire, but he manages to fall draped across the barb wire fence, so all the rest of the guys behind him can stream up over his back and overrun the jerries.

Now. Substitute complacency for the enemy lines and stodgy publishers for the Wehrmacht, and that insane G.I. starts looking an awful lot like John Shirley. With one major difference: Shirley ripped himself loose from the fence, tucked his giblets back in, stitched himself up, sublimated the pain, and has kept on firing ever since.

Where others whose names are more broadly recognized have struck gold, John Shirley was already there. He was the one who convinced William Gibson it was a good idea to write cyberpunk. His graphic horror was out there years before anyone heard of Clive Barker, and he'd already staked out gritty, quirky noir when Quentin Tarantino was still a video clerk trying to pronounce Au Revoir, Les Enfants.

Despite giving science fiction a nod so slight you might not even notice, Black Butterflies nevertheless 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. The collection is split down the middle, with the first half, "This World", comprised of stories lodged firmly in reality, and the second half, "That World," given over to speculative fiction.

Arguably, "This World" is the more powerful of the two, if only because everything is entirely within the realm of possibility. Moreover, the seamier the characters and their corrosive worlds, the greater the ring of authenticity. It's no secret that Shirley took a few tours along our societal underbelly. And now, years later, he effortlessly conveys the uneasy feeling that way too many of these people aren't mere fabrications, safely conjured in a comfy office full of books, but dredged up from memories of an urban purgatory riddled with toxic drugs and casual violence. Meet the predatory male hustlers of "You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did?", the pathetic love-addicted Kanya of "The Footlite", and the inhumanly callous slackers of "Answering Machine"... and you know they're all out there somewhere. Or were. Shirley is often at his peak when depicting lives in collision -- sometimes on the last day of their own, and other times the last day of someone else's. But even those stories told at more of a remove often wield just as potent a punch. "The Rubber Smile" is a dissection of slasher movie mania that puts to shame the grossly overrated makers of Scream, and "Cram", one of the shortest tales here, is a ferocious yet moving portrait of doomed survivors clawing for one last fistful of life in the fresh hell of an earthquake-ravaged subway.

Distinct from the raw directness of the first half, the stories of the second are more oblique, metaphors and satires and allegories whose backdrops may be as realistic as those of "This World", even if the events are not. In "Delia and the Dinner Party", a peculiar revenant (in footy pajamas) shows a young girl the grotesqueries lying beneath the facades of brittle civility worn by her parents and their friends. The immortality-seeking sorceror of "Black Hole Sun, Won't You Come" slaughters the remaining populace of a post-apocalyptic earth, driven first to frenzy by their lack of resistance, then to ultimate despair by the realization that he's the only one who hasn't already transcended death through love.

Stories with messages are rarely served well when their creators wield them with bludgeons rather than sutures, and Shirley does go a little heavy a time or two. "Aftertaste" may be an entertaining ghetto zombie romp, with bad crack as the culprit, but its anti-drug stance is a little too obvious for its own good. Still, let he who is without sin cast the first typewriter. 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.

(fly back)