Jan Dominik Kucharzewski in the German magazine, Screem
(Translated by the writer)

Butch starts fucking around with the dead girl's body.
So begins "War And Peace," the second story in Black Butterflies, the most recent story collection by punk-literature-icon John Shirley. And with this sentence, all is said. Or is it? What seemingly begins as necrophili-porn soon transforms as the story line delves into the fears of a man whose Weltanschauung is dismantled little by little. There is something Kafkaesque about it, only Shirley does not confine himself to using hints and surrealism (well, not in this story anyway) to relate the increasing paranoia of his protagonist.

Shirley's style is as precise and merciless as the harsh flash of a scene-of-the-crime photographer. His descriptions of our cold, hard reality, border close to nihilism, but never come near simple exploitation. At the end of the "War And Peace" the message is delivered that you can not even trust yourself.

This is only one of the sixteen stories which are gathered in Black Butterflies. The volume is divided into two thematic sections: This World ("real" horror) and That World (fantastic horror). In my opinion the first part is a little stronger and more homogeneous than the second part, but that does not mean too much as all the sixteen stories are, without exception, more than just good. Shirley's stylistic variation extends from the rude colloquial tone of "You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did?" to the almost poetically intense language of "Cram." It goes almost without saying that no two stories are alike in content. Whether writing social-satirical fiction like "The Exquisitely Bleeding Heads Of Doktur Palmer Vreedeez" or the edgy story "The Footlite" (which almost hurts one physically as it is read) or, as in my personal favorite, "Cram," Shirley is describing a surrealistically bizarre vision of a subway accident with a climax reminiscent of the dark eerie aesthetic of a Giger painting -- this guy really knows his business. His narrative maxim seems to be: Go where no one has gone before. Who cares if the reader can return?

In one remarkable story, "The Rubber Smile," Shirley even anticipates most of the ideas of the blockbuster film Scream long before that movie came into the cinemas.

Sixteen times Shirley is like sixteen horror trips on a strong hallucinogenic drug: sometime during the reading don't be surprised if you begin to believe, to sense a buzzing and flapping wings creeping into the periphery of your vision. .

(fly back)