From BOOKLIST:
Shirley's latest begins horrifyingly--a top-secret government lab is
destroyed by nasty, experimental nanotechnology--and just gets
creepier,
though more subtly so for quite a while, with just flashes of strange
things in the woods and odd behavior by the involved populace. The
comfortable town of Quiebra is in deadly danger, but the government,
afraid of what will happen if the outside world finds out what has
been
let loose, is playing its cards close to its chest. For the Quiebrans,
however, their predicament seems at first only a streak of light in
the
night sky and a potentially profitable salvage operation for Adair
Leverton's father. Shirley's characters are believably flawed and
variable, while his nasty little nanocreatures are, well, nasty (also
single minded about spreading). Meanwhile, his prose is often quite
wonderful, even when he is describing something stomach-turningly
icky.
This portrayal of the dangers of secret experimentation with the
diabolically dangerous is unnerving, not least because it is
frighteningly convincing.
From LOCUS:
While John Shirley's Crawlers employs the cutting-edge concept
of
weapons-grade nano-tech run amok, for the most part the "sensawunda"
SF element of infinite possibilities takes a back seat to a different
format drawn from horror, thrillers, and suspense (books, cartoons,
and films) -- the world of walking corpses, hair's-breadth escapes,
fools or innocents wandering solo into danger, untrustworthy
"authorities" And governmental cover-ups, with seemingly miscellaneous
conjunctions of brave/clever/offbeat people who must try to combat
Evil as a ticking clock counts down the hours and minutes until
Doomsday. You might call it a tribute to that pulpish spirit. But amid
all the flamboyant perils, Shirley also scrutinizes real life and
non-iconic people, particularly teenagers, with the sharp eye of a
mainstream writer. And the larger perspective of SF will eventually
return to haunt us.
The small East Bay town of Quiebra CA lacks the glamour of San
Francisco, the radical chic of Berkeley, and the glossy comforts of
the more affluent suburbs over the hills. It's mostly a
blue-collar/underpaid white-collar burg with more than its share of
screwed-up inhabitants, like Mason's uncle in his disaster of a house
where "dirty clothes lay about the floor, which was otherwise papered
over with cast aside old issues of the National Enquirer. The
beer
cans and pizza boxes had been shoved off the coffee table onto the
floor to make room for Uncle Ike's cleaning kit and the rifle." (Is it
any surprise that Mason's into drugs?) The most peculiarly screwed-up
of them all, Vinnie "Vinegar" Munson, wanders the town talking to
himself or strangers ("Look out, brother, the wind'II lock handcuffs
on your extremities like Officer Rhino") and observing the world in
his own bizarre but far from stupid manner. Between these extremes of
adult trashiness and oddity, the teenagers try to find their way in
the world while suffering from the nearly universal angst peculiar to
their kind whether they be geeks, jocks, or earnest souls who don't
know what they are. For many of them, escape from this place already
seems impossible even before it gets cut off from the rest of the
world by malign forces, governmental and otherwise.
Such material may seem ripe for sitcom or teen-movie caricature, but
Shirley gives himself room to look deeper, mastering the argot,
life-styles, hopes and fears of his young characters, even as the
Creep-Out meter begins to rise from disquietude toward sharp-fanged,
drooling, extravagant Horror. After Chapter 1 introduces the menacing
SF macguffin, Chapter 2 takes the time to present several of
these teens as genuine individuals before the odd satellite streaks
through the sky and crashes by Quiebra's dock on Suisun Bay. The
consequences of that landfall appear gradually, and can be poetically
brief as "The scream of tires, the scream of a small animal, the
scream of a child." Chapter 1 left much unexplained, and even the one
(increasingly rebellious) government-man protagonist doesn't know much
about what's really going on in this little corner of Northern
California. Gradually it becomes clear that whatever kind of plague is
running through the town, adults are most vulnerable to its inhuman
transformations and teens are the most resistant. Family by family, in
happy homes and thoroughly messed-up relationships, at school and on
the streets, the parents/authority figures change, leaving the kids
increasingly to their own devices. The results can be poignant, like
the three-line "prose poem" that concludes Chapter 6: "Larry wanted
his mom./ He wanted his dog./ He wanted his dad." (Most animals are
also susceptible to rogue nano, and the ones that aren't can still he
slaughtered.) The most vulnerable kids can be pitied for their
lingering trust in grownups, while the wildest, toughest kids may
prove to have the best perspective of what's going on, disillusioned
enough to read the chaos rather than just throwing themselves
into an
ultimate lawless rave up and riding the waves of destruction.
The nanotech-driven Crawlers that produce more of their kind
from
human material -- "people" who can turn into entities like androids as
envisioned by Picasso -- aren't simply bent on destruction. Oh no,
they
have a Plan, a goal that is simultaneously utopian, Orwellian, and
Vingean (a uniquely SFnal variant on the temptation of Faust.)
But it would spell disaster to modern humanity and all its works. So
elements of both gory zombified Creature Feature horror and
apocalyptic suspense come increasingly into play as the plot moves
toward its seemingly inevitable devastating climax. Shirley handles it
all with a fine touch, from the most extravagant creep-outs to the
movingly mundane, and on to hints of futures still to come. It's a
masterful performance.
From PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:
In Shirley's frightening new novel, he extends the smart work he did
in Demons (2002), investing a fierce genre tale with spiritual import.
Here Shirley reaches back to the classic pulp scenario of a small town
beset by an alien invasion. In this case, though the townspeople of
Quiebra, Calif., initially assume that the capsule that crashes
originated in space, it's actually a satellite put into orbit by a
hush-hush military research outfit fearful of the out-of-control
nanotechnology experiment it contains. The experiment involves
nanoparticles that have evolved into a kind of group mind (as in
Michael Crichton's Prey), taking over human (and animal) hosts and, by
incorporating pieces of hardware, refashioning those hosts into an
amalgam of human and machine ("Deputy Sprague's neck was gone,
replaced with a metal stalk..."). Humans differ as to their
vulnerability to takeover, with some adults more resistant than
others, and younger people quite resistant; this allows Shirley to use
teenagers -- a likely readership for the book -- as the novel's heroes, and
his understanding of teen ways and patterns of speech is deep and
exact. This tack also allows for some profound emotion, as
kids -- particularly Adair and Waylon Leverton, whose father is the first
person taken over in Quiebra -- witness the soul-destruction and/or death
of their parents. The novel's depiction of humans devolving into
group-mind-controlled machines proves an excellent metaphor for
Shirley's take here on the human condition, which posits that some of
us are already machinelike and others more "awake"; but the narrative
does slide slightly into didacticism as it elaborates these
understandings. Overall, though, this is an exciting novel of ideas
wrapped in red-hot pulp.
From BOOKPAGE:
Crawlers has Shirley's trademark intensity, moral outrage and
critical
wit but also includes deep social and political allegories as well.
What
happens when humanity becomes too dependent upon technology? Are we
sacrificing consciousness for mindless pleasures and superfluous
comforts? What if sentient technology turns the tables and begins
using
us as its tool? Shirley's latest is as terrifying as it is
thought-provoking.
From CEMETERY DANCE #45:
John Shirley has never conformed to genre rules. His work is often
literally indefinable. Nor does he write in an always-identifiable
groove. He writes in his own original and singular zone. In the
publishing world, that translates to "uncommercial" -- a word that's
usually an epitaph rather than an adjective.
So, when I say that with Crawlers John Shirley has written the
most
commercial novel of his career (excepting some written under
pseudonyms), that might be like saying the Pope is pregnant or that
Shirley's sold-out and produced pap. It's neither. Crawlers is
a book
that is accessible and entertaining to a broad audience (more
commercial) while remaining intelligent and retaining more than
surface
meaning (as he's always done).
Crawlers' basic premise is a venerable science fictional horror theme:
We've created a monster we can't control. The monster soon
outdistances
its creators. We are doomed -- unless a small band of non-heroes can
heroically thwart the monster.
John Shirley's approach to this theme in Crawlers is comparable to
that
of Stephen King. (There's a sentence some Shirleyfans thought they'd
never see.) Elizabeth Hand once wrote King "exploited the symbolic
power
of everything we fear most -- that is, everything we do wrong --
forcing
us to gaze at ourselves through a long shadowy tunnel. The secret of
King's success is not that he writes so well about monsters and
ghosts,
but that he writes so persuasively about us."
But...
Shirley is still Shirley. King always connected with the Middle
American
Zeitgeist: small towns, regular folks, classic rock. Shirley has
always
been plugged into the current or even the stream slightly beyond the
"now": New York/San Francisco/LA/Places You Don't Want to Find, edgy
types, punk.
One of Crawlers middle-aged protagonists notes, at the novel's
explanatory moment, that we all have surrendered some of our own lives
to our technology, we all, in fact, have surrendered too much. King
would have used that character (and similar ones) to carry the plot
and
present the book's primary point of view. Not Shirley. His highly
believable adult characters play their parts, but it's the adolescent
protags -- the gear-laden, PDA-toting, IMing, cellphoning,
downloading,
burning, technology-native kids -- who are the heart and true heroes
of
his novel. Horror must evolve to remain horror and the resonance of
Crawlers is 21st century while King's work, however admirable, belongs
to the 20th.
The adult inhabitants of the northern California town of Quiebra are
typically damaged. Everyone is flawed. Relationships are cracked. Life
is full of rifts and chasms. The kids are just trying to grow up --
whatever that means. Teen-aged Adair recognizes that things come apart
and come together again -- but that things have to come apart again,
too. She likes a new boy in town, Waylon, who is way into UFOs, shadow
government, conspiracies, and CIA plots, dude. They and their friends
are a heartbreakingly real mix of kindness and cruelty, anticipation
and
resignation, cockiness and unsureness. For most kids, even those from
"good" families, their sense of what is needed to grow up healthy
comes
from "sitcoms and shows like Boston Public and TV movies and HBO
specials and all that shit..." as much or more than from their
parents.
After a government satellite streaks through the night sky and crashes
through an old dock in Suisan Bay, things start getting weird in
Quiebra.
There's something wrong with a growing number of the adults: they act
like automatons. In fact, there's something "off" about all of
Quiebra.
Soldiers are running over cats "accidentally." Home computers are
stolen
or just torn apart with parts stolen. The electronics class at the
high
school is ransacked. People's cars are stripped. Everyone is building
strange little satellite dishes and attaching them to their roofs.
Not all the adults are affected. Adair's Aunt Lacey -- a newspaper
columnist who has left her job because the paper could not risk some
truthful, but damaging, revelations she had written -- isn't. Neither
is
Bert Clayborn, a neo-transcendentalist sometime-high schoolteacher and
writing instructor at the local college. Both are rational, thinking
people but when Lacey discovers odd devices being delivered to town
mailboxes, she knows the strangeness is more than paranoia. She turns
to
Adair and Waylon who have pieced together other parts of the dangerous
puzzle. But they dare not speak out yet.
Vinnie "Vinegar" Munson, sees things clearly, too, not that anyone
would
listen to him. Vinnie wanders the streets talking to himself and
seeing
the world in a way some might term daft. ("Once you started thinking
of
roadkill it was hard to stop. He hated thinking of roadkill.") Vinnie
knows better than to tell anyone about the squirrel with eyes that
extend from their sockets on thin metal stalks and with blue sparks in
its over-large mouth; or the blue jay with a head that rotates on its
neck all the way around, unscrewing, till a little silvery worm comes
out from the opening; or the mid-sized terrier swinging through the
trees like a monkey. When he sees the local bank methodically robbed
at
one in the morning by its employees and other upstanding citizens, he
does speak up. But no one pays him any attention.
Things get stranger -- kids disappear and their parents are not
concerned, the teachers no longer show up for school, the cops give
the
kids Jack Daniels, marijuana, and tranquilizers and encourage them to
party. All those homemade antennas are pointing in one direction, and
none of them are aimed at the sky.
Meanwhile, Air Force Major Henri Stanner (who we first meet in the
damned scary prologue) has shown up to vet the possibility of
collateral
damage from "the accident." He's there to protect the townsfolk, but
his
governmental assumption that lying is the best way to do it may prove
fatal. If something really has escaped in Quiebra -- something that
can't be contained, something with the imperative to experiment and
find
new ways to proliferate, something that either "converts" humans or
uses
them for spare parts -- then destroying the town and everyone in it
may
be the only way to save the rest of the world...and cover-up a secret
Pentagon experiment gone far out of control.
And so Crawlers goes -- following the "standard" genre path but
always
impelled by that element, that essence, that puts it slightly in front
of the pack and makes it all new.
By the time the final standoff comes the reader will be hard put to
deny
that the world is truly on the brink of disaster or that this
particular
techno-nightmare doesn't already exist. King himself wrote, in
Danse
Macabre, that "the primary duty of literature" is "to tell us the
truth
about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed."
Shirley tells us the truth about ourselves and our world, in fact, we
get the feeling he's not always lying.
Meaningful, imaginative, and creepy, Crawlers is one novel you
definitely should not miss.
from LIBRARY JOURNAL:
Three years after a
government
experiment goes dreadfully wrong, a small community receives an
apparently
unearthly visitation in the form of strange lights in the sky and the
sudden
impact of an airborne vehicle. Soon the town's population become the
victims
of an insidious force intent on transforming all life on Earth into
something other than
human -- crawlers. The author of Demons and Wetbones crafts another
visceral chiller
that draws its impact from sympathetic characters caught in the grip
of powers
they cannot control.
from ALLSCIFI.COM:
Crawlersis a horror story on a par with Dean Koontz, Stephen
King and
Clive Barker. It is a story of science gone amuck and what the
consequences are when not enough safeguards are placed on a scientific
black-ops experiment. The novel is fast paced and the action never
lets
up yet the author doesn't ignore character development. The people who
populate the pages of this book are rugged individuals who try to
fight
the enemy and endear themselves to the audience in the process.
contact: jshirley@darkecho.com