Interview Update: December 2001
Q: The neverending interview still hasn't ended -- we just
slacked off it a bit. I think one of the reasons is that you've been
pretty busy with a lot of stuff and there hasn't been just one project
to focus on. You have 11 books available (or soon to be) right now:
The mass market versions of Black Butterflies and Wetbones, Really really Really Really Weird Stories, the three Eclipse books,
City Come A-Walkin', The View from Hell, ...And the Angel With Television Eyes,
Spider Moon, and Demons You've also got a novella -- Her Hunger -- in
Night Visions 10 and various short stories here and there. And we
have your lyrics for the Blue Öyster Cult to discuss.
I think back when we started this back at the end of 1995 you still
had a few copies of the original edition of Wetbones and New Noir out
there -- and lots of stuff out-of-print. So I guess you have plenty
of "current topics" to talk about.
Q: Okay, I'll bite...tell me, Mr. Shirley, what, in brief, do
you have to say about the events of September 11, 2001?
A:
In a nutshell I'll just say that: 1) Yes, we screwed up in the Middle
East, arming and then abandoning the Mujahadeen -- but they are no
angels. They punished women by rape, among other things, and many of
them enlisted with those oppressive monsters, The Taliban. 2) Yes, we
are also being punished to some extent by our greed and arrogance and
we should've realized the embargo against Iraq was doing more harm
than good and called it off long ago -- although the Iraqi elite has
exploited the situation by making a black market and stealing relief
supplies, and they exaggerate as to Iraq's condition. 3) Regardless of
our screw-ups the terrorists have no right to mass-murder our citizens
-- I do not see any convincing evidence for conspiracy theories
blaming anyone but al-Qaeda and regard such wild theorizing without
evidence as aid and comfort to an enemy. We have done well to
retaliate -- though I think we should've done it with more ground
troops to avoid civilian casualties, and to keep the murderous goons
in the Northern Alliance in hand. Militarily, though, the bombing has
worked.
Q: Now can we talk about your books?
A: I see you have "BÖC?" on your list. That's not how you spell
"book"...
Q:You know that stands for Blue Öyster Cult. I was going to ask
you about your lyric-work with them...
A: The new Blue Öyster Cult album Curse of the Hidden Mirror,
is mostly my lyrics -- I wrote eight of the 11 song lyrics (same goes
for Heaven Forbid, the prior BÖC album) -- and it's all good stuff,
musically, though some of it came out closer to what I envisioned than
other bits...But these guys --"the thinking man's hard rock band" --
are great musicians. Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser is one of the
greatest living rock guitarists and a damned good singer too (he sang
"Don't Fear the Reaper" and "Burning for You"). It's just a thrill to
hear him play guitar on something I took part in, to hear him and Eric
Bloom sing lyrics I wrote. The lyrics for the single, "Pocket", have
some specific spiritual meaning to me, as do the lyrics for "There's
an Eye in My Hurricane", "Dancing on Stilts", and "It's Good to be
Hungry".
Q: "Hungry"...that reminds me... What about screen work? I
think there's a project with Her Hunger?
A: It's from International Film Group and is based on my
novella, Her Hunger, and I did not write the screenplay, it's some
young woman, which is appropriate considering the subject matter:
succubae and the angst of teenagers, especially girls. They claim
it'll be made next year.
I am taking part in the formation of a new small but significant movie
studio but I can't say any more about that till it's formalized.
My wife Micky and I are writing a screen adaptation of Edgar Allan
Poe's "Ligeia" set in modern times. I also have a sort of
comedy/drama/fantasy screenplay which I'm writing in my head and hope
to download from my brain into a computer file early next year--but I
can't talk about that either. I'd like to adapt the story I wrote with
Marc Laidlaw, "Pearlywhite", into a screenplay for perhaps an anime.
It's a fantasy involving fantastic things happening to homeless kids
in an inner city setting. I'd like to adapt a book or a comic for the
screen for a studio, and why the hell doesn't my movie agent get me
some of that work? I think I'll call him and hassle him...
Q: Before you make that call -- Could we talk about your
books?
A: My books? A lot of books, yes. But a number of them are
small press, short novels, like Spider Moon -- a "new noir" novel,
about lunatic gunmen, missions of vengeance, pimps, chasing the
dragon, bounty hunters, and how relentless remorse can be in pursuing
those of us capable of feeling it. And then there's my short novel,
The View from Hell -- the "lollipops of pain" book...
I feel like telling that one -- despite some very good reviews,
(Publishers Weekly, Cemetery Dance, Locus...) a reviewer at
Kirkus (where I've always gotten good reviews in the past) reviled the
book, comparing me (in a negative way) to the Marquis de Sade, and
finishing off his review with what must be one of the most memorable
lines of modern toss-off hack book reviewing: "There are readers who
suck his lollipops of pain?" Delighted with that line, I swore I would
make up some actual lollipops with the label, "John Shirley's
lollipops of pain" to give out, and I'll do it sometime. And when I
gave a presentation at the Tentacle Sessions, at Cafe du Nord in San
Francisco, there were about 70 people there, who'd come to hear me
(reading, ranting and singing -- my guitarist and I did a pretty damn
good version of "Sister Ray") -- and I told them about the Lollipops
of Pain reviewer and then explained that, due to a slight misprint on
the signature page, the publisher had given me an extra crate of these
books that I would give out free, one The View from Hell to each
customer if the customer first said, "John Shirley I want to suck
your lollipop of pain." Everyone said it to me and I gave out the
whole crate. Draw your own conclusions about the perverse state of my
psyche -- and that of my readers.
Q: Books?
A: FourWallsEightWindows has a re-release of City Come A-Walkin'
in tradepaper. Black Butterflies is in mass market and is
yes...so is Wetbones although the Leisure edition of that book has a
lot of inexplicable typesetting errors in it. Those are all easily
available through chain book stores, independent bookstores, and
online through Amazon and B&N.
Really Really Really Really Weird Stories is in its second or third
printing. The most recent collection, DarkNess Divided, is in its
second printing from Stealth Press. Babbage has all three of the
revised "Eclipse" books available. ...And the Angel With Television Eyes
, a novel loosely based on a short story of mine from several
year's back, will be out from Night Shade on December 15. This novel
is, I think, more fun to read than many of the darker things I've
written (though I assure you, it is quite sufficiently twisted for
anyone's dark taste), and I hope to see it in a mass market edition
eventually.
Q: What about Demons? It's getting some great advance praise.
Tim Powers was raving about it at the World Fantasy Con. Steve
Saffel, your editor at Del Rey, said Powers sent a quote for it: "This
book seizes you by the face in
the first pages, and never turns you loose until the end, and it takes
you
to places fiction has never had the nerve to go before. Violent,
intensely
suspenseful, visionary, surreal and every bit as gritty and immediate
and
believable as a police-report, this book will scare you, dazzle you,
and
delight you." Pretty hot stuff.
A: Tim is very kind. He is a writer I deeply admire, so for him
to praise my work like that... it's meaningful and greatly
appreciated. Del Rey is coming out with Demons in early February or
March. (IF nobody blows up Park Avenue.) This is not only the original
novella Demons I did for Cemetery Dance (rewritten and improved),
there is also a sequel to that novella, Book Two: Undercurrent
included in the same volume. And it's going to be an audio book, too.
I'll be reading part one and Harlan Ellison (!) is reading part two.
Demons is an allegorical horror/dark fantasy novel involving a vast
invasion of demons, who rip their way through civilization -- and it, of
course, explains, eventually, how that came about. It's not an "end
of days" apocalyptic Revelations-type novel. People who think they see
the End Times around us now are illiterate ignoramuses who are not
aware that Revelations, which the church fathers who made the final
picks should not have included in the Bible, was actually written
about the Romans and Nero is the Antichrist (one other Caesar is also
a possibility -- it's one of those two guys). It is only the
Rorschach inkblot-effect that makes Revelations seem as if it relates
to our time. People who go to the woods looking for a Bigfoot will see
one off in the distance, in the shadows, because they expect to see
one. People who look at the sky expecting UFOs will see them -- they
will mis-identify normal aerial phenomena for 'flying saucers'. People
who expect to see evidence that Revelations is coming true in our time
will see that evidence in the same way.
But does that mean that there are no diabolic or divine forces at work
in our lives? There probably are diabolic forces at workand Iım sure
there are divine forces. But perhaps we donıt need any help from the
devil. Demons is ultimately about human demonism, about us possessing
demons rather than demons possessing us; about our being the monsters;
about how some kinds of multinational-corporate behavior is the
equivalent of human sacrifice. Mammon too was a 'god'. And it's about
how there are, among us, a few who are awake enough to share the same
world, who are present to the temporal and the eternal at once, and
who are our only hope.
Q: Two novels, Demons and ...And the Angel With Television Eyes, one about devils and one about angels? Does that mean anything?
A: My stationery has an angel on one side of my name, a devil
on the other. I have a tattoo with an angel on one side of a sacred
symbol, a devil on the other, both of them holding it in place. They
represent two sides of human nature but also two sides of nature
itself, relatable to yin and yang, and thereıs an idea that the
complete, harmonized man has both his devil and angel or, in
some fables, his wolf and lamb, contained and balanced within him,
guided by a third force, that unifies and exalts. Someone at the John
Shirley Message Board recently asked me about why I have used astral
travel and out-of-body experiences in my writing, and whether I
believe in astral bodies. It's found in both those books so it seems
relevant to repeat some of what I said here.
I have used imaginative descriptions of out of body travel (aka astral
travel) a few times in my fiction -- recently in two forthcoming
books, Demons (it's in there a LOT) and ...And the Angel With Television Eyes (a little). The reasons I use it are several.
First I don't see it used much. It seems to me a useful device in
fantasy *if* one can evoke it well. (Another form of it, out-of-body
travel into the realms post-death, is in my short story about The Crow
-- "Wings Burnt Black" -- in the anthology Shattered Lives Broken Dreams
and in my collection Darkness Divided). I think I can evoke it
better than most could because I have some knowledge of related
esoteric matters and because I work on making the incorporeal seem
corporeal, the surreal seem real. Which brings me to the second reason
I use it --because it naturally offers up imagery for the canvas of
the surrealist; and though I tell linear, internally logical stories,
they are, when I write fantasy, influenced by the Surrealists. Third,
it is possible to express certain metaphysical ideas very handily in
writing about OBEs and astral travel. But it can seem totally bogus
and foolish if not handled right and many readers (doubtless many
reviewers) might dislike it as being not something they can believe
in.
Q: Do you personally believe in the astral body?
A:
I believe that most accounts of out of body travel (and methods for
enabling it) are fraudulent or delusional. But I believe in the astral
body hypothetically. I believe that the soul, as a discrete creation,
is likely not something we are born with, but something we create with
spiritual work. I believe we have a spirit, always, which is
essentially God taking part in us; but as for a soul that survives
death as an individual, of that I am skeptical. I prefer the idea that
we must create a surviving soul through spiritual work. Here is some
of what I wrote in a nonfiction book I'm writing, drawing on Ouspensky
and others, about traditional beliefs in esoteric circles: ...a man
who has attained the full potential possible to a man, and with it
immortality, has developed four bodies. Each of the four bodies is
composed of a finer substance than the previous body in our
list....The four bodies have various names in various traditions.
Christian mysticism calls the first body the Carnal Body, this the
physical body, the carriage in Eastern parlance; the second body is
the Natural Body, the horse in Eastern terminology, which contains
feelings and desires; the third body is the Spiritual Body, or the
driver of the horse and carriage, corresponding to the mind; the
fourth body is the Divine Body, or the Master: called the Causal body
in Theosophy, it has crystallized Unchangeable I, consciousness, and
Will.
Many in the traditions speaking of these bodies may be unaware that
man is not born with the second, third and fourth finer bodies. We
don't have them unless we make them -- they must be cultivated in the
right sort of internal and external conditions. We don't need these
higher being-bodies to live our lives. We need them to live our lives
fully and freely, however, and to live as individuals in the
afterlife...the functions of a man who has only a physical body are
governed by that body, but a man who has higher bodies is, in each of
his centers and as a whole, governed by those higher bodies... An
ordinary man's body is that of an automaton, the slave of influences
around him; but the carnal body of the higher man, who has all four
bodies, obeys him.
Q: As an ordinary woman controlled by impulses arising from my
body and my desires, caught up in free association and controlled by
my lower nature -- I think we'd best call that an end.
©2001 Paula Guran
Original Interview: January
1996
Interview Update: December
1996
Interview Update: January
1998
Interview Update: January
1999
©2001 Paula Guran
A:Current topics? Like
whether or not I should be stockpiling ammunition? Or converting to
Islam just to be on the safe side?
