REVIEWS

New York Times Book Review
[Shirley section] [Full Review].
"...a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work....all his stories...give off the chill of top-grade horror. It's a moral chill, because Shirley's great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering.... And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained. The prose is attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. He writes about sensation unsensationally, with a particular tenderness toward those who manage, against the odds and by whatever means, to feel something....[quoting Coleridge:] "My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." That's exactly what good horror writers like Joe Hill and John Shirley do with the shadows of their imagination. And there's an explanation here, too, of the hope that can keep even the most skeptical, fed-up reader coming back to horror fiction. Watching vampires having sex may not strike you as an adequate reward for suspending disbelief. But the poetry of fear and mortality is worth all the belief you can muster."

Publishers Weekly
In this collection of new and reprinted stories, Blue Õyster Cult songwriter and cyberpunk pioneer Shirley (The Other End) demonstrates his talent for blurring genre boundaries. The first section contains nonfantastic accounts of the darker side of humanity, including the quietly creepy The Sewing Room, in which a woman discovers that her husband is a serial killer and is tormented by her conflicting responsibilities to her family and to justice, and Seven Knives, a brutal tale born from the author's experiences of moral bankruptcy and narcissism in Hollywood. In the second section are stories with fantastic elements, including Blind Eye, a continuation of a Poe fragment in which a lighthouse lamp reveals the hidden sins of the villagers living below, and the Lovecraftian novelette Buried in the Sky, about a skyscraper complex built upon a pre-Aztec foundation. In Shirley's world, solitary characters go to desperate means to connect with others, never quite succeeding but still recognizable and poignant in their humanity.

Booklist
Booklist There's really just one new (i.e., previously unpublished) story in this collection, but not to quibble. Shirley is an effective, craftsmanly producer of first-rate chillers, who doesn't need monsters or ultraviolence to creep us out. Take the new story, "The Sewing Room," in which, finally, nothing blatantly horrifying happens, which is the most shocking possible development. It is one of a dozen stories in the book's first section of nonsupernatural stories. The eight in the second section do employ the supernatural, but conservatively. If Thomas A. Harris, of Hannibal Lecter fame, ever wrote short stories, they might resemble Shirley's. But would they be as good? --Ray Olson

Green Man Review
...this is a John Shirley collection, and the best way to describe it is that Shirley makes his own genre, a roughly California-shaped playground inhabited by junkies and video game players and Hollywood mavens who really aren't that different from one another, and whose appetites are going to slide them into and just maybe out of trouble. It's a place of music, lots and lots of music, and of a thin veneer of normal over a deep, rushing river of violence and strangeness, one that we're all in danger of falling into at a moment's notice....the stories of Living Shadows refuse to leave the reader unmoved....the collection as a whole is brutally strong. These are not stories that can be cast aside after reading on the premise that they're not real. Enough of them -- and maybe all of them -- could be, and therein lies their magic. -- Richard Dansky

Full Review

Horror Reader
In some ways, this book can be considered along the lines of a greatest hits album. It's got plenty of classics, some pieces that have found more recent "air time", and a dynamite new single....one of Shirley's best qualities as a writer [is] he's not content to dip his writer's tool (not much of a pen, anymore, is it?) in a single genre. In Shirley's fiction, it's not surprising to find ingredients such as crime, human evil, supernatural horror, sf, the fantastique, satire, philosophy, or that above mentioned shot of the Lovecraftiana dumped into the genre blender and pureed. This concoction can then be mainlined by eager readers, where it will promptly explode genre conventions and cliches....

Here, darkness dwells in many locales: from the mean streets of the inner city to the apparently quieter suburbs, from the glistening halls of a high rise mall/apartment complex to a nineteenth century town... There's a little something for everyone and quite a bit for discerning readers....

However, be warned: a collection like Living Shadows is a gateway drug. Do not be surprised if you find yourself jonesing for more Shirley fiction after your first taste. -- Daniel Robichaud

[Full Review]

HorrorWorld
John Shirley is a damn good writer.... He could write with the best of any genre he wished, whether it's cyberpunk, dark fantasy, weird fiction, or urban noir. He writes tales that unsettle, provoke, and even outrage.... His prose is razor sharp and as dark as the urban landscape.-- Steve Middaugh

[Full Review]

Monster Librarian
When an author produces a work that haunts me long after I read it, I tend to be hooked on that author forever. John Shirley's novel Wetbones made me feel uncomfortable as I read it, and it haunts me still. When I picked up Living Shadows I was nervous as I always am when I crack open a work by John Shirley. That nervous feeling is a testament to his skill. I knew I was in for a ride through the darkness....For fans of original horror fiction that has something important to say, Living Shadows is a must-have. -- David Agranoff

[Full Review]

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