With illustrations by Tim Ferret
FC2/Black Ice Books (1993)
ISBN 0932511554
Softcover/ 119 pp.
From the Cover Notes:
From The Review of Contemporary Fiction:
The Stories:
In New Noir, John Shirley, like a postmodern Edgar Allan Poe, depicts
minds deformed into fantastic configurations by the pressure, the very
weight, of an entire society bearing down on them. "Jodie and Annie on
TV," selected by the editor of Mystery Scene as "perhaps the most
important story... in years in the crime fiction genre," reflects the
fact that whole segments of zeitgeist and personal psychology have
been supplanted by the mass media, that the average kid on the streets
in Los Angeles is in a radical crisis of exploded self-image, and that
life really is meaningless for millions. In "I Want to Get
Married, Says the World's Smallest Man," a crack prostitute's state of
mind degenerates so far as to become entirely mechanical. These
stories also bring to mind Elmore Leonard and the better crime
novelists, but John Shirley -- unlike writers who attempt to extrapolate
from peripheral observation and research -- bases his stories on his
personal experience of extreme people and extreme mental states, and
on his struggle with the seductions of drugs, crime, prostitution, and
violence.
The half-dozen nightmarish stories in New Noir... make Nirvana's
Kurt Cobain look a little like
a primpy choir-boy. Punctuated with Tim Ferret's alarmingly surreal
illustrations, these pieces flaunt a staccato prose fast as a
channel-surfer's finger and laced with a 20,000,000-kilowatt charge....
These dope dealers and design students, ex-rock musicians and
forty-nine-year-old ushers, are members of an affectless McGeneration,
slackers all, moving full tilt on the road to nowhere, Motley Crue on
the radio, through a cosmos of Jack-in-the-Boxes, oil refineries, gas
station restrooms smelling of urine and disinfectant, and the endless
electronic reflections produced by the hypermart of late capitalism.
"There's making it like Bon Jovi," one of them declares, "like Eddie
Murphy - that's one thing. You're on a screen, you're on videos and
CDs. Or there's shit." These are the poles of their existences, and
those existences, each dominated by some addiction, are genuinely
scary, like the dreams of the man in one piece which always end in the
"great luminous cerebrum and spinal stalk" of a nuclear blast. Every
character here is in a state of existential freefall while searching
for a brief bright moment of equilibrium....[T]he amazingly fine and amazingly powerful
New Noir... is about changes in perspective,
voyeurism, and radically private vision. All you've gotta do to enjoy
it is sit back, strap yourself in, and embrace the wattage.
