LOCUS: THE VIEW FROM HELL is a new short novel that tackles it all. The structure is unconventional (what at first appear to be free-standing episodes gradually weave together into a coherent center stream). The all-over narrative is stuffed with nasty sweetmeats of ugly behavior that eventually turn on a dime and are leavened with a redeeming sprinkle of grace notes.
It's not an easy task to accomplish. But Shirley's good.
In this novel, hell is where you find it -- and what you make of it. As ever, it seems that poor, old, easy-to-insult California is in for a drubbing here; at least as it provides a wonderfully believable canvas for all manner of terrible happenings.
In the hell that is Hollywood, Younger is a TV producer who's got one last shot at the bigtime. A Rupert Murdoch-like media mogul can give him the resources and opportunity to bring a dream to life -- but only if Younger pays a perverse toll.
In the hell that's the suburbs, wife Lu Ann's on mood elevators. But that doesn't stop her from crushing in her obnoxious husband's skull with a boombox. Is it just PMS?
In the hell that is corporate life, the executives of a pharmaceutical firm and their families discover that a popular product has proven to produce some highly unpleasant - and potentially disastrously unprofitable -- side effects. Can reality be ignored? Or spun? Or simply buried?
And then there's the element of the fantastic. From the beginning, the author introduces us to the actual narrators of the story, the alien energy creatures whose names translate simply as capital letters. The creatures wield a great deal of power here on our world, and one of them determines to play out an intellectual experiment by setting up a "terrarium" environment for selected humans,
SF readers with a more historical orientation may get a special kick out of this. Shirley's energy beings echo a bit of Eric Frank Russell's Vitons; their cosmic science fair project smacks slyly of Robert Heinlein/ Anson Macdonald's "Goldfish Bowl."
In the enclosed alien habitat where any defunct human can be raised from the dead in a short time,murder and suicide become major leisure activities.
Human existence turns ugly. It's Survivor with no binding vote to exit the island.
But even here, the novel suggests, decency and love have a place, however endangered. Where the going gets truly strange, is in Shirley's merging of alien strangeness and metaphysical conceits. It's all an insane Catherine wheel spinning madly on the head of a pin, but it seems to work.
And there are the grace notes I mentioned previously, those redemptive moments where humanity prevails -- up to a point. I won't be more specific, since I'd hate for any reader to shuck his burden of psychic pain until the author allows him (or her) to.
It's a good thing that John Shirley strikes an ultimate balance, otherwise THE VIEW FROM HELL might strike a number of readers as a cogent, well-produced, highly articulate suicide note.
There are a lot of unpredictable writers in dark fantasy and horror. But of them all, John Shirley is one of the hardest to predict. He ducks and weaves through
an enormous variety of approaches to the fantastic. He sometimes is so nihilistic and apparently cynical, his work bums like acid. Then he'll turn around and shock the cringing reader with a work of consummate humanity. Nothing sappy, mind you. But he seems to delight in confounding expectations.