Praise for Living Shadows

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New York Times
It’s a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work… Shirley’s great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering. The opening line of his novel “Demons” states the theme succinctly: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.” …Maybe the best story in this superb collection is a rapt little piece called “Skeeter Junkie,” in which a young heroin addict first begins to enjoy the feeling of the mosquito feeding on his arm, then starts to identify with it and then, as the drugs ooze through his veins, somehow becomes it and finally uses the “exquisite” flying bloodsucker to transport him to the apartment of his comely but standoffish downstairs neighbor. It’s a horror story, I guess, but it’s also funny, weirdly erotic and, in a way that horror almost never is, tragic. -- Terry Rafferty

Publishers Weekly
In this collection of new and reprinted stories, Blue Öyster Cult songwriter and cyberpunk pioneer Shirley 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
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
[T]his 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