Books to Die For

John Shirley's IN EXTREMIS

If you're a reader, chances are you have some favourite authors. If I were to ask you their names, you could probably rhyme them off pretty quickly. If I were to ask you what your favourite story of theirs was, however, you might find that answer a bit more elusive. When you really like a writer, it's often hard to nail down which of their books or tales you love the most. I have this problem when talking about John Shirley, whose work I've loved ever since a friend back in college said, "You got to check out this guy's writing, Monica. It's totally up your alley." That friend was very right.

But what Shirley book should I put in Books to Die For? Although the author has written roughly 40 novels, it's his short stories that have always had the most profound effect on me as a reader. That said, it would be a no-brainer to put his brilliant 1999 Stoker Award-winning collection BLACK BUTTERFLIES: A FLOCK ON THE DARK SIDE in this column, but I think I'll choose a "best of" short story collection that's a little more recent: IN EXTREMIS, which gathers some of the most extreme tales he's written over the course of his lengthy career.

I interviewed Shirley back in 2011, around the time of IN EXTREMIS' release, for Rue Morgue #114. Here's a bit more about the book from that issue:

The 326-page book revels in life on society's fringes, and the desperate dregs, demented junkies, sadists and sexually insatiable deviants you might meet there. There's occasional interference from supernatural entities, such as the mysterious shadow beings who trick people into committing suicide in "Cul-De-Sac," but mostly the humans are the monsters. (Shirley atones for them in the book's foreword, attesting, "They are, in fact, human beings blindly trying to fumble their way out of their own special mazes."

This is certainly true for the character of Perrick in "Just Like Suzie," who has a dead girl clamped onto his dick after a drug-fuelled sexual encounter goes bad; the newly deceased Cordell in "Paper Angels on Fire," whose eternal fate is to have his hope crushed repeatedly while being endlessly consumed by the mouths of hell; and the desperate woman in "Call Girl, Echoed," who crudely amputates her sex organs with a folding jackknife because men only want to fuck robots nowadays. But the most affecting entry is "Faces in Walls," about a lonely, mute paraplegic, who's routinely abused by the staff at the care facility in which he's been bed-bound for the last six years. It's equal parts soul-shredding and terrifying - offering up an unimaginable degree of helpness."

It's more of a concept collection," Shirley says of the book. "It's an attempt to create an experience that has a certain taste, that offers hope of breaking through the veil of sleep; it tries to wake the reader up in new ways. It uses some humour, absurdity - some of it is definitely absurdist - but much of it is dead serious."

Perhaps what makes Shirley's work so hard-hitting, though, is his knack for description that practically places the reader within the hostile, seeping environs (crushed between ravaged, dying bodies in a wrecked commuter train, for instance); the occasional seamless blending of science fiction with stark horror (a man practices sustainable taxidermy to exhibit living celebrities); and a dogged slavery to the language and flow of stories, to the ponit of willingly breaking convention and even the rules of grammar ("Answering Machine" tells a tale of murder entirely through a stilted telephone message). 

And Shirley's not afraid to change the arrangement. Several stories in IN EXTREMIS received minor edits and updates, as he feels his talent is much more honed now. Many writers consider this a faux pas, that the work is sacred, but not Shirley. 

"I think that's just being a real writer," he says. "A real writer is always trying to make the writing purer, more potent, clearer, more communicative... I don't change the story though, I just try to bring it more powerfully into focus."

IN EXTREMIS can be purchased in paperback on Amazon for roughly $15, while the eBook edition is less than $10.