John Shirley

John Shirley (born February 10, 1953) is an American writer, primarily of horror, fantasy, science fiction, noir fiction, westerns, and songwriting. He has also written one historical novel, a western about Wyatt Earp, Wyatt in Wichita, and one non-fiction book, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. Shirley has written novels, short stories, TV scripts and screenplays—including The Crow—and has published over 84 books including 10 short story collections. As a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. Shirley won the Bram Stoker Award for his story collection Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side. His newest novels are Stormland, Suborbital 7, Axle Bust Creek, the Spur Award winning novel Gunmetal Mountain,Blood in Sweet River and The Silver Revolver.

John Shirley was born in Houston, Texas and grew up largely in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon. His earliest novels were Transmaniacon and Dracula in Love for Zebra Books, and City Come A-Walkin, a proto-cyberpunk novel, for Delacorte. He also wrote the A Song Called Youth cyberpunk trilogy for Warner Books, re-released as an omnibus in 2012 by Prime Books. 2012 saw his noir-flavored novel of apocalypse, Everything Is Broken released by Prime Books. In 2013 PM Press released Shirley's New Taboos. In October 2013 HarperCollins/Witness released his novel about Conan Doyle in the afterlife, Doyle After Death; Skyhorse Publications brought out his historical novel about Wyatt Earp, Wyatt in Wichita, in August 2014. Shirley's collaboration with rock musician Mark Tremonti, an adaptation of Tremonti's rock opera A DYING MACHINE, was completed in June 2018. Shirley's novel Stormland came out in 2021 from Blackstone. His novel Gunmetal Mountain came out in 2023 and in 2024 won the Spur Award from the WWA. His novel Suborbital 7 came out in 2023 from Titan.

Besides having written numerous books Shirley was lead singer of the punk band Sado-Nation, in 1978-79; he was lead singer of the post-punk funk-rock band Obsession, on Celluloid Records, while living in New York City and Paris, France, in the 1980s, and was later in the band the Panther Moderns. He is currently performing with The Screaming Geezers. Shirley has also written 23 song lyrics recorded by Blue Öyster Cult.

Shirley's one nonfiction book is Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Penguin/Tarcher). John Shirley has three adult sons, Perry, Byron, and Julian. He currently lives in the Vancouver Washington area with his wife, Micky Shirley.

Shirley is known for his cyberpunk science fiction novels, such as the A Song Called Youth trilogy, City Come A-Walkin' and Black Glass, as well as his suspense (as in his novels Spider Moon and The Brigade), horror novels and stories (e.g., Demons and Crawlers and the story collection Black Butterflies) and horror film work. The A Song Called Youth cyberpunk trilogy, Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona, has been slated for a new edition by Dover Books in 2017. His tie-in novels include the best-seller BioShock: Rapture. His best known script work is the film The Crow, for which he was the initial writer, before David Schow reworked the script. He also wrote scripts for Deep Space Nine and Poltergeist: The Legacy. He was nominated for an Emmy in the Prime Time Animation category for an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He received the Spur Award from The Western Writers of America, for his novel Gunmetal Mountain.

Authors David Agranoff and Nancy Collins and editor/critic Paula Guran cite his intense, expressionistic early horror novels, such as Dracula in Love and Cellars as an influence on the splatterpunk movement in horror, and the subsequent "bizarro" movement. Appreciation of John Shirley as an author of dark fiction was amplified by a January 2008 The New York Times review, by critic Terrence Rafferty, of Shirley's story-collection Living Shadows which said in part:

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.

Shirley's cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin, the A Song Called Youth trilogy and Stormland. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffery called him "a postmodern Edgar Allan Poe." Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence in an introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin. Shirley's story collection, made up of increasingly bizarre stories, the whimsically titled Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories has developed a cult status.