John Shirley

John Shirley currently lives in Vancouver, Washington, with his wife, Micky Shirley. He has three adult sons: twins Byron and Perry and their younger brother Julian. Byron is a yacht captain and yacht broker; Perry is a journalist, teacher, and artist. Julian is a Bay Area-based underground rapper and producer of hip-hop, trap, chiptune, and various other electronic music genres as well as a professional computer technician. He is also known as Juji or Young Bios. John Shirley was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up largely in the Portland, Oregon, area. During the 1980s, continuing to publish novels, he pursued a career as a musician while living in New York City and Paris, France. Shirley fronted the post-punk funk-rock band Obsession and recorded for Celluloid Records . He was in the band The Panther Moderns during the mid-nineties to early oughts with John Karr on the guitar and keyboards, Mike Deery on bass, and other guest musicians. They issued the album Red Star in 1997. The double album Broken Mirror Glass: The Anthology 1978-2012 was issued in 2013 by Infrarot and includes thirty songs—in chronological order—from more than three decades of musical work by Shirley. Another 2013 album, John Shirley and His Criminal Accomplices , offers seventeen songs from the same period. (It is available on iTunes.) His most recent band is the Screaming Geezers. His lyric credits for other bands include eighteen songs recorded by Blue Öyster Cult . Shirley's earliest novels were Transmaniacon (sf, 1979) and Dracula In Love (horror, 1979). His third novel, the proto-cyberpunk City Come A-Walkin' (1980), provided William Gibson with the precursors "both of sentient cyberspace and of the AIs in Neuromancer " not to mention mirrorshades and a "post-punk milieu...cp to the max, neatly pre-dating Bladerunner ." He also wrote the A Song Called Youth cyberpunk trilogy of Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988), and Eclipse Corona (1990). The trilogy has been re-released by Dover Books and as ebooks by Open Road Media. Other early novels include the suspense thriller The Brigade , the surrealistic A Splendid Chaos , and Three-Ring Psychus (re-written and re-issued in 2014 as High ). Cellars (1982) and In Darkness Waiting (1988) have become horror classics, as has Wetbones (1991) ("John Shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary tales to tell. Wetbones is a wild and giddy ride, confronting the reader with marvels and horror in equal measure."— Clive Barker) His science fiction novel Silicon Embrace ("Thrills and spills, with plenty of encouragement for armchair UFO-conspiracy enthusiasts."— Kirkus ) was published in 1996. His first collection of short stories, Heatseeker (Scream, 1989), was published to high praise. Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside (first published: Mark V. Ziesing, 1998) and Really Really Really Really Weird Stories (Night Shade Books, 1999) garnered both critical kudos and further popular acclaim. Publishers Weekly named Black Butterflies as one of the "Best Books of 1998." It also won both the Bram Stoker Awards and the International Horror Guild Award for Outstanding Collection. Demons (originally published as a limited edition novella by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2000) was republished in a new version with a second novella, Undercurrents , in hardcover by Del Rey (2002) and trade paperback in 2003. Although several of his novels can be considered cult classics, Demons became a cult phenomenon, still selling over fifteen years later. His creative skill at adaptation has led him to craft numerous novelizations and tie-in novels for films, television series, comic universes, and games. The most notable of these include bestsellers BioShock: Rapture (2011) and Halo: Broken Circle (2014). His most recent longer original fiction includes urban occult fantasy Bleak History (2009); noir-flavored novel of apocalypse, Everything Is Broken (2010); New Taboos (which co