[Special logrolling disclaimer: After he had turned in this review, Mr. Dedman received, and accepted, an offer from Mr. Shirley to collaborate on a novel. -LP]
John Shirley is the author of A Song Called Youth (the Eclipse trilogy), Wetbones, City Come A-Walkin', Silicon Embrace, the collections Heatseeker, New Noir and The Exploded Heart, and co-writer of the screenplay for The Crow. This collection is sub-titled "A Flock on the Dark Side," which sums up much of his work. Though Shirley's work is not unrelievedly dark (witness the humor, beauty, and even hope in Silicon Embrace), in this collection, as in much of his other writing, the light comes mostly from the fantastic elements.
The stories in Black Butterflies are divided into "This World" and "That World." The stories in "This World" lack overtly fantastic elements, and most of them are very frightening indeed. Shirley's version of "This World" seems to be populated largely by psychopaths who murder and rape as much from boredom and bafflement as anything else; one of the few characters in "This World" to display anything resembling empathy is the computer science teacher in "What Would You Do For Love?," and she uses computer models to help predict the actions of people around her. "What Would You Do For Love?" is not only the last story in "This World," as though it were a segue into "That World," it's the first in which most of the characters will seem familiar to nearly all of us, and the first with something like a conventionally happy ending.
Shirley's talent is that he enables us to empathize with characters who have so little empathy for others, whether we want to or not, despite gut-punch beginnings that many horror writers might use as a coup de grace. For example:
Butch starts fucking around with the dead girl's body. "Butch," I tell him, real dry, "I'm pretty sure that's not standard police procedure." ("War and Peace")You know that girl, the one who died from cum? I used to know her, and I know why she did it. ("Footlite")
Later, when he was thinking about what it would be like to take a bullet in the head, Darry found that, even then, he couldn't blame Marla. He thought: Marla was only one part death. ("What Would You Do For Love?")
The weakest piece in "This World" is "The Rubber Smile," a story about slasher movies and their fans, and even that's pretty scary. The tightest (and Shirley isn't one to waste words) is "Answering Machine."
"That World" throws overt fantasy elements into Shirley's universe, and while some of the stories (such as "Pearldoll" and "Aftertaste") are almost conventional horror tales, others are...different. "The Exquisitely Bleeding Heads of Doktur Palmer Vreedeez," in which celebrities are encased alive in plastic sheathing to form a horrific sculpture garden for the enjoyment of Idi Amin, is an enormously over-the-top sick joke. "Delia and the Dinner Party," in which a little girl's "imaginary friend" translates her parents' over-dinner conversations, is a gem, and if you'd prefer something upbeat and dislike televangelists as devoutly as I do, "Flaming Telepaths" will make your day.
Black Butterflies isn't for all tastes, but if you like your fiction nasty, brutish and short, this is your sort of collection.
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