Crawlers

Praise

“With his electric intensity, elegant prose, and eye for details both sleazy and tender, Shirley is one of the most original voices in fiction today.” –POPPY Z. BRITE

“Barely street-legal, Shirley’s Bosch-like visions mark him out as perhaps the closest thing contemporary American fantasy has to a genuine ‘outsider artist.’ ” –WILLIAM GIBSON, Author of Neuromancer

“John Shirley accomplishes things that most writers would not dare to attempt.” –BRUCE STERLING, Author of Schismatrix

“John Shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary tales to tell. I heartily recommend a journey with John Shirley at your side.” –CLIVE BARKER

"Shirley’s latest begins horrifyingly–a top-secret government lab is destroyed by nasty, experimental nanotechnology–and just gets creepier, though more subtly so for quite a while, with just flashes of strange things in the woods and odd behavior by the involved populace. The comfortable town of Quiebra is in deadly danger, but the government, afraid of what will happen if the outside world finds out what has been let loose, is playing its cards close to its chest. For the Quiebrans, however, their predicament seems at first only a streak of light in the night sky and a potentially profitable salvage operation for Adair Leverton’s father. Shirley’s characters are believably flawed and variable, while his nasty little nanocreatures are, well, nasty (also singleminded about spreading). Meanwhile, his prose is often quite wonderful, even when he is describing something stomach-turningly icky. This portrayal of the dangers of secret experimentation with the diabolically dangerous is unnerving, not least because it is frighteningly convincing." -Booklist

"Crawlers has Shirley’s trademark intensity, moral outrage and critical wit but also includes deep social and political allegories as well. What happens when humanity becomes too dependent upon technology? Are we sacrificing consciousness for mindless pleasures and superfluous comforts? What if sentient technology turns the tables and begins using us as its tool? Shirley’s latest is as terrifying as it is thought-provoking." -Bookpage

"CRAWLERS is a horror story on a par with Dean Koontz, Stephen King and Clive Barker. It is a story of science gone amuck and what the consequences are when not enough safeguards are placed on a scientific black-ops experiment. The novel is fast paced and the action never lets up yet the author doesn’t ignore character development. The people who populate the pages of this book are rugged individuals who try to fight the enemy and endear themselves to the audience in the process." -All Scifi.com