In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley Paperback – July 26, 2011

I've been on a bit of a Shirley bender lately, and that's an apropos way of describing how many of his books I've recently read. But I have to say this about In Extremis: these are some of the sickest, most brilliant stories around. Feel the desire to skewer the pop spectacle? There's a story in this volume for that. Ever wondered who or what the logical extension of J.G. Ballard is? It's John Shirley. Read the ingenious "Cram" and discover the hairline fault that cleaves the space between sex and death in urban population clusters. Disaster? Yeah, it's in there. Humanity - always. It's always at the heart of his stories, no matter how graphic or disturbing. A clarion call for the 21st C. Shirley's a street walkin' cheetah with a handful of napalm, a 21st Century boy.All of these, nearly all of them, are prime examples of contemporary black humor. They're tightly written, efficient in their excess and call to mind the likes of Bataille and, as mentioned before, Ballard, among others. Highly recommended.

I love the writings of John Shirley, and this book has many of his short stories. Most of them are pretty bizarre and trippy, some kind of confusing due to technical vocabulary, I was hoping the stories would be much more scarier and extreme. He wrote another book called DEMONS, And the book was in two parts, the first part was FANTASTIC, and the second part was actually boring. Some of the stories in IN EXTREMIS are hard to understand, maybe I'm not that well versed in the English vocabulary, but some and most of the other stories are easier to read and understand and were pretty entertaining.

John Shirley is a sick, sick man....Just kidding! Mr. Shirley is actually a highly skilled writer with many excellent short stories and novels under his belt. The stories in this collection range from Crime to Horror to unclassifiable and are often darkly humorous. One story I especially enjoyed concerns a malevolent "bro" ghost that haunts a Costco supermarket. And don't miss the classic "Skeeter Junkie". I didn't find the stories to be too extreme, so don't let that scare you off. There's some sex and violence, but it always serves the story and is never pornographic or gratuitous. Only one story made me cringe a bit, "Call Girl, Echoed". Buy this book and see if what you think. Highly recommended!

This is a great book of extreme short stories - by turns horrific and hilarious in a macabre sort of way. Don't buy it if you're squeamish or turned off by graphic sex and violence. Many of the stories are set in the seamy underworld of San Francisco of the present and past couple of decades and the backgrounds and characterizations are extremely accurate.A must read for fans of extreme fiction.

I chose this highest rating because the stories work as just imaginative entertainment but also have some lessons about how we treat one another. Like Rod Sterling and Harlan Ellison, Shirley's fiction eggs us on to wake us up as fragile beings doing harm to other fragile beings on a fragile world. Bravo!

I really enjoyed John Shirley's Demons but the short stories all seemed to do with scummy people and overtly sexualized situations. I'll stick to the novels from now on.

I really love John's writing and this collection of shorts was no disappointment. A great add for anyone who enjoys this genre.

He is a very unusual writer. Love him.