Clive Barker has a quote on the back of this book recommending the author. As a Barker fan, the endorsement was enough for me to make the purchase, but after reading Black Butterflies I can say John Shirley is not on par with Clive Barker’s work.
Black Butterflies is a sixteen short story collection, divided into two sections: This World and That World, stories based in reality and fantasy, respectively. Each story ranges from about eight to twelve pages each.
Each short story is like a snippet, an intense moment in the characters’ lives. Almost every character is psychologically screwed up in some way: they are stalkers, killers, molesters, and abusers. Many of the characters are so perverse that death is the least of this book’s horrors. In Footlite, a story of an abused woman who commits suicide by injecting herself with her ex-boyfriend’s body fluid, Shirley writes about child molestation, going so far as to describe the act. It’s written not to condone the act, but not to condemn it either. The characters’ depravities are written as plain fact, like the characters (and author) see it as normal or a way of life. The perversion is the Black Butterflies' horror element.
Almost every story deals with the seedier sides of humans. There are no good guys, no silver lining, no hope. One story, You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did?, goes on about drug use, murder, dirty drag queens and a dominatrix, with the payoff being two of the perpetrators escaping with some money.
Likable characters are infrequently written about, keeping the book’s overall tone too dark for my taste. In a relatively lighter story, Delia and the Dinner Party, a young girl escapes her amoral parents by slipping into a coma and living in her imagination, but not before she sees her parents as multi-headed monsters with freakish genitals.
One of the more digestable stories is The Rubber Smile about a film student researching how people react or relate to horror flicks. This story asks the question that Black Butterflies as a book asks: How do we react and respond to this type of horror? Do we cringe or do some of us relate and embrace this horror?
Shirley is a competent writer exposing the obscenities people endure or perpetrate and mixing it with the ordinariness of everyday life. The stories are short, so he hits the reader quickly with intense descriptions. There’s not much extra verbiage. However, he writes as if he were speaking or thinking which doesn’t necessarily make for an easy read. It’s choppy and scattered and jumps around and makes my head hurt. It lacks a flow that I prefer.
I wouldn’t say this is a terrible book, it’s just not a book I prefer in content and writing style. If you ever want to know, what does a drugged up gay prostitute who’s in the midst of turning a trick think about?, then maybe Black Butterflies will interest you. I am aware that Shirley is trying to be horrifying through his stories and characters but it’s too depraved for me. It didn’t make me feel scared, just made me feel sick and wishing I hadn’t read it.
Recommended:
