The View from Hell
A novella.
From the dark side of Hollywood – to the cruel secrets of one of America's most secretive industries... To the twisted, explosive little Hells of suburban America...
To a hidden experimental world within a world – a terrarium for human beings where sex and drugs and violence are just factors in the experiment... Where experiencing new deaths becomes the ultimate drug, the ultimate ride – the final addiction.
The question is – would you know if you were in Hell, necessarily? Maybe it depends on your definition of Hell. What's yours? Haven't you ever said, "I'm just in Hell" and sincerely meant it – if only for a few minutes? Some parts of the world are truly Hell. Some parts are easier. But that's Hell's little game, isn't it?
Sometimes you think, why did I do what I did, just now?
Could something have been influencing me... from outside?
Not all astral puppeteers are demons – not exactly. Not at first. But if they're not – what are they? And what are we, the puppets, really?
Are we really human?
Are you sure?
John Shirley
John Patrick Shirley (born 1953) is an American science fiction and horror writer of novels, short stories, and television and film scripts.
John Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe". Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin.