1/26/2024 0 Comments Shirley doyle broken roadsHis novels include the seminal cyberpunk trilogy known collectively as A Song Called Youth ( Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona), Wetbones, and Everything is Broken. He has written novels, short stories, TV scripts, and screenplays. John Shirley is an award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and noir fiction. Doyle will yet be reunited with his one true love. I hope there will be a sequel, and perhaps Mr. In an Author’s Note, Shirley’s adds, “Any conceivable afterlife would have consistent physics and biological principles, all its own.”Įven if you don’t catch every reference to Conan Doyle’s personal life, this is a fun book to read. Doyle theorizes that the spirit plane is invisible because it vibrates at a level undetectable to the mortal eye, like fan blades spinning so fast we can’t see them. There is an aspect of what Professor Thomas Howard called “purgatorial” when describing William’s themes.īut there is a solid basis for science in the Doyle/Shirley universe. In terms of how negative karma might affect people who exist on alternate planes of reality, this book reminds me of the writings of Charles Williams, whose work was arguably the darkest and weirdest of all the Inklings, that Oxford literary group that also included J.R.R. “If some of us unconsciously chose places like Garden Rest, perhaps others, darkly obsessed, chose an underworld where they might act out the suffering they felt they deserved”, muses Nick Fogg in Doyle After Death. Comic book collectors speak of the “Marvel universe” and the “DC universe.” This is the Doyle/Shirley universe. He even includes an appendix, which expounds upon Doyle’s theories about the spirit world and incorporates those theories into the novel. Shirley’s biographical knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle informs the novel and confirms Shirley as a fan and a history scholar. In one nighttime scene, four men look down at the town from a steep hill and see a view like a rich chiaroscuro painting. The plot advances at a breezy clip that is somehow both relaxing and exhilarating, and Shirley has a knack for cinematic descriptions. Also, flashbacks to the detective’s last case among the living give the story a touch of gritty noir realism. A private detective named Nicholas “Nick” Fogg wakes up in the Afterworld after dying in a hotel room in Las Vegas. John Shirley’s Doyle After Death reads like a classic Sherlock Holmes whodunit, with a couple of major differences.įirst, it takes place in the afterlife, or as the people of Garden Rest prefer to call it, the Afterworld. The shaded cobblestone streets of Garden Rest are lined with shops, cottages, a pub, a boarding house near the town square, and of course, something nefarious lurking in dark hinterlands.
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