Book Review: John Shirley's "Stormland"

A Hard Rain is Going to Fall

 We have met the future and it sucks. The forecast is brutal in John Shirley's "Stormland."

The hellish opening pages of John Shirley’s Stormland remind me of Escape from New York. Bang! Shirley’s protagonist is on the move to a very shitty place. How shitty? As shitty as it gets. Aye. It’s a sea voyage, matey. A murky, slime-streaked trip! A bad trip, obviously. Shirley's magical misery trip begins with no draggy exposition, just a few clues and offhand comments. But the character's destination is clear …

 

Welcome to hell. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn’t hot. It’s wet and soggy.

 

Stormland is set in an unspecified future. Maybe 25 years from now, maybe 75. The uninformed reader might think it's a scary "sci-fi" book about climate change. The novel's protagonist (Darryl Webb, an ex-US Marshal, turned bounty hunter) thinks he’s going to nab a shitty, mass-murdering fugitive hiding out in a shitty stretch of the South Carolina coast called “Stormland.” Webb arrives at his shitty destination in a shitty underwater vehicle called an “amphisub.” (By this point, attentive readers will have noticed the prevailing "shit" theme.) As Pvt. “Pyle” observed in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, “I am in a world of shit.” Webb knows exactly how the man feels. But changing this shitty world isn’t even an option for him. Abandon all hope ye who enter. Webb did, a long time ago. Along with everyone else who had a grain of sense.

 

That’s what you find out. In just the first few pages.

 

Shirley doesn’t lecture or preach in the pages that follow. He grabs you by the throat and drags you into his drowned hellworld. Webb and the other inhabitants of that world don’t find it particularly hellish. It’s just their world. Climate change isn’t an issue anymore, at least to them. The climate done changed a long time ago. 

 

By way of analogy, consider the Fertile Crescent. Thanks to the assaults of early human civilization, the Fertile Crescent. Isn’t. It’s a fucking desert now. The people who live there aren’t surprised. Oh fuck! Look at all this fucking sand! Nah. They just live with it. The inhabitants of Shirley’s soggy hell feel the same way about the fucking rain. And that rain has clearly washed away much of their humanity.

 

In clever synechdoche, Shirley tosses you the bones of brutal character details on the first leg of Webb's voyage. A callous remark about a dead brother. A captain who puts a gun in Webb’s face when the bounty hunter sneers at calling his shitty boat a “vessel.” Details like that. These people are damaged and hard. Survival mode is their default setting. It’s not even a choice anymore. 

 

You figure that out after a few more pages.

 

In a nasty bit of brilliance, Shirley then continues his ripping yarn as if he were writing for the people of this lousy time. Yeah, he’s not writing for you. This isn’t science fiction, baby. This is now. Shirley's readers are in 2117 (or whatever), and the drowned world is just background — and in the present tense. These future readers are here for the story — a manhunt, a police procedural, a detective story, whatever. Or so it seems …

 

Whatever you call it, Webb’s bounty hunter’s hunt goes on. Unlike John Carpenter’s Snake Plissken or William Gibson’s Case, Webb isn’t motivated by time-released toxin sacks in his bloodstream that will kill him if he doesn’t complete his task on time. Nobody’s forcing him to do the job. Webb needs the money.

 

Webb’s financially motivated manhunt unfolds with vivid description — always grounded in the character’s phenomenological experience of physical reality. Shirley interweaves this sense data with Webb’s stream of consciousness and expositional info bursts. All these threads come together effortlessly. (At least you might think so if “writer” isn’t your job description. Having fucked up a few verbal tapestries in my time, I can assure you it’s not.)

 

Webb’s brutal quest slogs on to its ineluctable end. Shirley being Shirley, he flips the script several times along the way. I’d be a right bastard to spoil the surprise, so I won’t. But here’s a hint …

 

Heartlessness is a defense mechanism. Hope is the cruelest gift of Pandora’s Box. Ernest Cline danced around the point in "Ready Player One," but let’s speak the plain truth. In a crapsack world, VR is a better rush than heroin. Reality sucks. But it’s the only dance there is. Human beings can adapt to anything! Don’t smile, idiot. That sucks, too.

 

Clear as mud, I know. But it all makes sense if you read Stormland. I highly recommend it.

 

Shirley's at the top of his game in this novel. Stormland is up there with his Eclipse trilogy and City Come a Walking. Simply put, Shirley’s story is great. The words that deliver his story are, too. But unforgiving. Shirley’s prose is as hard as a Dim Mak death punch. How shall I put it? 

 

Shirley can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful... Mr. Shirley, boy, you are good. 

 

Actually, to be honest, that’s what Hemingway said about Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. I figure it also applies to Stormland, and I couldn't find a better way to put it. And he’s Hemingway, right? I can’t improve on Hemingway, right? Anyway, he’s dead, so who cares? And where was I?

 

Book review. Right.

 

OK. Uh. Bruce Sterling covered some of the same soggy ground in Heavy Weather. Shirley’s novel is more like Heavy Weather, ten or twenty years later. As if the hard rain kept falling. And then got harder. J.G. Ballard took a similar plunge in The Drowned World — a novel he wrote for the money and ultimately disowned. A half-assed thought experiment, at best. But Shirley doesn’t play that. 

 

Stormland isn’t a glass bead game. In plain English, it’s not an intellectual exercise. Or a Waterworld variation of Mad Max for that matter. There’s no winking, no hint of camp. 

 

Shirley is dead serious. His characters are flesh and blood — and that’s the real strength of his writing. Abandon all hope. That’s what his characters do. Shirley gets you under their skin. He makes you feel their hopeless reality.

 

And then you know how it feels.