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Get startedStormland
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Learn moreThey call it Stormland: a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where climate change’s extreme weather conditions have brought about a “perfect storm” of perpetual tempests; where hurricane-strength storms return day after day, 365 days a year.
The heart of Stormland is Charleston, South Carolina, a flooded ruin where hundreds of people remain for their own peculiar reasons; where thugs prey on the weak, and a strangely benevolent cult tries to keep everyone insanely sane. Here, plutocratic evil takes advantage of Stormland’s lawlessness to cultivate a weirdly puppeted theater of cruelty.
Swept into the turbulent vortex of Stormland is an unlikely duo—a former serial killer and a former US Marshal—who must work together to bring light to America’s late twenty-first century heart of darkness.
A cyberpunk detective thriller set in a maelstrom of climatic upheaval, classism, and corrupt power, Stormland paradoxically dramatizes the resilience of the human spirit.
John Shirley is one of the original cyberpunk writers. He is the author of numerous novels, including Demons, Crawlers, Wetbones, Cellars, Bleak History, City Come A-Walkin’, Bioshock: Rapture, and the Song Called Youth trilogy. His story collections include the Bram Stoker Award–winning Black Butterflies. He is coscreenwriter of The Crow, has written an episode of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine television series, as well as animation scripts.
Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“With this gripping dystopian novel, Shirley extrapolates a grim vision of a late-twenty-first-century US wracked by climate change…Howling super-hurricanes, grisly torture scenes, and the horrors of scientific experimentation on human brains make for harrowing reading. This is a sober warning about the seductive dangers of power.”
“A powerful and necessary story for these times.”
“Stormland is a headlong sci-fi thriller about the punk squalor of post-disaster situations. It’s also got some remarkably interesting speculative technologies, so I’d say that Mr. Shirley is quite on top of his game with this one.”
“John Shirley’s acerbic humor is a perfect match for his sense of doom and adventure. One of his best. Buckle in!”
“This swampadelic adventure transmogrifies such real-time disasters as Katrina-flooded New Orleans into the stuff of speculative nightmares.”
“Set in a nightmarish future where extreme weather perpetually batters the coast, Stormland portrays human tenacity and ingenuity within a Hobbesian universe. John Shirley has created a vivid, hurricane-soaked canvas and a cast of memorable characters, none more so than a reluctant detective and a reformed serial killer who work in tandem to solve a series of perplexing crimes. A feat of dystopian imagination, Stormland cements Shirley’s voice in the upper echelon of the cyberpunk genre.”
“One of our best and most singular writers. A powerhouse of ideas and imagery.”
“A tightly paced, well thought-out cyberpunk thriller that entices after the very first chapter…Spare, no-nonsense prose like that of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Karl Edward Wagner, but with a cyberpunk twist that’s all [Shirley’s] own. It’s a sort of cyberpunk noir mixed with a biting commentary on mankind’s greed. Stormland is a big, sprawling read with plenty for just about everyone, a fun way to pass the time if stuck at home or on a bus.”
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