Shirley has written novels, short stories, TV scripts and screenplays—including The Crow—and has published over 84 books including 10 short-story collections.

Shirley won the Bram Stoker Award for his story collection Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side.

He was nominated for an Emmy in the Prime Time Animation category for an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

[1] Appreciation of John Shirley as an author of dark fiction was amplified by a January 2008 The New York Times review,[2] by critic Terrence Rafferty, of Shirley's story-collection Living Shadows which said in part: It's a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work.

.Maybe the best story in this superb collection is a rapt little piece called “Skeeter Junkie,” in which a young heroin addict first begins to enjoy the feeling of the mosquito feeding on his arm, then starts to identify with it and then, as the drugs ooze through his veins, somehow becomes it and finally uses the “exquisite” flying bloodsucker to transport him to the apartment of his comely but standoffish downstairs neighbor.

[2]Shirley's cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin, the A Song Called Youth trilogy and Stormland.

"[3] Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself.

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.

William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, collaborated with Shirley on short stories—as did fellow cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker.

Shirley's lyricism, wealth of ideas and imagination, crossover pioneering, and street-level honesty have been praised by other writers including Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Roger Zelazny, Marc Laidlaw, and A.

Shirley's personal experiences as a recovering drug addict and punk rocker brought verisimilitude to his darker, urban-tinctured writing.

He also wrote the apocalyptic, politically charged novel, The Other End which, according to the author's website, takes the apocalypse away from the Christian Right and gives Judgment Day to Liberals to do with as they please.

E.g., Demons, in which it is discovered that industry has deliberately caused deaths by cancer as part of a vast secret program of human sacrifice.

His novel of dark urban fantasy set in a slightly futuristic New York, Bleak History, was published by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books in 2009.