Who is Michael Shea

Michael A. Shea was born to Irish parents in Los Angeles. There he frequented Venice Beach and the Baldwin Hills for their wildlife.

After attending UCLA on the advance Placement program while still in the tenth grade, he made his way to UC Berkeley for the wild-life there during the Time of Troubles.

He hitch-hiked twice across America and Canada, and at a hotel in Juneau Alaska, chanced on a battered book from the lobby shelves: Cugel the Clever, by Jack Vance.

Not till four years later, after a brief first marriage, and a year spent hitch-hiking through France and Spain, did he write an hommage to Jack Vance, for which that great man graciously declined to share the advance offered by DAW Books.

Subsequently he ranged all over the L.A. Basin, painting houses and teaching Adult ESL by night. In 1978 he had the blessed luck to meet his wife, artist and author Lynn Cesar. The pair of them co-authored their beautiful and beloved children, Adele and Jacob, currently ranging the great North-West, and the world at large.

Horror in its first coinage is a ripple of the flesh - as in horripilation, when the tremor brings our hair erect. It is the shudder of awe and of ecstasy at reality's unbearable grandeur and beauty eternal, that seizure of fear and laughter that takes us when we remember where we really are: spinning inside a discus of dust and fire flung out by the huge first heartbeat of time.

What, after all, is our landscape when we lie sleeping? When we've laid by our tools, and folded ourselves into darkness? We surf the methane storms of Jupiter, stride in our nakedness across the razor-sharp, un-eroded stone of the moon, indestructible wraiths fast as light, absolute zero our element, deathless diamonds our brains. We live in the Universe then, and deep in our spines, live always in the Universe.

Come sunrise, we walk around with our skull boiling with hierarchies, histories, holocausts, hymns and hyperboles... but our souls know always we have only our monkey-bones to scaffold our galactic visions, have only one fist-sized heart to hold the ice-white constellations, the wild-haired comets, and old Sol's nightly hemorrhage on a jade-the-amber sea. Horror is just our dying amidst the hair-raising wonder and heart-breaking glory that is flying apart all around us. Our knowing and feeling this - that is our soul.

I mean to say, that Horror is never mere butchery. Certainly, the Universal Recycling can be stressful. Time and gravity hammer us all back down to hydrocarbons, if nothing else gets us first, and we feel always the tug of this grand transaction's approach. But without the wild beauty of what we are losing, where is the Horror, really? Without the soul's hair-raising cry of heartfelt awe, what's been lost?

• Nebula Best Novellette Finalist (1980): The Angel of Death


• Nebula Best Novella Finalist (1981): The Autopsy


• Hugo Best Novellette Finalist (1981): The Autopsy


• Hugo Award Finalist (1981): Polyphemus


• World Fantasy Best Novel winner (1983): Nifft the Lean


• World Fantasy Best Collection Finalist (1988): Polyphemus


• World Fantasy Award (2005) Novella winner: The Growlimb


• International Horror Guild Award (2005) Finalist: The Growlimb


• British Fantasy Society Award (2005) Finalist: The Growlimb


• Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards (2005) Nominee: The Growlimb