John Shirley was born in Houston, Texas and grew up largely in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon. He was lead singer of the post-punk funk-rock band Obsession, on Celluloid Records, while living in New York City and Paris, France, in the 1980s, and was later in the band the Panther Moderns. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. John Shirley has three sons, twins Byron and Perry, now 27 and Julian, a Bay Area-based underground rapper, 22 years-old. He is married to Michelina Shirley.

The influential and eclectic John Shirley is known for his cyberpunk science fiction, as well as his suspense (as in his novels Spider Moon and The Brigade), horror novels and stories, and horror film work. His best known script work is the film The Crow, for which he was the initial writer, before David Schow reworked the script. He also wrote scripts for Deep Space Nine and The Legacy. Some cite his intense, expressionistic early horror novels, such as Dracula In Love and Cellars as an influence on the splatterpunk movement in horror, and the subsequent "bizarro" movement. Appreciation of John Shirley as an author of dark fiction was amplified by a January 2008 The New York Times review, by critic Terrence Rafferty, of Shirley's story-collection Living Shadows which said in part:

Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) Trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe." Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, 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. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin. Shirley's recent story collection, made up of increasingly bizarre stories, the whimsically titled Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories has developed a cult status.

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. A. Attanasio. His more surreal work, as in A Splendid Chaos showed how it was possible to describe the indescribable with a paradoxical believability and impeccable internal logic no matter how bizarre the subject matter. Unlike many "street" flavored writers, Shirley's personal experiences as a recovering drug addict and punk rocker brought real verisimilitude to his darker, urban-tinctured writing.

In recent years Shirley was has written "tie in novels" and novelizations, as well as 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. This reflects his tendency to create fantasy entertainment which is also political satire, or spiritual allegory. 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. 2007 saw the release of a new story collection, Living Shadows, from Prime Books. His novel of dark urban fantasy set in a slightly futuristic New York, Bleak History, was published by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books in 2009.

Shirley's work ranges in tone from the surreal to the grittily naturalistic to the nightmarish. He is also a songwriter and singer, having fronted numerous punk bands, including the New York band Obsession, who were recorded by Celluloid Records. He has written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult, such as several songs on the album Heaven Forbid.

Shirley's short story collection Black Butterflies won the following awards:

• The Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers of America
• International Horror Guild Award
• Selected as one of the best books of 1998 by Publishers Weekly

Novels

• Transmaniacon (1979)
• Dracula in Love (1979)
• City Come A-Walkin' (1980)
• Three-Ring Psychus (1980)
• The Brigade (1981)
• Cellars (1982)
• Several books in the Traveler series of post-apocalyptic men's adventure novels (as D. B. Drumm)
• Several books in the Specialist series of mercenary/adventure men's adventure novels (as John Cutter)
• A Song Called Youth Series (also known as Eclipse Trilogy):
• Eclipse (1985)
• Eclipse Penumbra (1988)
• Eclipse Corona (1990)
• In Darkness Waiting (1988)
• Kamus of Kadizar: The Black Hole of Carcosa (1988)
• A Splendid Chaos (1988)
• Wetbones (1991)
• Silicon Embrace (1996)
• "Demons" (2000, novella)
• "...And the Angel with Television Eyes" (2001, novella)
• "The View From Hell" (2001, novella)
• "Her Hunger" (2001, novella)
• Spider Moon (2002)
• Demons, a new version with sequel novel Undercurrents (2002)
• Crawlers (2003)
• Doom (2005, novelization of the film version of the Id Software computer game)
• Constantine (2005, novelisation of the film featuring the DC/Vertigo comicbook character)
• John Constantine, Hellblazer: War Lord (2006, based on the comic book character, not the movie version)
• Forever Midnight (2006, Predator series tie-in)
• Dead White (2006, tie-in with Batman Begins)
• John Constantine, Hellblazer: Subterranean (2006)
• The Other End (2007)
• Steel Egg (2007)
• Black Glass (2008)
• Bleak History (2009)

Short story collections

• Heatseeker (1989)
• New Noir (1993)
• The Exploded Heart (1996)
• Black Butterflies (1998)
• Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories (1999)
• Darkness Divided (2001)
• Living Shadows (2007)

Nonfiction

• Gurdjieff - An Introduction to his Life and Ideas (2004) ISBN 1-58542-287-8
• Cognition Factor John Shirley expresses some personal ideas and philosophy in the smart movie Cognition Factor (2009).

Shirley wrote most of the lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult albums Heaven Forbid and Curse of the Hidden Mirror as well as the songs "Demon's Kiss" and "The Horsemen Arrive" from their soundtrack Bad Channels. Their 1972 song "Transmaniacon MC" was the inspiration for the book Transmaniacon.

In 2000, Shirley recorded several tracks with Tony and Paul DeStefano of Too Hip For The Room, and also appears on their Blue Öyster Cult tribute album Don't Fear The Remake.