Posthumous book revives legacy of Glencoe author with cult following

One of Mike Shea’s favorite memories of his late father came from watching him write.

Robert Shea — the co-author of the popular series with a cult-following “Illuminatus!” and author of historical novels like “Shike” and “All Things Are Light” — drafted his works on typewriters before he purchased an early Apple IIe computer and backed up all his chapters on floppy disks, Mike recalled.

Once he completed a book, Shea would hand feed each page into a letter-quality printer over the course of two weeks to eventually produce a 10-inch stack of papers he could package and mail from his family’s home in Glencoe to his editor in New York. 

“I asked him, ‘God, isn’t this killing you?’” Mike said of his father’s printing process. “He said ‘No, this is the best part. This is the part where I take all of this stuff that’s been sitting in a computer, that doesn’t exist anywhere, and now I’m making it real, I’m physically making it real.’”

Now, more than 30 years after Shea died, a new work by the beloved but otherwise lesser-known local author has once again been made physically real.

“Every Day is a GOOD Day,” a collection of essays, interviews and other pieces involving Shea, was published last month by Hilaritas Press, a small press established in part by the daughter of Robert’s friend and co-author of the “Illuminatus!” series, Robert Anton Wilson.  

The new book of Shea’s writing was edited by and owes much of its existence to the dedication of one of the late author’s fans, Tom Jackson, who scoured for pieces Shea entered into a variety of publications and independent zines now preserved in library archives.

Jackson recalled he was first introduced to Shea’s work after becoming a fan of the “Illuminatus!” trilogy, which was published in 1975 and involves a free-ranging science-fantasy tale featuring satirical conspiracy theories and trippy hallucinations. 

Jackson, who writes from Ohio about Wilson and other authors for his independent blog, RAWIllumination, said he met Shea at a 1989 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. 

After the two shared a conversation about “Illuminatus!”, Jackson went on to read and enjoy the rest of Shea’s solo works, the majority of which are historical action novels like “Shike,” which is set in ancient Japan, and “Shaman,” which is about Native American tribe leader Black Hawk.

After Shea died of cancer at the age of 61, the 1994 issue of a magazine called the Green Egg ran an obituary that said “in the next few years, several more of Bob Shea’s works will be published including a collection of essays.”

That posthumous collection, however, never came to print. Until now. 

“One of my hobbies is to promote writers who I think could use a little attention,” Jackson said. “A lot of the writers I like don’t need any help from me, like I’ve read all of Jane Austen’s novels but she’s famous and she doesn’t need any help from me.”

“Robert Shea is someone who died in 1994 so obviously he hasn’t been having new books come out, and I don’t want him to be forgotten,” Jackson said. 

Jackson was aware of Shea’s contributions to independent, radical zines and ones Shea made himself, like the anarchist-themed zine “No Governor.” That zine ran from 1975 until 1990 and always listed a publishing address in Glencoe, where Shea spent the last 17 years of his life.

After tracking down copies in a Michigan library, transcribing Shea’s words and contacting Shea’s son Mike in 2024 to obtain permission to collect the excerpts into a book, Jackson kept searching for more material. 

He located interviews Shea did (one with Ken Campbell who adapted “Illuminatus!” for the theater), a piece of unpublished fiction and permission from the estate of Shea’s third wife, Patricia Monaghan, to include an essay she wrote after Shea’s death, “Physics and Grief.”

“Entertaining, thought provoking and richly varied, ‘Every Day is a GOOD Day’ is a perfect introduction to the anarchistic principles and humane thinking of Robert Shea — a man more interested in finding flaws in his own beliefs than he is in forcing those beliefs on others,” author John Higgs wrote for the new publication’s jacket.

Mike Shea was more than amenable to having his father’s words reprinted, as he already has many of his works available online through use by a creative commons license that allows the work to be copied and consumed for free as long as individuals aren’t using Shea’s work for profit.

Now a writer himself and owner of a publishing business, Mike has continued on his father’s legacy as a creative person, but he emphasized how “Every Day is a GOOD Day” also helps ensure Shea’s unpublished work will be shared and enjoyed by others.

“For me, having my father’s work out there and available to people, and knowing it can be on places like Project Gutenberg and Archive.org and other places like that, is great. I want it there,” Mike said. 

“The idea of holding it too close, that people who had the fortune of being a child of a writer who wrote something, in my mind, doesn’t give me the right to try to control the flow of the work that he made.”

“I don’t feel like I have a stronger right to the work that he created than anyone else does and now I feel like that work belongs to the world,” Mike said.

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