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The Ends Of The Earth
Lucius Shepard's short fiction ranges far and wide over the field of SF and fantasy, and is crammed with show-stopper ideas and an intense originality. The Ends of the Earth is a testimonial to a genius of the genre, and a major American writer. Winner of the 1992 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.
Contents:
The Ends of the Earth (1989)
Delta Sly Honey (1987)
Bound for Glory (1989)
The Exercise of Faith (1987)
Nomans Land (1988)
Life of Buddha (1988)
Shades (1987)
Aymara (1986)
A Wooden Tiger (1988)
The Black Clay Boy (1987)
Fire Zone Emerald (1985)
On the Border (1987)
The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter (1988)
Surrender (1989)
Contents:
The Ends of the Earth (1989)
Delta Sly Honey (1987)
Bound for Glory (1989)
The Exercise of Faith (1987)
Nomans Land (1988)
Life of Buddha (1988)
Shades (1987)
Aymara (1986)
A Wooden Tiger (1988)
The Black Clay Boy (1987)
Fire Zone Emerald (1985)
On the Border (1987)
The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter (1988)
Surrender (1989)
484 pages, Hardcover
First published January 24, 1991
6 people are currently reading
297 people want to read
About the author
Lucius Shepard
296 books156 followersBrief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen, when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some pleasant memories.
Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.
In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.
Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.
In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.
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November 28, 2017
The Ends of the Earth: Luminous, powerful stories of war, exotic locales, and supernatural horror
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Lucius Shepard had already created one of the best short story collections in the genre, The Jaguar Hunter, which won the 1988 World Fantasy Award and Locus Award for Best Collection, with “Salvador” winning the Locus Award in 1985 and “R&R” winning the Nebula Award in 1987. His work is steeped in magical realism, supernatural horror, Central America and other exotic locales, and hallucinatory depictions of futuristic warfare. In my opinion, Shepard is one of the best stylists to ever work in the genre. That’s why I can’t help including a writing sample from some stories in The Ends of the Earth — they’re just so good.
It’s always tough to come up with a sophomore effort that lives up to the hype of the original. Fortunately, when you’ve lived as dramatic and eclectic life as Lucius Shepard, working a host of random jobs to support years of exploring obscure corners of the planet, that makes for fertile ground for great, memorable, and frightening stories. I’m always amazed by authors who can come up with fantastic tales just living in a quiet house in the suburbs, where the biggest event is when a squirrel sneaks onto the bird feeder or the neighbors’ dog gets loose.
It’s a testament to the power of the human imagination, but nothing beats having BEEN to Central America and the Carribean, drinking rum at a beach-side shack with the locals late at night, and hanging out with the burned-out expats trying to escape our modern materialist society. And when you actually have the writing skills to craft stories that fascinate, repulse, and entertain, then you’ve got it made. And like The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth also won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1992.
“The Ends of the Earth” (1989): This is a classic story that is immediately recognizable as a Shepard story. A successful writer named Ray has a failed affair with a married art gallery owner in New York and decided he needs to flee his life and civilization, and chooses an obscure town called Livingston in Guatemala. Being an author, he is fully aware of the artistic pretentious of seeking to escape to the ends of the earth to find inspiration in his own emotional pain along with the new environment so different from the busy streets of Manhattan.
The bar — Café Pluto — was set in the lee of a rocky point: a thatched hut with a sand floor and picnic-style tables, lit with black lights that emitted an evil purple radiance and made all the gringos glow like sunburned corpses … I was giddy with the dope, with the wildness of the night, the vast blue-dark sky and its trillion watts of stars, silver glitters that appeared to be slipping around like sequins on a dancer’s gown. Behind us the Café Pluto had the look of an eerie cave lit by seams of gleaming purple ore.
There he discovers the expected mixture of disillusioned ex-pats, impoverished locals, and drug-taking bohemian would-be artists. It’s all according to script, until he meets a rather unpleasant Brit named Carl who has set himself up as the top dog in the bohemian community, claiming to be writing an obscure academic work on local folklore and black magic, but supporting himself by selling drugs to other foreigners. Ray takes an instant dislike to Carl, not least because one Carl’s followers is an alluring young French woman named Odille, whom Ray is attracted to and who has her own emotional issues she is fleeing from. The scene is set for a classic love triangle in a tiny Guatemalan village, until one night Ray discovers a set of strange dolls that Carl has acquired from a local shaman. Supposedly they are part of an ancient game that Carl is studying, but he is very reticent to reveal more details, and when they all decide to get high on hashish and play the game, things quickly take a sinister turn…
“Delta Sly Honey” (1987): Here is another Shepard story set in a war setting, this time behind the front lines in Vietnam. Randall J. Williams is a skinny and shy young Southern guy who transforms into the “High Priest of the Soulful Truth and the Holy Ghost of the Sixty-Cycle Hum.”
Randall’s job is mainly to handle the bodies of dead soldiers, but one day a lifetime sergeant named Andrew Moon decides to make meek Randall his target of bullying. One day someone using the tag line Delta Sly Honey answers Randall’s broadcast, and he freaks out and goes AWOL. As the narrator investigates, things get more bizarre and horrific…
“Bound for Glory” (1989): This is definitely a strange and memorable tale of a nightmarish train trip to Glory, a town in a post-apocalyptic Wild-West type of landscape where desperation triumphs over hope. The train passes through a strange series of border towns but the biggest danger is when it goes through the Patch, an area where the laws of physics, mysterious fauna, and behavior of the passengers all change unpredictably. Anybody who has read Jeff VanderMeer’s SOUTHERN REACH trilogy will recognize the eerie echoes of that occult sense of dread.
The train guard Roy Cole patrols up and down the train cars, looking into the eyes of each passengers for the telltale signs of madness, and doesn’t hesitate to use his shotgun if he feels it is justified. When the narrator and his female companion Tracy go through the Patch and Tracy starts to transform, he is torn between protecting her from herself and Roy Cole, but he should really be more concerned about the changes that are happening to himself. The ending of the story truly turns things on their head, but you’ll have to read it to find out why.
“The Exercise of Faith” (1987): Here’s a story that doesn’t resemble other Shepard stories I’ve read. The protagonist is a priest that heads a small group of parishioners. But he has an ability not generally available to men of the cloth. The opening paragraph describes it well:
From my pulpit, carved of ebony into a long-snouted griffin’s head, I can see the sins of my parishioners. It’s as if a current is flowing from face to face, illuminating the secret meaning of every wrinkle and line and nuance of expression. They — like their sins — are an ordinary lot. Children as fidgety as gnats. Ruddy-cheeked men possessed by the demons of real estate, solid citizens with weak hearts and brutal arguments for wives. Women whose thoughts slide like swaths of gingham through their minds, married every one to lechers and layabouts.
Knowing the innermost thoughts and sinful urges of his flock leads the priest to pursue some very deviant paths and deliver possibly the most perverse sermon of all time. Depending on your temperament, you may find it either hilarious or blasphemous. A very unusual story.
“Nomans Land” (1988): This is the story of several sailors who get caught in vicious storm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard (which also features in Shepard’s story “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”) and who find themselves stranded on a tiny deserted island appropriated named “Nomans Land”. The only survivors are Bert Cisneros, a mean-spirited Portuguese man, and the Irish cook Jack Tyrell.
There is little friendship between the two, but they take shelter in an ominous bunker overnight. The next morning, Jack encounters a strange, haunted-seeming woman named Astrid who sees to be living alone on the island, an entomologist studying the ubiquitous tiny white spiders that seem to make their webs in every corner of the island. Jack and Astrid develop a lonely and desperate relationship that suddenly takes a turn to horror (Shepard’s favorite technique), and then goes far beyond, bringing our tenuous understanding of reality into question, as the little white spiders swarm over the island.
“Life of Buddha” (1988): This is the first story in this collection that I just didn’t like. It’s the story of a heroin addict nicknamed Buddha that basically spends much of his time in a drugged-out stupor in a shooting gallery, ostensibly serving as security for his dealer. He has decided to shut out the painful memories of his family by losing himself in drugs, and encounters another lost soul who is also living in the margins and struggling with gender issues. There are some fantasy/horror elements, but I couldn’t care about the characters or the story much.
“Shades” (1987): Here is a return to form for Shepard, as a Vietnamese man named Tom Puleo returns to Vietnam to cover a story about a young soldier named Stoner who died in a village called Cam Le. A Marxist mystic has invented a device that can summon ghosts, and Stoner’s ghost has come back to haunt the village, scaring the residents away and attracting foreign attention. As a fellow soldier with Stoner, the machine inventor wants to see if Stoner’s ghost will respond more to Tom. The story is filled with intense paranormal confrontations between Tom and Stoner’s ghost, and the ending is poignant.
“Aymara” (1986): This was one of my favorite stories of the collection, another seamlessly-crafted take of revolution in Central America and the take of a gringo named Captain Lee Christmas who becomes deeply embroiled in Honduran politics at the turn of the century. The framing narrative is told by a political journalist named William who is fascinated by the story of Christmas and also looking to write a story about a mysterious US military facility and the growing presence of CIA agents around the town. As always, Shepard captures the details of the steamy daily life in the city, and when William begins a torrid love affair with an exotic dark-haired local woman named Ivie. The mystery behind the military facility involves scientists, exotic experiments, revolutionaries, and the two lovers in the middle of it all. The ending is wonderfully enigmatic, a great story.
“A Wooden Tiger” (1988): Another classic Shepard tale of supernatural horror, embittered CIA agents, incarnations of the goddess Kumari, and sordid goings on in Katmandu. An ex-CIA chief named Clement decides to track down the most recent incarnation of the dark goddess Kumari, who regularly inhabits the bodies of young girls who are treated like goddesses until the spirit moves to the next one, at which point they are discarded and shunned. Clement tries to track down a former incarnation, now a mere mortal, and encounters his former mentor D’allesandro, who taught him all the dirty tricks in the book, but who was now gone rogue Lieutenant Kurtz-style. It’s all very murky and intriguing, exactly the type of story Shepard excels in without repeating himself.
“The Black Clay Boy” (1987): This is a short and creepy story set in small-town Ohio, narrated by an old woman named Willa Selkie. She is a recluse, harassed by neighborhood boys with petty pranks. Then she reminisces back to hear early days as a beautiful young woman forced to marry a wealthy older man when she was just 18. Turns out Willa has a very intense libido that cannot be satisfied by her distant and old husband. When he discovers her pleasuring herself, he basically has a heart attack and curses her with his dying breath. She goes on to remarry, but again can’t get no satisfaction, turning to part-time prostitution just to get her fix, eventually setting her sights on a sexually-frustrated Reverend. As we flash back to the present, Willa turns now eyes on her Black Clay Boy, a type of voodoo doll, hoping for one last moment of pleasure…
“Fire Zone Emerald” (1985): Another atmospheric and intense Shepard tale of high-tech soldiers in a Central American war zone, this time in the Guatemalan rain forest. The story begins with Quinn, a soldier injured and separated from his unit after an attack and explosion, finds himself alone in Fire Zone Emerald. He is hardly able to move, and when he gets an unexpected call on his com unit from someone named Mathis of Special Forces who seems sympathetic but may have gone rogue, Quinn is suspicious. The story becomes a cat-and-mouse game as Quinn tries to evade Mathis, with some very tense action sequences. What’s that you say? Where is the trademark dark supernatural element that distinguishes Shepard’s stories? Well, you should discuss that with the queen, who takes the shape of a tiger and can place thoughts in your mind…
“On the Border” (1987): This was one of my favorite stories — a desert-based tale of desperate and marginalized hoodlums who try to rise above their origins, the classic pursuit of a reward for the kidnapping of the beautiful daughter of a rich man, and some magical realism in a surreal brujo in the desert and a bizarre mountain village that may be a total head trip into a psychedelic and violent denouement. It’s a taught tale with a lean and mean James Ellroy feel, but with the empathy of Shepard’s love of outcasts and the glimpses of sublime spiritual mysteries hiding in the sordid corners of our world.
“The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” (1988): This is one of the longest stories in the collection and is part of Shepard’s ongoing series of fantasy stories about Griaule, the giant dormant dragon who has been trapped by a magician’s spell and has become a part of the local geography, but still exerts a subtle and sinister influence on the human communities that surround it. This story is about Catherine, the daughter of a scalehunter in Hangtown who makes his living chipping away loose scales to sell in the nearby town. She is beautiful, as the title states, but also vain and selfish, toying with the hearts of the young men and stealing them away from their girlfriends just for the malicious fun of it. One day she is resting alone and is assaulting by a village thug, and in the struggle to resist his attempted rape, she accidently kills him with her scaling hook. She is then forced to flee into the dragon’s mouth as his vengeful brothers try to kill her.
Thus begins a very surreal odyssey inside the body of Griaule, which turns out to be inhabited by all sorts of bizarre and disturbing creatures much like something from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth or Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, and more importantly a lost colony of humans called feelies, descended from a pair of retarded villagers many generations past. They have formed a strange and degenerate society that seems to be swayed by the inscrutable and dark influence of Griaule’s thoughts. Catherine is taken into this society and gradually falls into the rhythms of this subterranean world, a prisoner of both the feelies and the dragon’s pervasive presence. Then one day a young scientist enters her world, changing everything.
This is one of those tales with metaphorical overtones that dares you to interpret both the situation and events and discover the hidden themes and messages. However, much like his award-winning story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” while the story is fraught with meaning, the exact interpretation of what the dragon represents is elusive and will vary from reader to reader. Is the dragon a dormant god, exerting a sinister influence on human affairs for his own unknowable reasons, or an embodiment of a more subtle evil that is not divine in nature? Themes of free will, self-determination, and imprisonment are also explored, and the will to adapt to captivity. Guilt, revenge, love, escape, freedom, and good/evil; it’s all there in a fairytale format that also reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s short stories.
“Surrender” (1989): The final story is a confluence of all Shepard’s favorite elements: a dismal Central American military conflict, corrupt militia groups involved in nefarious scientific experiments, jaded journalists who discover things are even more screwed-up than their cynical outlooks were prepared to handle, and dark gun battles against subhuman creatures in dark and dangerous jungles and caves. The narrator gives the story its sarcastic attitude and challenges the reader to have an opinion of the endless miseries of US involvement in Central American wars and state-building, its failures and hypocrisy, and what we think of it while kicking back with a cold one from the comfort of our sofas in front of the TV watching ABC news and Monday Night Football.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Lucius Shepard had already created one of the best short story collections in the genre, The Jaguar Hunter, which won the 1988 World Fantasy Award and Locus Award for Best Collection, with “Salvador” winning the Locus Award in 1985 and “R&R” winning the Nebula Award in 1987. His work is steeped in magical realism, supernatural horror, Central America and other exotic locales, and hallucinatory depictions of futuristic warfare. In my opinion, Shepard is one of the best stylists to ever work in the genre. That’s why I can’t help including a writing sample from some stories in The Ends of the Earth — they’re just so good.
It’s always tough to come up with a sophomore effort that lives up to the hype of the original. Fortunately, when you’ve lived as dramatic and eclectic life as Lucius Shepard, working a host of random jobs to support years of exploring obscure corners of the planet, that makes for fertile ground for great, memorable, and frightening stories. I’m always amazed by authors who can come up with fantastic tales just living in a quiet house in the suburbs, where the biggest event is when a squirrel sneaks onto the bird feeder or the neighbors’ dog gets loose.
It’s a testament to the power of the human imagination, but nothing beats having BEEN to Central America and the Carribean, drinking rum at a beach-side shack with the locals late at night, and hanging out with the burned-out expats trying to escape our modern materialist society. And when you actually have the writing skills to craft stories that fascinate, repulse, and entertain, then you’ve got it made. And like The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth also won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1992.
“The Ends of the Earth” (1989): This is a classic story that is immediately recognizable as a Shepard story. A successful writer named Ray has a failed affair with a married art gallery owner in New York and decided he needs to flee his life and civilization, and chooses an obscure town called Livingston in Guatemala. Being an author, he is fully aware of the artistic pretentious of seeking to escape to the ends of the earth to find inspiration in his own emotional pain along with the new environment so different from the busy streets of Manhattan.
The bar — Café Pluto — was set in the lee of a rocky point: a thatched hut with a sand floor and picnic-style tables, lit with black lights that emitted an evil purple radiance and made all the gringos glow like sunburned corpses … I was giddy with the dope, with the wildness of the night, the vast blue-dark sky and its trillion watts of stars, silver glitters that appeared to be slipping around like sequins on a dancer’s gown. Behind us the Café Pluto had the look of an eerie cave lit by seams of gleaming purple ore.
There he discovers the expected mixture of disillusioned ex-pats, impoverished locals, and drug-taking bohemian would-be artists. It’s all according to script, until he meets a rather unpleasant Brit named Carl who has set himself up as the top dog in the bohemian community, claiming to be writing an obscure academic work on local folklore and black magic, but supporting himself by selling drugs to other foreigners. Ray takes an instant dislike to Carl, not least because one Carl’s followers is an alluring young French woman named Odille, whom Ray is attracted to and who has her own emotional issues she is fleeing from. The scene is set for a classic love triangle in a tiny Guatemalan village, until one night Ray discovers a set of strange dolls that Carl has acquired from a local shaman. Supposedly they are part of an ancient game that Carl is studying, but he is very reticent to reveal more details, and when they all decide to get high on hashish and play the game, things quickly take a sinister turn…
“Delta Sly Honey” (1987): Here is another Shepard story set in a war setting, this time behind the front lines in Vietnam. Randall J. Williams is a skinny and shy young Southern guy who transforms into the “High Priest of the Soulful Truth and the Holy Ghost of the Sixty-Cycle Hum.”
Randall’s job is mainly to handle the bodies of dead soldiers, but one day a lifetime sergeant named Andrew Moon decides to make meek Randall his target of bullying. One day someone using the tag line Delta Sly Honey answers Randall’s broadcast, and he freaks out and goes AWOL. As the narrator investigates, things get more bizarre and horrific…
“Bound for Glory” (1989): This is definitely a strange and memorable tale of a nightmarish train trip to Glory, a town in a post-apocalyptic Wild-West type of landscape where desperation triumphs over hope. The train passes through a strange series of border towns but the biggest danger is when it goes through the Patch, an area where the laws of physics, mysterious fauna, and behavior of the passengers all change unpredictably. Anybody who has read Jeff VanderMeer’s SOUTHERN REACH trilogy will recognize the eerie echoes of that occult sense of dread.
The train guard Roy Cole patrols up and down the train cars, looking into the eyes of each passengers for the telltale signs of madness, and doesn’t hesitate to use his shotgun if he feels it is justified. When the narrator and his female companion Tracy go through the Patch and Tracy starts to transform, he is torn between protecting her from herself and Roy Cole, but he should really be more concerned about the changes that are happening to himself. The ending of the story truly turns things on their head, but you’ll have to read it to find out why.
“The Exercise of Faith” (1987): Here’s a story that doesn’t resemble other Shepard stories I’ve read. The protagonist is a priest that heads a small group of parishioners. But he has an ability not generally available to men of the cloth. The opening paragraph describes it well:
From my pulpit, carved of ebony into a long-snouted griffin’s head, I can see the sins of my parishioners. It’s as if a current is flowing from face to face, illuminating the secret meaning of every wrinkle and line and nuance of expression. They — like their sins — are an ordinary lot. Children as fidgety as gnats. Ruddy-cheeked men possessed by the demons of real estate, solid citizens with weak hearts and brutal arguments for wives. Women whose thoughts slide like swaths of gingham through their minds, married every one to lechers and layabouts.
Knowing the innermost thoughts and sinful urges of his flock leads the priest to pursue some very deviant paths and deliver possibly the most perverse sermon of all time. Depending on your temperament, you may find it either hilarious or blasphemous. A very unusual story.
“Nomans Land” (1988): This is the story of several sailors who get caught in vicious storm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard (which also features in Shepard’s story “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”) and who find themselves stranded on a tiny deserted island appropriated named “Nomans Land”. The only survivors are Bert Cisneros, a mean-spirited Portuguese man, and the Irish cook Jack Tyrell.
There is little friendship between the two, but they take shelter in an ominous bunker overnight. The next morning, Jack encounters a strange, haunted-seeming woman named Astrid who sees to be living alone on the island, an entomologist studying the ubiquitous tiny white spiders that seem to make their webs in every corner of the island. Jack and Astrid develop a lonely and desperate relationship that suddenly takes a turn to horror (Shepard’s favorite technique), and then goes far beyond, bringing our tenuous understanding of reality into question, as the little white spiders swarm over the island.
“Life of Buddha” (1988): This is the first story in this collection that I just didn’t like. It’s the story of a heroin addict nicknamed Buddha that basically spends much of his time in a drugged-out stupor in a shooting gallery, ostensibly serving as security for his dealer. He has decided to shut out the painful memories of his family by losing himself in drugs, and encounters another lost soul who is also living in the margins and struggling with gender issues. There are some fantasy/horror elements, but I couldn’t care about the characters or the story much.
“Shades” (1987): Here is a return to form for Shepard, as a Vietnamese man named Tom Puleo returns to Vietnam to cover a story about a young soldier named Stoner who died in a village called Cam Le. A Marxist mystic has invented a device that can summon ghosts, and Stoner’s ghost has come back to haunt the village, scaring the residents away and attracting foreign attention. As a fellow soldier with Stoner, the machine inventor wants to see if Stoner’s ghost will respond more to Tom. The story is filled with intense paranormal confrontations between Tom and Stoner’s ghost, and the ending is poignant.
“Aymara” (1986): This was one of my favorite stories of the collection, another seamlessly-crafted take of revolution in Central America and the take of a gringo named Captain Lee Christmas who becomes deeply embroiled in Honduran politics at the turn of the century. The framing narrative is told by a political journalist named William who is fascinated by the story of Christmas and also looking to write a story about a mysterious US military facility and the growing presence of CIA agents around the town. As always, Shepard captures the details of the steamy daily life in the city, and when William begins a torrid love affair with an exotic dark-haired local woman named Ivie. The mystery behind the military facility involves scientists, exotic experiments, revolutionaries, and the two lovers in the middle of it all. The ending is wonderfully enigmatic, a great story.
“A Wooden Tiger” (1988): Another classic Shepard tale of supernatural horror, embittered CIA agents, incarnations of the goddess Kumari, and sordid goings on in Katmandu. An ex-CIA chief named Clement decides to track down the most recent incarnation of the dark goddess Kumari, who regularly inhabits the bodies of young girls who are treated like goddesses until the spirit moves to the next one, at which point they are discarded and shunned. Clement tries to track down a former incarnation, now a mere mortal, and encounters his former mentor D’allesandro, who taught him all the dirty tricks in the book, but who was now gone rogue Lieutenant Kurtz-style. It’s all very murky and intriguing, exactly the type of story Shepard excels in without repeating himself.
“The Black Clay Boy” (1987): This is a short and creepy story set in small-town Ohio, narrated by an old woman named Willa Selkie. She is a recluse, harassed by neighborhood boys with petty pranks. Then she reminisces back to hear early days as a beautiful young woman forced to marry a wealthy older man when she was just 18. Turns out Willa has a very intense libido that cannot be satisfied by her distant and old husband. When he discovers her pleasuring herself, he basically has a heart attack and curses her with his dying breath. She goes on to remarry, but again can’t get no satisfaction, turning to part-time prostitution just to get her fix, eventually setting her sights on a sexually-frustrated Reverend. As we flash back to the present, Willa turns now eyes on her Black Clay Boy, a type of voodoo doll, hoping for one last moment of pleasure…
“Fire Zone Emerald” (1985): Another atmospheric and intense Shepard tale of high-tech soldiers in a Central American war zone, this time in the Guatemalan rain forest. The story begins with Quinn, a soldier injured and separated from his unit after an attack and explosion, finds himself alone in Fire Zone Emerald. He is hardly able to move, and when he gets an unexpected call on his com unit from someone named Mathis of Special Forces who seems sympathetic but may have gone rogue, Quinn is suspicious. The story becomes a cat-and-mouse game as Quinn tries to evade Mathis, with some very tense action sequences. What’s that you say? Where is the trademark dark supernatural element that distinguishes Shepard’s stories? Well, you should discuss that with the queen, who takes the shape of a tiger and can place thoughts in your mind…
“On the Border” (1987): This was one of my favorite stories — a desert-based tale of desperate and marginalized hoodlums who try to rise above their origins, the classic pursuit of a reward for the kidnapping of the beautiful daughter of a rich man, and some magical realism in a surreal brujo in the desert and a bizarre mountain village that may be a total head trip into a psychedelic and violent denouement. It’s a taught tale with a lean and mean James Ellroy feel, but with the empathy of Shepard’s love of outcasts and the glimpses of sublime spiritual mysteries hiding in the sordid corners of our world.
“The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” (1988): This is one of the longest stories in the collection and is part of Shepard’s ongoing series of fantasy stories about Griaule, the giant dormant dragon who has been trapped by a magician’s spell and has become a part of the local geography, but still exerts a subtle and sinister influence on the human communities that surround it. This story is about Catherine, the daughter of a scalehunter in Hangtown who makes his living chipping away loose scales to sell in the nearby town. She is beautiful, as the title states, but also vain and selfish, toying with the hearts of the young men and stealing them away from their girlfriends just for the malicious fun of it. One day she is resting alone and is assaulting by a village thug, and in the struggle to resist his attempted rape, she accidently kills him with her scaling hook. She is then forced to flee into the dragon’s mouth as his vengeful brothers try to kill her.
Thus begins a very surreal odyssey inside the body of Griaule, which turns out to be inhabited by all sorts of bizarre and disturbing creatures much like something from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth or Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, and more importantly a lost colony of humans called feelies, descended from a pair of retarded villagers many generations past. They have formed a strange and degenerate society that seems to be swayed by the inscrutable and dark influence of Griaule’s thoughts. Catherine is taken into this society and gradually falls into the rhythms of this subterranean world, a prisoner of both the feelies and the dragon’s pervasive presence. Then one day a young scientist enters her world, changing everything.
This is one of those tales with metaphorical overtones that dares you to interpret both the situation and events and discover the hidden themes and messages. However, much like his award-winning story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” while the story is fraught with meaning, the exact interpretation of what the dragon represents is elusive and will vary from reader to reader. Is the dragon a dormant god, exerting a sinister influence on human affairs for his own unknowable reasons, or an embodiment of a more subtle evil that is not divine in nature? Themes of free will, self-determination, and imprisonment are also explored, and the will to adapt to captivity. Guilt, revenge, love, escape, freedom, and good/evil; it’s all there in a fairytale format that also reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s short stories.
“Surrender” (1989): The final story is a confluence of all Shepard’s favorite elements: a dismal Central American military conflict, corrupt militia groups involved in nefarious scientific experiments, jaded journalists who discover things are even more screwed-up than their cynical outlooks were prepared to handle, and dark gun battles against subhuman creatures in dark and dangerous jungles and caves. The narrator gives the story its sarcastic attitude and challenges the reader to have an opinion of the endless miseries of US involvement in Central American wars and state-building, its failures and hypocrisy, and what we think of it while kicking back with a cold one from the comfort of our sofas in front of the TV watching ABC news and Monday Night Football.
May 12, 2008
Shepard brings to mind Conrad’s dark adventures, The Twilight Zone, James Triptree jr., films of John Carpenter, debauched yanqui in peril existentialism of Greene, X-files, Robert Stone of Dog Soldiers and Flag for Sunrise, and the crumbling fantasy worlds of Swanwick and Gene Wolfe. This collection is even better than Jaguar Hunter without a clunker in the batch. Gnostic visions, other dimensions, time travel, train rides through hell, ghost patrols, and other pulpy concepts are either thrown on their heads or revitalized with dense prose, great dialogue, setting, and characters. These stories are pretty relentlessly dark but so convincingly pulled off that exhilaration rather than misery is the end result. Highlights are the Mad Max meets Carlos Castanada in the “Heart of Darkness” dystopia of the U.S./Mexican border “On the Border(more of dystopia than it already is), Gnostic vision of “Noman’s Land”(we are all dreams of white spiders...ugh), the brutal Nepalese spy thriller “Wooden Tiger”, surreal western of “Bound for Glory”, the various war stories(Vietnam and future Guatemala), the Triptree evoking time travel fable “Aymara”, the vivid and grotesque fantasy epic of the “Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter”, and the pulpy allegory for the real world nightmare history of Guatemala in “Surrender”.
June 20, 2012
Lucius Shepard is one of those writers who can't be easily categorized. His fiction flirts with genre, skittering over barren, haunted territories marked by JG Ballard and Joseph Conrad, and at times stylistically, his pen wields florid like Clark Ashton Smith, or precise in the fashion of Graham Greene. He truly is a master of the short story and short novel. This Arkham House collection (while not as good as its predecessor, 'The Jaguar Hunter') has all the trademarks of Shepard; ex-pats with some type of darkness in their hearts, moving through foreign territories in a mystical haze; of slipstream ghosts plaguing a war-torn landscape; futuristic 3rd world states where one brave man tries to break away from it all; and the facade of a disillusioned reality being split at the seams by misunderstood Gods.
The highlights of this collection are 'The Ends of Earth', 'Nomans Land', 'Bound for Glory' and 'Fire Zone Emerald'. Besides a somewhat annoying narration from the lead in 'A Wooden Tiger', there's not a lemon in the bunch. In 'The Ends of the Earth', a failed writer becomes attached to a ravenous, talon-shredding God who haunts the Guatemalan jungles. 'Nomans Land' tells of an Irish boatman stranded on a Nantucket island where the government once tested nuclear devices - where now, the only thing alive are white spiders from beyond the cosmos (a serious cosmic force is present here, something taken from Olaf Stapledon's 'Starmaker' and given a serious mind fuck). 'Fire Zone Emerald' is a bold action piece where a futuristic soldier armed to the teeth takes on a band of drug-addicted rebels. And 'Bound for Glory' has a train running through 'the bad patch', a stretch of land peopled by psychopathic mutants. And also included is the dragon fantasy, 'The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter', an eloquent piece that takes place in the cavernous body of a comatosed dragon. Shepard even plays around with the shock twist ending fashioned by 1950s horror comics like 'Tales from the Crpyt' in his short, 'Black Clay Boy' - only this time there's no revenge, but a self sacrifice that burns with a sudden, raw perversity.
There's nobody who works like Shepard, and it's a shame he's not read as widely as he should be. A fine collection.
The highlights of this collection are 'The Ends of Earth', 'Nomans Land', 'Bound for Glory' and 'Fire Zone Emerald'. Besides a somewhat annoying narration from the lead in 'A Wooden Tiger', there's not a lemon in the bunch. In 'The Ends of the Earth', a failed writer becomes attached to a ravenous, talon-shredding God who haunts the Guatemalan jungles. 'Nomans Land' tells of an Irish boatman stranded on a Nantucket island where the government once tested nuclear devices - where now, the only thing alive are white spiders from beyond the cosmos (a serious cosmic force is present here, something taken from Olaf Stapledon's 'Starmaker' and given a serious mind fuck). 'Fire Zone Emerald' is a bold action piece where a futuristic soldier armed to the teeth takes on a band of drug-addicted rebels. And 'Bound for Glory' has a train running through 'the bad patch', a stretch of land peopled by psychopathic mutants. And also included is the dragon fantasy, 'The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter', an eloquent piece that takes place in the cavernous body of a comatosed dragon. Shepard even plays around with the shock twist ending fashioned by 1950s horror comics like 'Tales from the Crpyt' in his short, 'Black Clay Boy' - only this time there's no revenge, but a self sacrifice that burns with a sudden, raw perversity.
There's nobody who works like Shepard, and it's a shame he's not read as widely as he should be. A fine collection.
August 30, 2023
The best stories here are phenomenal - "Bound for Glory," "Fire Zone Emerald," "Nomans Land," "The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter." Some of the others are let down by a few tiresome tropes (the narrator will meet a woman and he will always fuck her), but overall this is a very entertaining, at times moving, at others horrifying, collection. Looking forward to reading Life During Wartime.
October 28, 2023
Shepard draws on many of his Central American travels and experiences to colour his storytelling, and these descriptions do make his stories much more original than most SF/Fantasy/Horror/Supernatural story-tellers, but it is this personal experience that rules more than the genre element. Whether it be SF, or the supernatural, often these genre elements end up being the flavour rather than the content. Science Fiction ideas like time travel in the story 'Aymara' colour the story but are not the driving force; it is always the characters, situations, and their feelings for each other, that create the page-turning momentum. This, on one hand, is what makes great story-telling, but Shepard's stories lack the bite of interesting plot twists and turns that Science Fiction helps to create, and often I was left with less than a satisfying result.
I often found that Shepard used too many words stretching sentences out longer than they needed to be - simple concise writing could have made many of these stories more engaging. There were good, interesting ideas, but too much explanation of feelings and motivations tended to slow the plotting down. 'Bound for Glory' is a great story (idea), but shorter, more compact storytelling, would have made that story much more impactful. As it was for its 30-page length, I often found myself thinking about something else. At times Shepard used the technique of backstory info dumps to explain a character's current state of mind, but in the end I just didn't care.
I ended up skipping through a couple of stories about war, which never interests me, and starting those stories didn't engage me one iota.
'The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter' was pure Fantasy with a setting of a village/community (or a full province?) who had built their homes on the back of a ginormous sleeping dragon (put to sleep by some ancient magic). This story really interested me, but I did find that the descriptions, here were almost too basic and didn't give me much to shape my own imaginations. This is worth reading, for the idea, and it did make me want to seek out The Dragon Griaule for more stories about this interesting conception.
The final story 'surrender' felt the most engaging, and it felt like the most personal:
I often found that Shepard used too many words stretching sentences out longer than they needed to be - simple concise writing could have made many of these stories more engaging. There were good, interesting ideas, but too much explanation of feelings and motivations tended to slow the plotting down. 'Bound for Glory' is a great story (idea), but shorter, more compact storytelling, would have made that story much more impactful. As it was for its 30-page length, I often found myself thinking about something else. At times Shepard used the technique of backstory info dumps to explain a character's current state of mind, but in the end I just didn't care.
I ended up skipping through a couple of stories about war, which never interests me, and starting those stories didn't engage me one iota.
'The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter' was pure Fantasy with a setting of a village/community (or a full province?) who had built their homes on the back of a ginormous sleeping dragon (put to sleep by some ancient magic). This story really interested me, but I did find that the descriptions, here were almost too basic and didn't give me much to shape my own imaginations. This is worth reading, for the idea, and it did make me want to seek out The Dragon Griaule for more stories about this interesting conception.
The final story 'surrender' felt the most engaging, and it felt like the most personal:
Some will say that by injecting a science fictional element, I'm trivializing the true Central American condition. But that's not the case. ... the slaughters, the mass graves, smoldering corpses, rape and torture, all thoroughly documented and all thoroughly ignored, this was merely a part of that, a minor adagio in a symphony of pain, the carrying forward of a diseased tradition.
September 6, 2013
This was my first Lucius Shepard book and I have to say, I really enjoyed his brutal, unique style.yes, there's a lot of sex and violence in his stories with an enjoyable mix of the fantastic but none of it seemed over the top or inappropriate to the contexts or characters. I like that he writes about Americans in other countries and his descriptions of the people and places are vivid and engaging. The unique sense of each story was refreshing, as I didn't feel that any of his stories bled into the other. In fact, I would have to take time between stories to let the previous one fade before I could start the next without searching fruitlessly for some connection between characters. Highly enjoyable.
May 18, 2017
After half of the stories, I finally gave up.
July 26, 2020
Another exercise in nostalgia. I remember this one as having some terrific stories in it.
Alas, on this reread, I found the stories to be a bit similar. I enjoyed Shepard's style 20 years ago, but I am repelled by it today. That's on me.
Not as good as I remember, but Shepard still has something to say about class, race, and power.
Of particular note, the power and impact of "Surrender" derives not from the narrative particulars, since it is first person past, and the action is boilerplate horror which doesn't survive the first reading, but is suggested in its title: the surrender of erstwhile idealists to the moral rot of human life. I especially appreciate this monitory line: "...if you haven't been taking notes on the inexorable transformation of the Land of the Free to just another human slum..."
I've decided not to revisit them all. I am discouraged.
Alas, on this reread, I found the stories to be a bit similar. I enjoyed Shepard's style 20 years ago, but I am repelled by it today. That's on me.
Not as good as I remember, but Shepard still has something to say about class, race, and power.
Of particular note, the power and impact of "Surrender" derives not from the narrative particulars, since it is first person past, and the action is boilerplate horror which doesn't survive the first reading, but is suggested in its title: the surrender of erstwhile idealists to the moral rot of human life. I especially appreciate this monitory line: "...if you haven't been taking notes on the inexorable transformation of the Land of the Free to just another human slum..."
I've decided not to revisit them all. I am discouraged.
March 8, 2022
A simply wonderful collection of hard-hitting stories.
March 16, 2022
I definitely prefer his later stories.
May 25, 2022
You should read this.
July 7, 2025
Great author. Deep plus language skills.
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May 22, 2012Yes, I'm not going to rate this one. This isn't as unqualified of a recommendation as The Jaguar Hunter. Several of the stories – at least of the ones that I've read – are beautiful, wonderfully done, appetizingly dark, and – I guess just all around appealing. I'm talking about "The Ends of the Earth," "Delta Sly Honey," "Bound for Glory," and "Surrender," and if what I've heard is true, "The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter" fits into that category as well. However, a couple of the stories – "The Exercise of Faith," "The Black Clay Boy" – made me sick to my stomach. The graphic content – rape, sex, etc. – in those two stories alone turned me off to the book for a long time. Maybe pick this one up from the library, if you can find it, which I doubt.
July 16, 2015
I read this a long time ago and stumbled across it again in our woefully understocked local library branch. I reread it again to fuel my personal nightmare generator. Every story in this collection is haunting, sometimes beautiful, and always full of shocking juxtapositions and grotesque associations Shepard can make. His writing moves beyond fantasy into the surreal, the hallucinatory, and maybe even the downright insane.
February 2, 2021
Arkham House did beautiful job, publishing dark fantasist Lucius Shepard. His moral stance reminds me of Joseph Conrad, but, with lush and international settings. The world still is unexplored and untrammeled, if so, humanity has tainted, somehow. Shepard has exotic settings, humanity has dark recesses of the heart to explore.
February 11, 2008
My first collection of short stories by Shepard. Shepard weaves tales full of beauty, wonder, terror, and beyond.
May 14, 2012
Another great collection. Can't go wrong with Shepard.
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