Most writers cannot consistently hit the mark when writing short stories, but Lucius Shepard is unlike most writers. Coming off like a cross between Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Joseph Conrad, Shepard takes the ordinary and invests it with limitless supernatural potential, causing symbols, analogies and gut-wrenching emotion to rise up in the smoke of his storyteller’s campfire and mingle in the ether for as long as he wants.
From the voodoo-tinged, Africa-based horror story “Crocodile Rock” to the title story, which is set in a nightclub in Mafia-ruled Russia, Shepard’s stories in his new collection, “Eternity and Other Stories,” span the globe. Their tone runs from dead seriousness to off-the-wall silliness, as in “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?,” which features aliens and wannabe wise- guys mucking about in the swamplands of Florida.
The lead story, “Only Partly Here,” is one of those “is it or isn’t” tales that may or may not involve the supernatural.
Set at the former World Trade Center site in New York, its protagonist, Bobby, works with his fellow blue-collar grunts by day and gets loaded to the gills by night in an attempt to forget the horrors he witnesses during the cleanup. Even while trying to forget those horrors, Bobby falls victim to the overwhelming desire to imbue every found object with significance, as he almost does with a round, rubber widget:
“It is a wicked sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual function is understood by only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God.” Shepard’s elegiac story is by far one of the best fictions to come out of the 9/11 tragedy.
Likewise for “A Walk in the Garden,” a futuristic tale set in Iraq as immediate as the nightly news and as timeless as the best fables. When Spec. Charles N. Wilson and his squad, stationed in northern Iraq, chase some insurrectionists to the base of a mountain, they come across the opening of a cave that apparently leads to Muslim Paradise. Of course one man’s paradise is another man’s hell. Shepard’s horrific fantasy speaks yards about how some cultures will never truly understand one another.
Shepard is one of those rare writers who can convey the feeling of great myths even to something as mundane and sad as prison life, as he does here with the first sentence of “Jailwise”:
“During my adolescence, despite being exposed to television documentaries depicting men wearing ponytails and wifebeater undershirts, their weightlifter chests and arms spangled with homemade tattoos, any mention of prison always brought to mind a less vainglorious type of criminal.”
Shepard’s control of and facility with language and the short fiction form is remarkable. “Eternity” is one of the finest collections of short fiction anyone will pick up this year.
Dorman T. Shindler, a freelancer from Missouri, regularly contributes to several national magazines and newspapers.
