Lucius Shepard

In recent weeks I've been steeping deeply in the stories of Lucius Shepard. I've been eager to share him here, but don't know how to give him the introduction he deserves. Now I'm just going to jump in because I want people to read him!

Reviewer Rick Kleffel says, "Shepard is one of America's best-kept secrets, a great writer who produces superb work every time out of the gate, yet seems to remain beneath the radar of American mainstream readers." That's all true. He crafts beautiful, immediate, sensory language, laced with jaw-dropping metaphors. Yet his writing isn't overly complex; it's direct, just great storytelling. He gets inside the heads of his engaging characters, producing intimate, perceptive stories. This, combined with the pacing of a thriller, results in a powerful read condensed to fewer pages than you expect. He writes of the natural world, of war, poverty and power, of the nature of love relationships, Latin America or Southeast Asia, of America's South. He's a literary writer who veers a bit into the mythic, psychological horror, or magical existentialism. He's the kind of storyteller whose stories stick with you.

He's overlooked because he excels in the short form. "I don't read short fiction" sounds like me, but between books I decided to peek in and read the titular story from the Jaguar Hunter collection. I was hooked and read the remaining eleven stories. I realized that I don't dislike short fiction, that I really enjoy short fiction collections. What I dislike is reading uneven and unpredictable short stories in anthologies. When you read a collection by Lucius Shepard, you can trust the quality.

He's won the John W. Campbell Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo, among others, some numerous times, and has been nominated literally dozens of times. The best news is that he's been quite prolific in the last few years. He has two new collections coming out from small press, Dagger Key from PS Publishing, and Best of Lucius Shepard from Subterranean Press, plus a wonderful southern gothic ghost novel, Softspoken, out now from Night Shade.

For a taste:

Softspoken begins, "Sanie has been hearing him for days, she thinks, once she tunes into his voice. He's been there all along, lost among the creaks and gasps and groans of the old house, indistinguishable from the whisper of a breeze blowing through a window crack, though he's not speaking in a whisper, just softly, like a man gentling a tearful child or waking a lover."
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He brings the wind to life in the beginning of How the Wind Spoke at Madaket, a story in his first collection, Jaguar Hunter:
"Softly at dawn, rustling dead leaves in the roof gutters, ticking the wires of the television antenna against the shingled wall, seething through the beach grasses, shifting the bare twigs of a hawthorn to claw at the toolshed door, playfully flipping a peg off the clothesline, snuffling the garbage and tattering the plastic bags, creating a thousand nervous flutters, a thousand more shivery whispers, then building, keening in the window cracks and rattling the panes, smacking down a sheet of plyboard that has been leaning against the woodpile, swelling to a pour off the open sea, its howl articulated by throats of narrow streets and teeth of vacant houses, until you begin to imagine a huge invisible animal throwing back its head and roaring, and the cottage is creaking like the timbers of an old ship..."

I've gathered everything by him that I can find. I hope you'll give him a try.