Cover art by Jim Burns.
In this, his seventh major
collection, Lucius Shepard is as magisterial in narration and darkly
eloquent in style as ever. The stories gathered here conduct the reader
from the wastelands of the near future to the zoned-out bacchanals of
Hollywood, from the fevered bordellos of Central America to the
hallucinated revels of redneck country, from the broken hearts of
wandering loners to alluring fantasy realms just beyond the threshold
of perception. And when the journey is over, eternal contrasts – of man
and woman, bosses and workers, responsibility and escape, conformity
and freedom – stand in more powerful definition than ever before...
The title novel, Viator,
is here published in its full, intended text for the first time – the
previous version was some 20,000 words shorter – and is revealed as
Shepard’s masterpiece of the decade. Five men of Swedish descent,
drifters and drunks on the mend, are assigned to live aboard a derelict
ship on the Alaskan coast, only to perceive that they are on the brink
of a voyage beyond our world, one of beckoning glamour and incipient
madness. Long sentences, alternately languorous and urgent, run moodily
throughout the tale, in a feast of metaphoric language limning the
perils of a soul caught between anchoring love and transcendent
illusion.
And other stories set out
equally resonant crises of the conflicted psyche. A mine manager who
knows his domain for the very image of Hell bids for redemption, or at
least survival. A scriptwriter in Hollywood finds that false
appearances exist not only in films. A veteran rock singer, the “Queen
Mother”, confronts apparitions with muddled resolve. A town in Latin
America witnesses abasements emblematic of the region’s poverty. A
foolish man loses his lover and pursues her image to nowhere. And the
emergence of a monster on an American beach is not at all what it seems.
Viator Plus is a book of charismatic distinction, one of the finest collections of the year.
Contents:
- The Emperor
- Larissa Miusov
- Carlos Manson Lives (written as Sally Carteret)
- Handsome, Winsome Johnny (written as Sally Carteret)
- After Ildiko
- Chinandega
- The Ease With Which We Freed The Beast
- Viator
- Story Notes
