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Louisiana Breakdown
by Lucius Shepard
(Golden Gryphon, $21.95, 145 pages, hardcover; published in April
2003.)
Louisiana Breakdown adds another title to Lucius Shepard's already
impressive list of outstanding novellas and short novels. Like his previous
book -- Valentine, another short novel --  Louisiana
Breakdown is a torrid love story, this time set in the steamy town
of Grail, Louisiana.
Jack Mustaine's car breaks down just outside of Grail. He winds up
at Le Bon Chance, the town's hard-drinking, hard-rocking bar. He finds
himself thrust in the middle of more weirdness than he cares to handle,
and things just get weirder when thirty-year-old Vida Dumars, Grail's
Midsummer Queen, falls in love with him, or with who and what she believes
him to be.
Jack, too, falls in love, but he's wary and skeptical of the strange
tales he hears from and about her. It seems that powerful sorcerers
are fighting each other over Vida, and it all has to do with her role
as Midsummer Queen and the upcoming St. John's Eve, when Vida will pass
the title to her ten-year-old successor. The Midsummer Queen is a sacrifice
of sorts, offered to the Good Gray Man in exchange for Grail's continued
posterity.
Louisiana Breakdown is sumptuously written, oozing sweat, sex,
and strangeness with heady insouciance. Its characters are intriguing
and complex, their emotions and motivations impossible to pin down succinctly.
Its plot is enriched by a multiplicity of other stories that cross paths
with this one, without ever fully being explained: they add texture,
colour, and substance and open up the world of Shepard's folkloric Louisiana
beyond the confines of this one tale.
In other words, don't expect everything to make fully rational sense.
Much in the manner of David Lynch's films, Shepard effects inexplicable
and disturbing identity permutations on this journey into the hidden,
dark mythology of America.
Louisiana Breakdown is a gorgeously intense experience.
Originally published
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 26 April 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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