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Trujillo and Other Stories
by Lucius Shepard
introduction by Michael Swanwick
(PS Publishing, £35, 682 pages, signed, numbered, limited edition
hardback, also available as signed, numbered, limited edition slipcased
hardback priced £60, published June 2004.)
Review by Gary Couzens
 In
the SF/fantasy genre, there are plenty of examples of quality and plenty
of quantity. Having both coincide is much rarer. The usual examples
are Philip K. Dick (eight novels between 1964 and 1966), Robert Silverberg
(eight novels between 1970 and 1972) and Dan Simmons (four novels, albeit
especially long ones, in 1989-1990). To which one could add Lucius Shepard
in 2002-2003. The first three writers wrote short fiction as well during
their prolific spurts. Shepard's quarter-million words published in
2003 alone is entirely made up of short fiction, albeit particularly
long short fiction (you could quibble that, at some 45,000 words, Floater
is actually a short novel).
In all the above cases, there are extenuating circumstances. Dick was
writing at white heat, his work springing as much from his own personal
demons as it was fuelled by amphetamines, and in many ways he was returning
obsessively, and often brilliantly, to the same themes -- something
that applies to Shepard to some extent. Silverberg was actually slowing
down from the insane productivity of his early career, finding an
accommodation between his enormous facility and high literary standards
that he hasn't found before or since. It's also worth mentioning that
in the 60s and 70s, novels were generally much shorter then than they
are now: many of Dick's and Silverberg's were 70,000 words or fewer,
a length which may well not be commercially viable nowadays. Simmons's
output of some 800,000 words in two years is partly explained by a difficulties
in finding a publisher for Carrion Comfort (which runs to some
350,000 words alone) due to concerns over its length. Certainly in Shepard's
case, ubiquity is an effect of a logjam of accepted work. Some of the
stories are not new, but have been worked on for a number of years (Louisiana
Breakdown, published as a standalone book by Golden Gryphon, and
"Jailwise" among them). But that's not to deny the achievement.
Trujillo and Other Stories collects eleven stories, dating from
1999 to 2004. That's just a sampling of the work published over the
last few years, skewing more towards fantasy/horror. (A second collection
is due from PS in 2005 or 2006.) Shepard's forte is the longer novelette
or the novella, and none of the stories in this collection are under
10,000 words long, with one ("Eternity and Afterward") exceeding 30,000
words, and the one original, "Trujillo" itself, being a short novel
of around 55,000.
All writers have their "default" story or stories, the one that affirms,
rather than deviates from, their standard themes and styles. A "default"
Shepard story will contain most of the following: an isolated/obsessed/alienated
protagonist (almost always male and in early middle age), an exotic
setting (often Central American or Far Eastern), a romantically conflicted
view of relationships between men and women, and an episode (which makes
up a larger or smaller part of the story) where the protagonist is granted
a transcendent view of reality, or is transported into another one.
Shepard has a rich style, depending in part on an obsessive chasing
down of nuances of emotional states, not to mention a detailed sense
of place, and both of these partly explain the stories' length. (This
narrative voice isn't very convincing as a character voice, a particular
problem I had with "Jailwise". Occasionally it results in unduly lengthy
sentences.) Certainly some of the stories in this collection do adhere
to this template. They're individually very powerful and impressive,
but taken en masse some sense of repetition sets in. I'd recommend reading
this collection a story at a time, rather than attempting to swallow
it in larger chunks if not whole.
But on the other hand, there are stories that do vary this pattern,
and these are the ones that I found the most effective. "Only Partly
Here", Shepard's contribution to the growing subgenre of 9/11 stories,
opens the collection and is the shortest story included. Shepard is
at his most subdued here, as a tentative romance emerges between a construction
worker at Ground Zero and a young woman in a chastened, scared and afraid
New York City. Slowly, we -- along with the protagonist -- realise the
truth, but not before the protagonist has an epiphanic, if not entirely
unobscure, experience along the way. As Michael Swanwick rightly says
in his introduction to this collection, it's a quiet, but finally very
moving story grounded in pain, fear and loss.
Another standout for me is "Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?", the story
of an ex-con, his girlfriend and a strange woman with her two younger
male companions. In this novella, Shepard departs from his usual high
style by adopting a first-person vernacular voice. (He also, for this
story only, uses em dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate dialogue.)
Maceo, the narrator, is full of street smarts but fatally has no real
clue as to what is really going on around him. Another fallible narrator
features in "The Same Old Story", one of a cluster of five stories set
in the fictional Honduran town of Trujillo. Here, Jack blunders drunkenly
from one bar to another, telling his story to anyone he can persuade
to listen to him ... and the nature of his own personal hell soon becomes
apparent.
"A Walk in the Garden" follows a group of American soldiers in Iraq,
who stumble upon a rupture in reality -- an entrance to a very Islamic
version of Heaven and Hell, which could either be genuine or a consensus
hallucination. "Eternity and Afterward" follows its protagonist on a
phantasmagoric voyage through a very strange Moscow nightclub. Although
line by line this story is very impressive, and its insights into post-Glasnost
Russia very intriguing, I found it somewhat wearing over its great length
and unsure what it added up to other than its hero's sacrifice for the
woman he loves (one of several rather romanticised prostitutes in this
collection). "Jailwise" takes us to a very strange prison run by the
inmates, with no guards, and the story follows its protagonist's redemption
through art (a mural he is painting) and love (for a woman -- except
in this case she's a "plume", a male prisoner who has transformed into
a woman). "Crocodile Rock" is set in Africa, where our hero has to deal
with a man who claims he committed murder while changed into a crocodile
... a story which suggests a form of human evolution. Shepard writes
this story first person from the viewpoint of a black American, but
I'll leave it to others to advise how convincing it is.
The stories set in Trujillo itself continue the same themes. The protagonist
of "The Drive-In Puerto Rico" is a national hero rather resting on his
laurels who is driven to act by his friendship with a couple of American
journalists who have stumbled across evidence of atrocities. A strange
type of lizard is also involved in the story. In "The Park Sweeper",
again, the fantasy apparatus -- the trees in a scrubby park hiding a
magically miniaturised civilisation -- is there to tell a story which
is as much about a man trying to persuade the woman he loves to leave
her husband. "Seņor Volto" tells of a man who by means of a carnival
stunt of the title (grasp Volto's paddles and see how much of an electric
shock you can stand) is granted a view of what is really going on: strange
ethereal creatures preying on humanity. Each of these stories is certainly
powerfully written, but tend to fall into the "default" pattern identified
above.
Finally there's "Trujillo" itself, a short novel which gives the collection
its name. A psychiatrist, Dr Ochoa, is treating Stearns, an American,
sole survivor of a boating accident. As their sessions progress, Stearns
tells of his memory of a strange carved statue rising from the sea.
This may have something to do with his personality change post accident:
he's now become a predatory male, prone to exploiting and mistreating
the women in his life. Ochoa comes to the conclusion that a demon might
be at loose in the town, and Stearns might just be the latest of the
men it has possessed. Add to the plot Ochoa's teenage daughter Lizeth,
just beginning to be wayward, and Suyapa, a local girl Stearns is drawn
towards. "Trujillo" is a dark story about the bad things men can do
to women, even to the women who love them, and it leads up to an ironically
dark conclusion.
Even as a sampling of Shepard's output of the last few years this is
impressive, and what is mouth-watering for readers -- and daunting for
writers -- is that there is more of it to come. It doesn't even contain
my favourite recent Shepard story ("Over Yonder", which is collected
in Two Trains Running). PS Publishing promise us a further sampling
later this year. If you're an admirer of Shepard's work, then this collection
is a feast plenty big enough to be going on with, and it's also a very
comprehensive introduction for newcomers. Of Shepard's three previous
full-length collections two won World Fantasy Awards, and I suspect
Trujillo will be the one to beat this time round.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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