Eternity and Other Stories

Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard is one of America's finest overlooked writers, a man who has labored in relative obscurity (relative, that is, to the popularity he should have obtained twenty years ago) his entire career, turning out finely polished gems of prose in a world that, it would seem, prizes rough cuts. Eternity and Other Stories is Shepard's most recent, as of this writing, collection of short fiction, and like every other book of Shepard's I've read to date, I can unhesitatingly give it the Misanthrope (and Goat) stamp of approval.

While the stories here are very good-- open to a random page and you'll get finer writing than you will in 95% of the books published last year, guaranteed-- the collection is slightly inconsistent. Shepard's penchant for thick, somewhat difficult prose always runs the risk of a story getting bogged down in a lack of pace, and it does happen here on occasion; "Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?" is an especially slow trek, without the kind of million-dollar payoff at the end that makes some difficult books among the best you'll ever read (Grass' Dog Years and Walker's The Secret Servicecome to mind). But these are balanced out by the stories that, while still thick going, grab you and absolutely refuse to let go until you've turned the final page; these comprise the bulk of the book. "Jailwise" and "Eternity and Afterward," the book's final two pieces, are especially good at this sort of thing, despite being the two longest stories here (I didn't count words, but I'd be willing to bet that "Eternity and Afterward" is almost as long as Shepard's brilliant 2004 novel Viator); they caused me to forgo food and sleep.

There aren't enough different ways for me to say "you can't go wrong with Lucius Shepard;" eventually I may have to stop reviewing his work altogether, simply because the reviews will turn into carbon copies of one another. But really, there's nothing else to be said-- you can't go wrong with Lucius Shepard.