Lucius Shepard Books In Order

Life During Wartime

David Mingolla is one of many drug pumped grunts slugging it out in the rotten jungles of Guatemala, an expendable pawn in an endless, amoral war. Then he meets Debora, an enigmatic young woman who may be working for the enemy, and stumbles into the deadly war zone of psychic conflict where the mind is the greatest woapon, and thoughts are used to kill.

The Golden

Deviating from traditional tales that feature lonely vampires who prowl through human society in search of victims or solace, this account of vampires flourishing in their own ‘inhuman society’ takes place in the year 1860, when their centuries long breeding experiments have finally produced ‘The Golden,’ a mortal whose blood is perfect and powerful. Mobilized by the news of this discovery, aristocratic vampire clans arrive at the looming Castle Banat, where they plan to partake of the sublime blood. To their shock, the guests find that The Golden, a young girl, has been brutally murdered and her blood already drained. The story also follows the Inspector Michael Beheim a recent vampire assigned to track down the killer. Recounted in full 19th century literary style with gothic elements and foreshadowing, the inspector navigates his way through the vampire world and the crime therein.

A Handbook of American Prayer

From the first lines of A Handbook of American Prayer, award winning author Lucius Shepard signals his place in the classic American tradition of confessional memoirists. While his plot is unique, his literary precedents include the great moral chroniclers of crime on the biblical scale. Wardlin Stuart is an American messiah, a man who seems to have a direct line to God but if he does, it’s a divinity unlike any you may have prayed to. Stuart’s story begins when he kills a man in a bar and is sentenced to ten years in prison for manslaughter. In prison, he composes prose, poems, and prayers addressed to no recognizable god. He intends to produce only small benefits, no miracles. But miraculously, what he asks for happens, whether it be a girlfriend for himself or special privileges for fellow prisoners. Soon Wardlin is regarded as a local shaman, and he emerges from prison a national celebrity. Stardom pushes Wardlin into conflict with a fundamentalist minister, and. the two are destined for a showdown. In the meantime, it seems as if the god to whom Stuart prays has come into being, and is walking the earth.

Valentine

In South Florida, a journalist is stranded in the coastal town of Piersall. This secluded landscape hosts an unlikely encounter with a past love and the beginning of a chain of events that will link the estranged lovers. Shepard investigates the nature of their love and the elusive, alienating force that separated them in the past, despite their seemingly boundless passion. Here is an erotic Valentine of insatiable longing and hope. Lucius Shepard Brings to mind Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Ward Just. Wall Street Journal

Colonel Rutherford’s Colt

This is the MP3CD audiobook format in vinyl case. Read by Robertson Dean The itinerant gun show draws together many subcultures from the margins of society: survivalists, Aryan brotherhoods, and the team of Rita Whitelaw and Jimmy Roy Guy, dealers in collectible arms. Rita has made Jimmy an exception to her general disdain for whites, for Jimmy’s got a storytelling ability that borders on mystic vision, which he delights in applying to the weapons he acquires. When Jimmy makes an agreement with the widow of white supremacist martyr Bob Champion to broker her husband’s infamous Colt . 45, the widow stipulates that he keep it out of the hands of Champion’s disciple, who considers it a powerful talisman for his racist agenda. Jimmy and Rita run afoul of ”the Major,” but they’re not intimidated by his veiled threats. The gun has launched a story, and when Jimmy begins a story, one way or another, he’s bound to see it through.

Louisiana Breakdown

Welcome to Grail, Louisiana next to nothing and just beyond reality where hoodoo meets Jesus, and townsfolk pray to both. This dark fantasy delves into the psychological and motivational depths of Grail and its residents. Miss Sedele mixes up green cocktails called ‘cryptoverdes’ at Le Bon Chance. Vida Dumars, owner of the Moonlight Diner, peers into the deepest realms of her customers’ hearts as though they were picture windows. Town spirit Good Gray Man has promised good fortune to the town as long as it hangs onto tradition. A quirky, fantastical town’s heart and soul are slowly, often painfully revealed in this dark and captivating novella.

Viator

Quartered aboard the freighter, Viator, run aground twenty years before on a remote section of the Alaskan coast, the four men hired to determine the ship’s worth at salvage have begun to exhibit a variety of eccentric behaviors. They’ve become obsessed with Viator to the point that the world beyond seems of consequence only as it relates to the ship. When their putative leader, Thomas Willander, is afflicted by a series of disturbing dreams, he concludes that something on board may be responsible for their erraticism. He seeks the help of a woman in the nearby village of Kaliaska and together they initiate an investigation into the history of Viator, hoping to learn, among other things, why the ship was run aground and who was the mysterious man who hired the four. But their efforts may be too late. The men, whose eccentrities are now verging on the insane, show no sign of intending to abandon their new home, compelled by Viator‘s eerie allure. To make matters worse, winter will soon be setting in, ominous incidences of sound and light are issuing from the forest surrounding the ship, and Willander’s dreams may be coming true…

Softspoken

A chilling and mysterious voice becomes audible to Sanie shortly after she and her husband Jackson move into the decaying antebellum mansion that is the Bullard ancestral home in rural South Carolina. At first, she wonders if the voice might be a prank played by Jackson’s peyote popping brother Will or his equally off kilter sister Louise. But soon Sanie discovers that the ghostly voice is merely a single piece in the decadent, baroque puzzle that comprises the Bullard family history rank with sensuality, violence, repression and madness.

Vacancy

For many of us, the Ace Double Novels of the ’50s and ’60s have long been a source both of pleasure and nostalgia. This new double volume from Subterranean Press stands squarely in that distinguished tradition, offering a pair of colorful, fast paced novellas from one of the finest writers currently working in any genre: Lucius Shepard.

In Vacancy, a washed up actor, a mysterious motel, and a Malaysian ‘woman of power’ form the central elements in a riveting account of a rootless man forced to confront the impossible but very real demons of his past. This is Shepard at his harrowing, hallucinatory best.

Ariel brilliantly transmutes some traditional SF concepts alien incursions, the mysteries of quantum physics into an astonishing, often moving reflection on love and obsession, memory and identity, and the archetypal conflict that stands at the heart of an infinite multitude of worlds.

Barnacle Bill the Spacer

There are science fiction stories alongside short thrillers and a psychological horror story; something for everyone.

The Jaguar Hunter

Fourteen of Lucius Shepard’s most memorable stories are combined with a previously unanthologized novella, Radiant Green Star, to form a stunning sci fi collection. In the Nebula Award winning title story, a poor Honduran hunter is coerced into tracking the forbidden black jaguar of Barrio Carolina.

Beast of the Heartland

The fiction of Lucius Shepard has more to do with Joseph Conrad than Isaac Asimov. Fascinated by deception and decay, and generally labeled a cyberpunk writer, his work transcends the limits of genre fiction. Beast of the Heartland contains seven tales that explore the darkside where science fiction meets horror. Headed by the award winning ‘Barnacle Bill the Spacer,’ a story of high space mutiny, the book includes ‘A Little Night Music,’ a gothic tale of insanity; ‘All the Perfumes of Araby,’ where an adventurer in the Middle East links up with an ancient entity; ‘Human History,’ a postapocalyptic chiller; ‘Sports in America,’ a noir tale in the Chandler tradition; ‘The Sun Spider,’ a mini space opera; and the title story an ingenious picture of a battered boxer on the decline.

Two Trains Running

This collection of fact and fiction was inspired by the time science fiction writer Lucius Shepard spent with Missoula Mike, Madcat, and other members of a controversial brotherhood known as the Freight Train Riders of America. Shepard rode the rails throughout the western half of the United States with the disenfranchised, the homeless, the punks, the gangs, and the joy riders for the magazine article ‘The FTRA Story.’ That original article is presented here, along with two new hobo novellas, ‘Over Yonder’ and ‘Jailbait.’ In ‘Over Yonder,’ alcoholic Billy Long Gone finds himself on an unusual train. As Billy travels his health improves and his thinking clears, and he arrives in Yonder an unlikely paradise where a few hundred hobos live in apparent peace and tranquility. But every paradise has its price, and in Yonder, peace and tranquility breed complacency and startling deaths. ‘Jailbait’ is a hardcore tale of deception, lust, revenge, and murder in the seedy underbelly of rail yards and train hopping. Madcat, who functions best in a whiskey induced haze, must decide between solitude and companionship when he meets up with Grace, an underaged runaway. Grace, in turn, seeks the security of an older man and the life about which only young girls can dream.

Trujillo

In the town of Trujillo, in Honduras, on the edge of the Mosquito Coast, Dr. Arturo Ochoa, a semi retired psychiatrist, has a single patient: a troubled young man named Thomas Stearns, the son of a wealthy Atlanta family. Stearns has been found adrift on the Carribean in a vessel owned by two Nicaraguans, both of whom are missing; he has been alone for eighteen days and has little memory of that time. Suspected of murder, Stearns is unconcerned. He knows his family will buy off the police. But he is reluctant to leave Trujillo, having developed an odd affinity for the town. As therapy progresses, he tells of a mysterious stone figure regurgitated by, improbably, a whirlpool, and Dr. Ochoa, drawn into his pathology, begins to doubt not only Stearns’ sanity, but his own.

Eternity

Here are seven stories from a master of the art. Viktor Chemayev is the Philip Marlowe of Russian detectives, a sad eyed, heavy drinking romantic who refuses to stay beat. In the title novella of this extraordinary collection, he goes head to head with an Irish assassin in the depths of a Moscow nightclub in an attempt to win back his true love, who has been sold to the Beelzebub like king of the Moscow underworld…
Lucius Shepard is known for his dark, unpredictable vision, and in this assemblage of some of his best writing he takes us from Moscow to Africa; from the mountains of Iraq, where Specialist Charlie N. Wilson encounters a very different sort of enemy, to Central America, where a bloody handed colonel meets his doom via lizards. In these seven tales Shepard’s imagination spans the globe and, like an American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, refuses to be restricted by mere reality.

Aztechs

Life the second time around is short, strange and terrifying to the awakened. One ‘zombie’, victim of a bizarre scientific obsession, breaks away, leaving a trail of muder and miracle as he flees the Project and the horror his ‘life’ hasbecome.

The Taborin Scale

Perchance to dream…

To dream is to enter inner worlds of terror and revelation, to look the collective unconscious in the face. In this ground breaking anthology, five modern masters of the fantastic conjure especially potent encounters with the stuff of the sleeping mind, unveiling dark hints about who or what we truly are, about our uncertain relationships with the waking world. The stories in The Book of Dreams are bold ventures into the kingdom of Morpheus, upon which individual destinies crucially depend or perhaps the destiny of the entire human species.

In The Prisoner , Grand Master Robert Silverberg, long an explorer of visionary realms, indicates just how dangerous it can be to respond to a cry for help especially when you are unconscious at the time.

In Dream Burgers At The Mouth of Hell , the commanding prose of Lucius Shepard explores the secret dream factories of Hollywood, tracing where the inspiration of scriptwriters really originates.

In Testaments , Jay Lake brilliantly employs the language of prophecy to consider the totality of human history, and where its contradictory trends may lead us as new kings dream of glory.

In Rex Nemorensis , Kage Baker incisively considers the violent dream landscape of Vietnam veterans, and fuses it with the territory of ancient myth and ritual.

And in 86 Deathdick Road , Jeffrey Ford, dreamer of dreamers, plunges into an oneiric domain in which fateful symbols are everywhere, but truth is forever elusive.

The Book of Dreams is a cornucopia of strange enlightenment, a quintet of voyages to wonderful yet disturbing worlds within.

With Christmas in Honduras

Over the last twenty years, Lucius Shepard has carved out a unique place for himself in American literature, a hard to classify territory between fantasy and literature that is infused at once with a strong political sensibility, a sense of history, and elements of fantasy. His first work of nonfiction, With Christmas in Honduras revolves around Shepard’s time spent in Central America over the last thirty years and his fascination with Lee Christmas, a real life soldier of fortune instrumental in establishing the United Fruit Company. Christmas, a Louisiana railroad engineer who wrecked his train in the United States, fled south to Honduras to find work and wound up becoming a general in the Honduran army. he and his asstant, ‘Machine Gun’ Guy Malony, were tremendously influential in Central America and the United States, together becoming major players in the fruit company’s transition from business enterprise to murderous oppressor. The twisted legacy of Christmas in today’s Central America is recounted here as well drug dealers, stranded American veterans of the contra war, and failed American businessmen who came to exploit the country. Interweaving these many threads with his own story, Shepard has created a classic of narrative nonfiction.