orries about what there is going to be room enough to tell about in the 140 pages of Lucius Shepard's Louisiana Breakdown surface with its opening sentence. "You ever hear about this little place down in Louisiana," that sentence begins, as though spoken aloud by someone about to tell a Club Story, though neither this implied narrator nor his presumed audience up north ever takes on flesh. "You ever hear about this little place down in Louisiana, this nowhere town on the Gulf name of Grail?"
We have not, but we are going to: that is the promise of the Club Story voice, the voice of the portal-keeper of Story. What we do know already is that something happened; that the story to be told happened before we are told it, in an imagined bar maybe, over a beer or two, up north. And we instantly think we know something about this place with a name like Grail: that this "nowhere town" is almost certainly a polder—an enclave of heightened reality protected from the world outside, perhaps by a magus, or by some contract with the gods who haunt the inner aisles of the planet of our planet story; and that, moreover, this polder, this Grail, is a habitation much sought after and returned to, but probably not often left behind. If you can find the Grail, why on earth leave?
That's the first sentence. We are now ready to enter Grail, and the narrator obligingly takes us in. But what he describes, over the next few pages, hardly seems a paradise of any sort. Grail is a seemingly doomed small town of a sort familiar to all of us. The only factory in town has shut down. The downtown is full of vacant buildings. The strip malls that line the roads out of Grail are seedy. The inhabitants are old, or defeated, or deluded, salesmen without customers: human entropy, human rust. Grail is yet another example—we see Grails in life, we see Grails in fiction, interminably—of the internal exile, the evacuated belatedness, of most of America beyond the urbs. Or so it seems.
But somehow, even early on, before the nature of Grail's contract with the gods or god is made clear (for there is indeed a contract), we sense something happening that might be of extraordinary interest, though we do wonder how Shepard is going to fit the amplitude of what Grail may be into the few pages he has given us. At this point I'm going to jump the gun of the story, partly because (in truth) the story itself becomes almost too skidded over to bother with much, and partly because (even though I think Shepard intends us to speculate along these lines) I've more or less made up my own Grail.
The truth isn't always what it seems
Horror stories (and in its final pages Louisiana Breakdown sure does sled down the tram lines of horror) normally depend on what one might call a deferral of the real. What we see at the beginning of most horror stories is absolutely not what is going to be gotten when the veils are torn off. What we see in the beginning is that which has escaped—or never consciously met—the underlying reality of things, a reality which, in the genre of horror, usually comes at you from ago, from behind, from beneath. Horror is about the transgression you inflict upon yourself when you are caught up with; it is about being eaten by the Real You, the inner twin you left behind—down there in your past, down there in the backstory of the planet—that you abandoned to starve in your longing to cling to the passage of time, up here in the light of day. If you make a compact with the Devil Who Comes Up, that compact should confirm that the face you wear in daylight is a cerement mask. Grail should not, therefore, be what it seems. What seems awful to us about Grail should be precisely the cerements of a compact whose gist lies elsewhere.
The brilliance of Louisiana Breakdown lies in its ignoring of this assumption, though without ever acknowledging the move (but I'm sure, as I said, that the move is there). What we learn about Grail is that the more layers you peel from what it seems to be, the more it is exactly and profoundly what it seems to be. A long while ago, the citizens of Grail have made a bargain with one of a proliferating palimpsest or collage of gods and Beings; he/It is known as the Good Gray Man. It is a usual kind of bargain: every 20 years, a young woman is selected as the Midsummer Queen, and the woman who had been so serving is passed over to the Good Gray Man to feed his love-sick famishment. In return, he/It bestows good luck upon Grail.
The seemingly awful Grail we see is the reward. Good luck works, I think, in two ways. Grail itself is an epiphany of Grail. Being utterly true, being utterly there, it is a kind of manifestation, within the polder of itself, of Reality made manifest, without veils, worshippable. But it is more than that: The actual inhabitants of Grail are themselves utterly themselves, beyond role. And they know who they are (some of them have returned from elsewhere to become wholly who they are), and they say who they are. And they do not lie. They tell the truth about themselves, and about others. The truth does not kill. Grail is an empoldering of the inner grace and gravitas of an America normally despised. Grail is a magical retention of the heart of that America. Grail is paradise on earth.
Horror wears an unfamiliar face
This does not sound much like horror; and the fact it does not may help explain the 10-year gap between Shepard's writing of the first part of the book, where paradise begins to manifest within the form of Grail, and the remainder of the tale, where he has to bother with a story which will take us to the last page, kind of. That story begins in the high resonant voice of Lucius Shepard (through the mouthpiece of the Our Town-with-cojones teller of the Club Story) in full fixed gaze upon the aisles and ambages of the world, a world braided into a vision which seems (odd this, so late it has become) moral. Vida, the current Midsummer Queen, approaching the end of her reign and whatever happens afterward, has sexual congress with a swamp manifestation of her New Orleans lover, himself an aspect of the Louisiana Mardi Gras of Gods. Jack Mustaine, a youngish man, a singer-songwriter with an Orpheus-like skill with the guitar, comes to town, having fled his bad life out west. They intersect like atomic strong force and make love—very vividly.
But then ensues a fairly tiresome skedaddle through some pretty conventional horror tropes. Midsummer Night comes, and a surprisingly lackluster Revel unveils a few stray moments of frisson. The only memorable passages are those where a reconstructed Vietnamese R and V zone almost literally returns us to the humid chaos and apocalypse of 1968, a period and location Shepard has long occupied in his writings. But these passages flicker and fade, and we are left with some hasty wrap-up stuff. The Good Gray Man does something unspeakable to Vida. Jack Mustaine (not one of your classic Jacks) cannot swim against the current of evil or what, and decamps eastwards, where he will write some good songs out of the experience. And so forth.
We return to the ominousness of the length of the book. The first half of Louisiana Breakdown could have been the first chapter of a Great American Novel. As it is (I've hardly touched on the richness of these opening pages) it is the Dance of the Seven Veils of Mini Me.
