ucius Shepard published his first SF story in 1983, and was soon recognized as one of the finest authors of short fiction the speculative genres had yet seen. His early stories (1983 to 1989) were characteristically set in Central America and other parts of the Third World, and evoked the beauty and terror of their locations with a fevered ornate intimacy that recalled Joseph Conrad at his most intense and haunting.
The best of Shepard's complex dark fables of this period were assembled in the superb World Fantasy Award-winning collections The Jaguar Hunter (1987) and The Ends of the Earth (1991); later pieces, such as those gathered in Barnacle Bill the Spacer (1997, retitled Beast of the Heartland in the United States), were perhaps less sure, less compellingly engaged with the politics of their subject matter, but retained a cogent moral force. Novels that appeared in the first decade of Shepard's career were Green Eyes (1984), a striking foray into the metaphysics of Death, Life During Wartime (1987), a dense exploration of Central America through the lens of a future war, Kalimantan (1990), a long novella of Borneos here and elsewhere, and The Golden (1993), a vibrant apotheosis of the vampire novel.
After an hiatus of several years, Shepard resumed regular writing in 1999 with the novella Crocodile Rock. His steady output since then—new stories appear frequently in such markets as Asimov's, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction and Polyphony—is reflected in a stream of books recently published or scheduled for the next year or so: Valentine, Louisiana Breakdown, A Handbook of American Prayer, Two Trains Running, Colonel Rutherford's Colt, Aztechs, Floater and Trujillo and Other Stories. In these, Shepard's vast talent is achieving an extraordinary fruition.
I interviewed Lucius Shepard by e-mail in March 2003.
You have, by all accounts, led an extraordinary life, amply reflected in the varied settings of your stories and the extreme, often exotic plights of your characters. What personal experiences of yours have most centrally shaped Lucius Shepard the writer?
Shepard: In the early '80s, I spent considerable time in El Salvador and Honduras, a period during which there was a great deal of American military involvement in that region due to the contra war and the civil rebellion in Salvador. This was not my first experience of Third World oppression; but, as I was just beginning to write, these experiences played into everything I was thinking about writing and so had a distinct impact on what I set out to say.
I'd never seen terror employed with such demonic whimsy as in Salvador. I recall a village in which most of the young boys were missing a hand. Another [village] had been all but destroyed, the population slaughtered. The survivors told of government troops tossing infants into the air for sport and catching them on their bayonets. It wasn't that there were atrocities—it was wall-to-wall atrocity. The atmosphere in the capital, San Salvador, was of this impacted emotion. Fear ... but fear compressed into a thick, greasy, feverish thing that was more like an infection than a feeling. Mothers would find their sons' heads sitting on the stoop when they opened the door in the morning. When someone you knew was missing, you went to look for them at one of several disposal places used by the death squads. Vultures, pariah dogs, charred bodies. I was always paranoid because I was hanging out with people from the university and they were prime targets for the death squads. I kept thinking I was being followed, and I have the sense that I was followed on a couple of occasions; but most times I was probably just hiding from guys in sunglasses who were driving to work or going to lunch. ...
Everyone lived like that. It was insane, but it was insane all the time, so you grew accustomed to it and everything that didn't fit your notion of what was acceptably insane came to seem mega-insane. I remember arriving back in the States on Super Bowl Saturday in New Orleans. The airport was full of people wearing their team's colors, waving pennants, cheering. I didn't have any legitimate moral platform to look down on those people from, and I don't really believe my reaction was based on indignation or outrage. It was just such a shock. It didn't seem reasonable that anyone should be having fun or expressing glee. Such behavior, to my mind, was the height of insanity. That excess of frivolity in the face of the horrific conditions that were still my reality ... it made me feel murderous toward those people. I still feel that way sometimes when I write. Certain stories bring it out.
Travel in general, the experience of other cultures, has a continuing impact on what I do. I've traveled fairly extensively since I was a child. Thomas Wolfe once said, "The only way to know your country is to leave it." I tend to give that some credence. Traveling in the Third World has lent me a sort of hybrid perspective on politics that plays into some things I write.
In recent years I've been surrounded by strong, complicated women. Maybe I always have been so surrounded and only recently have noticed. Whatever the case, my discernment of these women, my doubtless incomplete understanding of them, is shaping a great deal of what I'm writing now.
Your stories are written at a high stylistic pitch; your prose is often ornate, cadenced, infused with a vein of rich, dark poetry. You were a poet and musician before you began writing stories; do your poetry and music still express themselves through—in—your prose?
Shepard: I was a lousy poet, so I hope my own poetry doesn't have a great influence. Whatever poetry insinuates itself into my work doubtless comes from the home schooling I received as a child—by the time I was 12 I was conversant with the Romantics, most of Shakespeare, and more contemporary poets such as Auden, Thomas, Yeats, et al. I was pretty much steeped in the traditions of iambic pentameter.
Music ... I don't know. Playing rock and roll was a way of avoiding writing for me. I knew I wanted to write, but didn't yet have the discipline. It was much more fun to write songs and get other people to play them. I learned a lot about comedy from watching white Midwesterners dance. I enjoyed, too, the instant feedback you receive with music, people staggering up and saying drunkenly, "You guys are better than Tool!" or, alternately, assaulting you in the parking lot. Very gratifying. Having to wait a year or so to know how something you've written will be received can be terribly frustrating. Much better to know right away. My favorite engagement: My band played the Golden Hatchet Saloon in Bad Ax, Michigan—like a line from a song, huh? Bad Ax is an old lumber town in the north of the state that's home to the terminally bored and lots of unemployed. When people learned we were from Detroit, they treated us with awe, as if we were fabulous creatures just in from Byzantium. I picked up the only girl in town who'd been to college (two years at Michigan State). She threw up on my shoulder, then her boyfriend and his buddies tried to run our van off the road. One of our roadies shot the grille off their car and we lived to tell. You simply can't overvalue such experiences.
All that aside, I'm convinced that the rhythm and sonority of language communicate to some readers. Careful readers have an ear; on some level they're listening to the flow of words. The craft of working your prose surface, of utilizing music in language, seduces them, draws them in toward the central meaning of whatever you're intending to show or evoke. So I'm conscious of that potential for music when I write.
The first decade of your career, 1983 to 1993, saw you publish a large number of extremely impressive stories, as well as major novels such as Green Eyes and The Golden. What, for you, are the highlights of that period? And: Are you a different writer now than you were 10 years ago? Have your creative goals changed?
Shepard: Of the early stories and novels I wrote, I still have some fondness for "R&R," "A Traveler's Tale" and "The Ends of the Earth." As to whether I'm now a different writer, certainly I'm a more precise writer—I'm capable of translating what I think into words with greater particularity. I have a clearer grasp of what I think good writing should be, and I've learned more tricks, both as regards style and structure. I'm a less sentimental writer, but a more emotional one. In so many genre stories, the entire point of the story is the sentiment involved, and that sentiment isn't earned, it's a button-pushing thing. This tendency is almost a cultural verity. If you have a hero or heroine who is in some fashion impaired, whether you're a writer or a filmmaker or aught else, you're halfway to the awards platform. Especially if it's an impaired child—you simply can't go wrong with Little Lame Prince stories. It's no accident I won a Hugo for such a story. All art is to a degree manipulative, but now I find this sort of usage cheaply manipulative. In the stories I'm telling these days, I work hard to earn whatever emotionality they contain, and I stay the hell away from the lame, the halt and the mentally challenged.
As for goals, I'm mostly interested in getting to the next story, the next book, and hopefully doing justice to them. That's what motivates me. But there are two books I'm gearing up to write that perhaps stand as goals: One's a rather eccentric epic crime novel set in Los Angeles during the Spanish Colonial period, the 1930s when South Central LA was home to a thriving jazz scene, and in the early 21st Century; and the other is a historical fantasy concerning a theatrical troupe during the Middle Ages. Both books require that I be more adept at my craft than I am now, and so the books I work on in the next couple of years, though I have high hopes for them, will serve as platforms that enable me to approach the two books I've mentioned.
You have a steady spate of new books coming out, collections and novels, from a variety of publishers. Let's look first at Valentine (2002), published by Four Walls Eight Windows. This is an intense love story, the couple at its center brought together in small-town Florida by a hurricane and kept there by curious events and coincidences. Is Valentine SF or fantasy, or is that decision entirely up to the reader?
Shepard: Lately I've been intrigued by the idea of using science-fictional or fantasy backdrops against which to set stories that have nothing to do with those backdrops, that are essentially mainstreamish. Most of us are intently focused on our immediate surround, on problems that distract us from observation, so inured to the ordinary rhythms of our days that we often remain more or less unaware of the great shapes of history that enfold us, and often unaware as well of simpler things. The last time I was in Honduras, I was on the north coast, in a place where the sky was so vast, in different quarters of it you could see wind blowing the clouds about in contrary directions. It was an amazing sight, and on observing this, I realized that I had been taking my home sky for granted—I hadn't really looked at it for quite some time, merely glanced up to see if rain was in the offing ... which, since I live in Portland, Oregon, it generally was, so why look? Recognizing this, it struck me that if something science-fictional intruded into our lives, we might well have a tendency to dismiss or neglect it.
In any case, Valentine was a perfect opportunity to try out this idea. The two main characters, Russell and Kay, are so deeply in love with one another, their observation of their surroundings is impaired—they likely wouldn't notice if a spaceship landed in their front yard, and if they did notice, they're so self-involved they wouldn't care. As they progress in their relationship, they take note of certain oddities in the environment of Piersall, the small Florida town where they're trapped, but they never try to make sense of them, to arrange the events into any logical shape. What I hoped to do was to get the reader to wonder about the backdrop and to register the fact that Russell and Kay seem more or less oblivious to it; this narrative strategy would thus serve to amplify their intense mutuality. Whatever my intent, of course it is up to the reader to make his or her own determination; but that's my take on the subject.
Four Walls Eight Windows is also due to bring out a new three-novella collection later this year—A Handbook of American Prayer. The title story has been gestating for quite a long time, not so? And the book will also feature your remarkable novella "Eternity and Afterward" (2001), which puts the Mafiosi of contemporary Moscow in a startling symbolic light—how did the concept occur to you, of a nightclub as a summary of all time, all space?
Shepard: Handbook is no longer a collection. The title story grew too long and so John Oakes, after a discussion back and forth, decided to publish it on its own. I actually wrote the story several years previously and had it wiped out in a computer accident. This was fairly depressing, and I decided not to attempt a rewrite. But then the story began to crop up in my thoughts again, and I set about not so much rewriting the original as writing a different, albeit similar, story about a slovenly, cynical man who commits a casual murder (manslaughter, actually) and lands in prison, where he persuades himself that he's discovered the secret of successful praying; he comes to believe that prayer is less an act of faith than—as he says—"an immoderate act of physics." A book is made of the prayers he's written for other convicts and for people who live in the small Arizona town to which he's paroled, prayers that are limited to asking for small blessings. A visit from a girlfriend, a letter from a relative, etc. One woman prays for a divorce. The book achieves immense success and makes him a cult figure. There's a strong fantasy element, which I probably shouldn't discuss, because it'll give too much away.
As for "Eternity and Afterward," its origins, I stumbled across a filler in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of those little half-inch-high items used to fill out a column, concerning a Moscow night club in which each night an auction was held, the only thing up for bid being a single rose. The image seemed the perfect metaphor for the excesses of the Russian criminal class during glasnost. As someone once said, "Facts are jewels." They breed in a writer the desire to illustrate them, and this fact bred such a desire in me, though I wasn't certain how to go about it. Several months later I was talking with Jack Womack, who had recently traveled to Russia, and he mentioned that some of the concrete buildings were so cheaply made, you could put your palm against the side of one and it would come away covered in sand. For a long time those two facts rubbed up against one another inside my head. Then I read a magazine article on the rebellion in Chechnya, and I came across the name Chemayev, which I liked. At that point I began to conceive the character of Viktor Chemayev, a young soldier in a Russian mafiya who is trying to buy the freedom of his girlfriend—she is, essentially, enslaved and used as a prostitute by the owner of a nightclub catering to the mafiyas. I wrote a few paragraphs, then let it sit for a year. Eventually I began to write on the story again, and I realized after four or five pages that the nightclub, which I had—for no particular reason—called Eternity, should embody the concept of eternity. I'm sure this was something part of my brain already knew. It just took a while to seep up into my consciousness.
Subterranean Press is issuing a hardcover of Colonel Rutherford's Colt, previously available only as an e-book. I found the way in which your contemporary gun-dealer protagonist, already a fictional creation, constructed a further fictional existence for himself in Old Cuba mesmerizing. Is this novel your commentary on how, and why, stories are told?
Shepard: In writing Colt, I certainly had none of the subtext in mind. The writer Megan Lindholm told me a story about a relative of hers who triggered the idea for the character, and then I started hanging around gun shows, and I became fixated on the idea of setting a story in that environment. In retrospect, however, I imagine to an extent Colt is a commentary on how my stories get told. As implied by my answer to the previous question, writing for me is a process that relies heavily on intuition and a lot of staring at walls, less thinking than spacing. The protagonist of Colt, Jimmy Guy, might be considered something of a savant. On the surface he's a little slow, altogether ordinary in his day-to-day life, but guns—special guns, guns with some history—inspire him to create stories about them, and in creating the stories, immersed in narrative, he becomes a character in his own creation, and the story about Cuba begins to reflect and then to generate events in the real world. As with method acting, writing for me is a form of controlled disassociative behavior ... though not quite to the extremes to which Jimmy Guy takes it. I tend to stay in character while writing some stories, which can be a downer for those around me, especially if it's a horror story.
A digression of sorts: most of the works we're discussing are novellas, or short novels. You're particularly noted for the strength of your novellas—between 20,000 and 40,000 words, you're without peer. Why novellas? What is it about this story length that you find so congenial?
Shepard: The easy way out would be to say I'm lazy, but I think it's more a case of stories finding their own length—most of the stories I've wanted to tell have fallen into the short-novel category by virtue of their narrative demands. That's changing, I think. My novellas keep getting longer. And now I'm doing novels.
The virtues of a novella are obvious. It's long enough to support novel-like characterization and short enough to where you don't have to spend a year writing it. One reason I like the novella is that a good many of my stories take place in a very short time frame, and it's a form in which you can fully explore an event that occurs within such a brief span. "Eternity and Afterward," for instance, takes place in a few hours and is 30,000 words. Having that kind of length allowed me to get into the protagonist's character—his development was the story, really—and into the Russian national character, which was central to the resolution. A novella also gives you room to play with the setting, which, in my view, is basically another character, one that amplifies your POV character, in that it reflects his or her emotional state.
A second title from Subterranean is Aztechs, a long novella first published on Sci Fiction. This refers on many levels to the Central American War stories you wrote in the '80s—the veterans of that future War are much about, and a possible solution to the eternal poverty and dependency of Central America seems to emerge. Is Aztechs a belated sequel and conclusion, a revisionist terminus, to the fictional scenario of Life During Wartime?
Shepard: In a sketchy way, Aztechs serves as a capstone to that particular series of stories, but I have a feeling I'm not done with the subject. Looking at the landscape of the stories, it hardly seems that the Second Coming incarnate as an AI with a proactive Latin American bias is a sufficiently stable circumstance to permit a happily-ever-after scenario. I know I'll continue to be interested in war as a fictional backdrop. At the moment, I'm captivated by the ends of wars, those times directly before victory is nailed down or before the surrender takes, when the violence rises to feverish and chaotic levels. So it's possible I may write something about the end of the war that predates the period detailed in Aztechs.
In most of your new stories about Central America, the setting is in and around a Honduran coastal town, Trujillo. You spend a lot of time in Honduras; is that part of the country indeed as magical, and as stricken, as you fictionally render it?
Shepard: The only way to answer is to tell you a bit about the place. The Mosquito Coast (La Mosquitia) occupies portions of the north coastal region of both Honduras and Nicaragua, and incorporates the largest untouched stretch of rain forest in the Western Hemisphere. The indigenes of the Mosquitia belong to several Indian tribes, notably the Miskitia and the Peche, and there is also a population of blacks, the garifunas, descended from French slaves who escaped from colonies in the Antilles in the 1600s, and maintaining a very African culture. It attracts so little of the world's attention, almost anything could happen there and we'd never hear of it. In effect, it's less a place than a green interruption of history.
Ninety percent of the income of the indigenes—a variety of Indian cultures—derives from lobster diving. The alternatives to diving are abject poverty and smuggling, which usually leads to a violent death. The lobster fleet is owned by the cocaine industry—the registered owners of the ships are wives or girlfriends or associates of cocaine traffickers whose criminal difficulties prevent them from assuming legal ownership. The reason Honduran lobster is relatively cheap is that the traffickers don't need to make a profit from it—the coke that comes into the U.S. on lobster boats is their cash cow. The boat owners do not feel compelled to take care of the lobster divers. These men are forced to make up to 14 dives a day with no air gauges and shoddy equipment in depths up to 130 feet. A safe dive depth in the U.S. is considered around 60 feet, and it's recommended that one dive to this depth no more than two or three times a day. Thus it may be seen that the captains of the lobster boats are in essence committing murder and attempted murder. There are thousands of men in the region who have been catastrophically paralyzed by the bends, and there are only two decompression chambers on the coast, one of which is often out of order. Should a diver be stricken in mid-voyage, the captains don't head back for port—they continue until the voyage ends, and by the time the injured man is brought for treatment, it's too late to do much good. ...
Every diver suffers at least mild paralysis due to the bends. All over the region, you encounter young men who can't grip your hand, or limp. The catastrophically paralyzed have an average life span of about three years. They die as a result of bedsores turning septicemic—this evolves into skin breakdown, urinary tract infections and so on. These people, indeed, all people of the Mosquito Coast, have essentially been abandoned by the Honduran and Nicaraguan governments. Those governments are only interested in the considerable reservoirs of oil that exist there. I should mention that I and some other folks are trying to finance wheelchairs for the paralyzed, trying to set up cottage industries so they can support their families, and if anyone has the urge to help and get themselves a tax deduction, it would be greatly appreciated. Checks should be made out to "Sub-Ocean Safety" and sent to the charity's accountant:
Sub Ocean Safety
C/O Deb Rollo
59168 Transmitter Road
Lacombe, LA 70445
Or you can go to the Web site and make a donation there: www.suboceansafety.org
Away from the coast, the region is a wilderness populated by tapir, jaguars, crocodiles, anteaters, et al. Even the larger towns are primitive—Palacios, for one, consists of a single dirt street lined with shanties, and that street also serves as the airstrip. Sometimes when you land there, you'll see children driving pigs off the runway in advance of the plane. During the contra war in the early '80s, hundreds of tiny airstrips were built by the contras and their allies all over the Mosquitia. These airstrips have been appropriated by the cocaine traffickers, who funnel their product through the area and also do some of their processing there. There is a great tradition of cocaine in the area. The contra war was partially funded by cocaine, which was flown into Lackland Air Force Base and other venues in the States from these very airstrips, and also from Trujillo, a town that lies on a bay enclosed by the Cape of Honduras on the edge of the Mosquitia.
Trujillo was once a tourist place, but since Hurricane Mitch in 1998, tourism has died out. The hotels are empty—the largest are owned by traffickers who use them to launder money. Much of the business of the Mosquito Coast—legal and illegal—is conducted in Trujillo, and many significant players in the region pass through the town. One such is a doctor from Georgia, a wealthy GP with a number of doctors working for him, who shortly before Mitch had a vision of the hurricane and came down to Honduras with medical supplies. He did admirable relief work during the hurricane and stayed on in-country. Over the past four years, he's turned into something of a revolutionary, fomenting rebellion in the Mosquitia, urging a secession from Honduras and Nicaragua. His vision includes, apparently, a 17-year plan during which the freedom of the Mosquito Coast would be achieved. I suppose the Aussie phrase "gone tropo" describes succinctly what has happened to him. He's off on this quasi-messianic death trip, and nothing short of death is going to stay him. He's been the target of assassins and travels with Kalashnikovs under the seat of his car, accompanied by a 19-year-old devotee, a weird leftist Batman and Robin. He managed to wangle three military landing craft from the U.S. military base in Panama and has been using them to run freight into the Mosquitia and also to spread his political message. I don't believe his life expectancy is high. People who annoy the traffickers usually don't have much life expectancy. At any rate, you see a lot of Yankee folly down in that part of the world.
Something called the Freedom Ship is scheduled to begin construction any day now in Trujillo. The Freedom Ship is purported to be the world's first floating city, a vessel that will house 100,000 people, be capable of accepting landings by jets, and will journey all over the world. Many, including myself, feel it is a scam, but others are believers. Either way, it's going to bring a whole new cast of characters into the place, grifters and entrepreneurs and so forth; and it testifies to the fact that foreigners—mostly Americans—believe they can come to Honduras and achieve wealth and power there, that they can work their hustles with impunity. Usually they are wrong about this, because they're ill-suited temperamentally to deal with the realities of Central American politics and life.
"Stricken," then, is surely a word that would apply to Trujillo and environs. The magic comes from the astonishing mixture of people and cultures. There's a guy I know who owns an old Coast Guard cutter—he was once a member of the French Foreign Legion. He makes a living at piracy, killing coke traffickers. He takes their cash and gives the drugs to the garifunas and the Miskitia Indians to sell. The Miskitias don't believe in an afterlife or God, but they believe in devils. They have no native crafts. No real cosmology. They give peculiar names to their children. I know two brothers and a cousin named Hitler, John Wayne and Alka Seltzer. You put the French Foreign Legion guy together with these curious existentialists and the garifunas, a sort of human alchemy results. By my lights, that's magic.
You have a massive collection in prospect from PS Publishing in 2004, tentatively titled Trujillo and Other Stories. What do you expect the lineup to be?
Shepard: The contents are not yet completely determined. Aside from the title novella, original to the volume, the stories I know will be included are "The Drive-In Puerto Rico," "Only Partly Here," "Senor Volto," "Jailwise," "Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?", "The Same Old Story," "The Park Sweeper," "Crocodile Rock." About half these stories will initially see print later this year. A story called "A Walk In The Garden," set in near-future Iraq, may be included, depending on when Ellen Datlow publishes it on Sci Fiction. There may be a new Dragon Griaule story in the volume, one that has the unevocative working title, "Skull." The book will wind up in the neighborhood of 200,000 words, probably just under that.
PS is also publishing a new novel, Floater, a stark yet opulent existential thriller about the operations of voodoo practitioners in New York City. Voodoo is an old staple, a cliche really, of dark fantasy; yet you give it a powerful new life. How did you set about this revision and revitalization?
Shepard: If voodoo seems a cliche in dark fantasy, it's mainly because it's handled in a cliche fashion. To my knowledge, not many writers of fiction have paid any attention to the real body of voodoo, only to its garish and mostly misapprehended plumage. The politics of voodoo, for instance, the intricately configured feuds that go on between temples and various sects, these occupy the minds of its devotees more than do the tenets of the religion, and almost nothing has been written about this facet of the culture.
The genesis of Floater was not voodoo per se, but derived from reading a number of articles by Michael Dailey of the New York Daily News, relating to the shooting of Amadou Diallo by an anti-crime team of New York City policemen during the pre-9/11 portion of the Giuliani administration. Diallo was a Haitian immigrant, and my thought was, what if he'd been an adherent of voodoo? I envisioned a similar incident in which this was the case. I wanted to contrast the politics of the shooting with the politics of a voodoo feud between a santeria temple and a group of Shango Baptists, a Christian voodoo sect, and use this as a backdrop to tell the story of one of the cops. For the purposes of the piece, I needed a doctrinal conflict that could be interpreted as being both a matter of cosmic and of mundane significance, and so I came up with a MacGuffin that involved the cyclical vulnerability of Okun, the warrior god of the voodoo pantheon, the notion that his place might be challenged by a new god. The dubious reality of the challenge—at least in the eyes of the protagonist, it's dubious—allowed me to suggest that it might be a fraud designed to cover up a revenge plot.
Your long novella Louisiana Breakdown, just published by Golden Gryphon, also involves voodoo and related beliefs. Why did you choose a small town in Louisiana as a microcosm of all the hypocrisies and false appearances of the world?
Shepard: Louisiana Breakdown deals less with voodoo than with the cultural and personal functions of faith under any name. In Louisiana, religion is a DIY trip, and in New Orleans there's a new syncretic religion every block or two. I know people down there who belong to churches that have congregations of five or six, Christian sects that borrow a little of this, a little of that, and wham!, it's a whole new belief system. So Louisiana seemed the perfect place to set a story about the accommodations people make in order to sustain faith, to preserve whatever illusions they believe can guarantee their security.
I intended the town of Grail to be a crystallization of Louisiana. It's a place that's both exotic and ordinary, unremarkable on the surface, but full of psychics and unexplained events and with a population who're persuaded to rely on a particular belief, on the validity of a pact they've made with an idiosyncratic spirit, the Good Gray Man—one they ultimately discover that they've misapprehended—in order to sustain the town's luck. One of the two protagonists, Jack Mustaine, is an interloper, a musician whose car breaks down outside of town. He's suffering a kind of moral breakdown himself, and his intrusion into Grail triggers events that eventually cause the breakdown of the town's belief system and the spiritual breakdown of the other central figure, Vida Dumars, a woman who, though she's held in low personal esteem by the town, is in truth its most important citizen. ...
In Vida, I was trying to combine two Louisiana women I once knew. The first was a very beautiful woman who lived with a wealthy dabbler in the occult—he kept a black goat tied to an altar in his living room and had the woman preside over various unsavory practices. The second was a woman who had concocted a very personalized and constantly evolving form of animism. She defined herself in terms of this faith, becoming so wrapped up in its convoluted skeins that she suffered a psychotic break. Vida, then, becomes both the queen and the victim of her somewhat omnivorous faith. Both a magical figure and an existential one. Which is a duality that reflects the character of the world as I perceive it. So how all this relates to your question ... I don't see the citizens of Grail as acting hypocritically toward Vida as much as they're locked into a belief system that forces them to behave in a hypocritical fashion if they are to survive. Perhaps that's the nature of hypocrisy, but I associate hypocrisy with cowardice, and I see the people of Grail as being too aggressive and stubborn in their behavior to be thought of as true hypocrites. They hate Vida because she makes them aware of the lie they're living; they revere her because only she can save them. There's no other way they can feel about her. And that, too, may be the way of the world as regards those whom it finds necessary to sacrifice.
In early 2004, Golden Gryphon issues Two Trains Running, a short collection of stories and essays about American hobo culture. You put quite a lot of research into this subject, didn't you? How directly did you experience life on the rails and in hobo jungles?
Shepard: Several years ago, I contracted to do an article for Spin concerning a hobo organization called the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a group that certain elements of law enforcement claimed was a hobo mafia responsible for—among other crimes—hundreds of murders, drug running on a massive scale, and the derailing of trains. As it turned out, this assertion proved ludicrous. The world of the contemporary hobo can be a violent one, but there is nothing organized about it. I hopped freights over a span of a couple of months, talked to train tramps in hobo jungles, urban squats, wino bars, at railfan conventions, in a supermax prison where I interviewed a hobo murderer named Mississippi Bones, and at various other venues. For a time I traveled on the rails with a hobo named Madcat, a Gulf War vet, and in his company I experienced a fair sampling of hobo life. It's a life that has little connection with the common view of hobos, that conveyed mainly by stories that reference the Depression era, which seems by contrast a rather innocent period. You don't run across too many colorful hobo gatherings with Woody Guthrie songfests and codgers talking about the good ol' days. There were some ugly nights, like the one I spent waiting to catch out on a train in a cattle pen in the Missoula freight yard, lying among piles of cow flop, while two drunken men who appeared to be in their 60s but were really 20 years younger threatened to kill one another, falling down and soiling themselves, screaming and sobbing until almost dawn. But there were good nights, too. One that comes to mind is a night I spent partying with a bunch of tramps in the New Mexico desert, celebrating the freight trains that passed by with bottle rockets and lots of fortified wine.
Shortly before I began riding, a hobo serial killer whose train name was Sidetrack had been arrested in Roseville, California, and subsequently admitted to over 40 murders. Thankfully, I never encountered anyone that menacing, but most people on the rails carry weapons. Knives, ax handles, goon sticks (ax handles to which softball-sized lumps of lead have been welded). Killings and beatings do occur. People get thrown off trains by fellow riders. For the most part, these acts are perpetrated not by hobos, but by people who prey on hobos—the neighborhoods in which freight yards are situated usually aren't upscale, and there are people about who're of a mind to do violence. You see a lot of men in the yards and the jungles who've been beaten or misused in some way. One night when Madcat and I were jungled up beneath an overpass in the Spokane freight yard, this guy came out of the weeds and fell out by our fire. He was covered with blood, his face painted red from scalp cuts and lumped up. His lower lip was raw-looking. He was so beat down he couldn't speak. We gave him a couple of drinks. When the whiskey hit the cuts inside his mouth, he let out a hiss that sounded like the fluid was damping a fire inside him. He put down three, four inches of whiskey and, strengthened, left without a word. God only knows if he was the winner of a fight or the loser.
On the upside, some of the hardcore train tramps I encountered were fascinating. This one hobo, Santa Claus, carried these remarkable hand-carved puppets in his pack and did shows for kids. A truly sweet old man. I met poets—not great poets, but honest ones. I met accomplished musicians, storytellers, and just good, ordinary people who weren't homeless or impoverished due to bad luck or fate; they simply had declined, for one reason or another, society's invitation to join. There are a great variety of folks out on the rails, not just hobos. Carny workers, itinerant preachers, Native Americans, illegal immigrants, yuppie riders who have taken riding the rails up as a hobby, et cetera, et cetera. Then there are the crusty punks, the new breed of hobos. Young, pierced and tattooed. Most from the absolute bottom rung of society. They're heavy drug abusers and drinkers, aggressive partyers, but many maintain a sort of sprained innocence. I came to think of the rail system as being an incredibly skinny, million-mile-long city that runs all through the country, a place with its own laws and customs, where if you want to hook up with somebody, instead of calling them on the phone, you spray-paint a message underneath a railroad bridge, and if you need to meet someone, instead of riding a bus or the subway, you catch out on a freight. There are, I believe, a large number of less livable cities in this country, at least in terms of their cultural rewards.
What else lies ahead for you? There've been reports of new stories about your famous Dragon Griaule, something titled The Iron Shore, a novel set in far-future Brazil, a crime thriller. ...
Shepard: This summer I'll be finishing a couple of things. A group of interrelated stories concerning Griaule. People will likely call it a fix-up novel, but Griaule was always going to have the form of a chronicle, so whatever it's called, that's how I think of it. I'll also, I believe, be finishing a mid-length novel about the Mosquito Coast. After that, I'll be working on a crime thriller called A Startled Outcry. And probably starting a science fantasy novel—a far-future piece set at the end of a great war. The Iron Shore is a short novel I'm pecking away at whenever I have a moment. Set in the Caribbean on the desolate end of an island where a man on corporate sabbatical has taken his young wife to live for a year. Kind of an end-of-the-Colonial-period political Grahame Greene-ish fantasy. I'm taking my time with it.
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