o it comes home to us again like a storm that has finally arrived, another big book from Lucius Shepard, a book big enough to shake the house if you drop it, a book that takes us way down inside the big thunder and thunderation belly of story of Lucius, down here with Lucius in the adamant and echolalia, caught in his crook like sheep for slaughter. Down here in big black booming Trujillo and Other Stories, all 682 big pages of it, we find ourselves in a world of hugenesses and moral anguish, of almost unendurable heterosexual stress and passion, assault and battery, the big booming voice of the author thumping tubs and thaumaturgies, as ever before. Or so it feels at a first read.
Pardon the noise. You have to shout to be heard. I'm not entirely sure Trujillo is a great collection, because it is perhaps too shoutingly monothematical in the end, but I know (after climbing back to the surface) that, like anything Lucius Shepard has ever written at his best pitch, it is a great event of a collection. And, like all Shepard, it has to be wrestled with, it earns that much effort from the reader. There are 11 stories here, and each one of them pounds like drums, though a couple do dwindle (as Shepard is sometimes inclined to) into senatorial peroration, the same asthmatic bathos that reduced, for instance, the recent Louisiana Breakdown to wheedle. But nothing here collapses quite so stertorously as that.
It is all very big to take in. It must not be read all at once. Trujillo itself, never published before, is the length of a short novel, and makes use of the space it takes; several others could have been published as good-sized chapbooks; only a few are what the talmudists of word-count would deem to be mere "novelettes." Only one story—"Crocodile Rock" (1999 Fantasy and Science Fiction)—comes out of the last century; all the rest are newer, crittercamming the beast of Now. "Crocodile Rock" is also the only story set in Africa, a garish cartoony Congo with a slightly vicarious heft of Conrad to it, all too easy to fabricate. The five stories that make up the second half of the book are set in and around Trujillo, Honduras, which is a real place; of the remainder, one is set in post-9/11 Manhattan; one in Iraq; one in Moscow; one in Florida, in the No Man's Land between Daytona Beach and Disney World; and one—"Jailwise" (2003 Sci Fiction) in a metaphysical prison that feels like an inside outside of the Dragon Griaule which malefically englobes the humans who live upon its stone tonnage. The latest Griaule tale, Liar's House (Subterranean Press, 2004, $35), typically carries its inarticulate protagonist into deeper and deeper ironies of bondage to the dragon at the heart, but the hero of "Jailwise," also "under the influence of a powerful coercive force," does indeed transubstantiate the dragging diktats of the world into a life shaped by making, for he is a great painter despite his deep knowledge that art is a sham on chaos, a mock "eidolon," an "illusion."
Loud and painful life lessons
All of this is conducted at a shout—sometimes subsonic, a vibrato deep under the mind's eye that references no actual noise; but sometimes, as happens often in Shepard, an inner shout of pain suddenly become audible, the giant wordless roar of frustation and/or epiphany of a doomed adult male—and it is all conducted in this world. None of the stories here begin in the future, or elsehwere than this planet; and most of them begin in the mundane. Trujillo seems to have been carefully assembled, in other words, to focus our minds on the millennial transforms of the verifiable here and now; every story in the collection seems somehow to tell stories of the human race—invariably represented by men, usually males who think they can eat before they are eaten—caught in gears of world-change. It is this sense of placement in the world, and accountability to the world, that makes Trujillo, which has hardly a conventional SF moment in all its pages, feel so much like SF:
The freeway, I-94, is a curving stretch of concrete along which flow thousands of cars ..., and sometimes as I drive, a dreamlike feeling steals over me, I become distant from human thoughts and desires, tranquil in the face of the unknown, and I see myself gliding along that white riverine strip, a soul and flesh encased in steel, one of thousands of such entities, and we are all moving inexorably toward a far-off patch of glowing red, brilliant and flickering like fire, drawn to it by a force beyond our comprehension, but confident that when we reach it we will be transformed in a fashion that will allow us to survive the great trouble that afflicts us all. ...
That was "Crocodile Rock," which does not identify what draws us into the fire. In "Señor Volto" (2003 Sci Fiction), human history is seen as a way to, as it were, menuize humans for the delectation of what we might call God, or Chaos Mask. We inhabit a "carceral universe" (the phrase is from "Jailwise"), and our only freedom is to obey freely. In several other stories, where there is no God to whip us into shape, all we can do is to articulate the chaos within and without, through our lives and art—"Going forward is who they are," as the American soldier tenterhooked to the portals of hell in Iraq realizes, in "A Walk in the Garden" (2003 Sci Fiction):
Sliding both hands forward and then dragging the haunches. Slower, but more stable. It's a tough choice, but he'll work it out, he'll devise a pattern of alternation, a system by which he can rest different muscles at different times and thus maximize his stamina. He knows how to do this sh-t. It's all he's ever done, really. Going forward against the crush of force and logic. Moving smartly when smart movement is called for. Crawling through shadow, looking for shade.
The metaphysical is physical. Learning hurts.
Life down among wounded
The other stories say the same about life on this planet. The most intimate of all is "Only Partly Here" (2003 Asimov's Science Fiction), set in the pit left by the fall of the towers in Manhattan (pits proliferate in Shepard, and they are all openings to hell); it is a ghost story whose emotional effect hit this reader (at least) only half a day after the end of reading, but hit hard. "Eternity and Afterward" (2001 Fantasy and Science Fiction), perhaps the most virtuoso tale in the book, carries a post-fall Russian hood into a nightclub which is a pit which is a revel which is an edifice which is a labyrinth which is hell which is the sum of life. Like many of Shepard's least paraphrasable tales, it is, in the end, an Arabian Nightmare: a series of dreams, each worse than its predecessor, each of them leading the dreamer deeper into the terrible pulse of things, and no exit ever. The Florida story, "Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?" (in Night Visions, 2004), is also an Arabian Nightmare.
Trujillo is, in other words, absolutely full of itself. Whether or not a particular story lifts successfully into its final pages, the reader cannot forget for an instant what it's really all about: the negotiations necessary when men (no women really figure from the inside out in this book) confront the face of chaos and realize that, somehow, they must continue to shape their lives under the gaze of that face, which is the face of any god able to delectate the world we live in now. The process is painful—Trujillo is full of men beating men up; men obsessed by women and having sex with women and brutalizing women; men stared at by crocodiles, whom they may become—and sometimes Shepard's storying of his clear deep sense of the nature of things does slide, as we said earlier, into bombast.
But even if some of these stories do breathe awful heavy before they stop, none of them fails to pound the heart. None of them fails to try to get at the heart of things. As a whole, the assembly of tales put together as Trujillo may be too unremitting in the conveyance of its message; the reader may fairly long to encounter, in its 700 pages, just one protagonist able to keep his head above water—water that is nothing but water, no portal need apply to suck us down. But in this book Shepard is not truly interested in surfers. This time round, he is really only interested in trying to describe the wounded who claw for dayspring, the disappeared who have learned how to breathe—like lungfish, "going forward is who they are"—in these waters of this planet.
