From CIA-led incursions in Central America to a massive dead dragon whose mental powers still permeate everything around it, Lucius Shepard wrote stories with style and vision. Despite significant critical acclaim, Shepard never achieved major success, even within the SF world of the 1990s.

Shepard (1943-2014), published around 10 novels and several short stories. Some of the these short stories were collected in a pair of volumes published by Arkham House, back when they published SF and not just horror/dark fantasy. His first novel, Green Eyes, appeared in 1984. Life During Wartime, one of the “Central America” tales (like Green Eyes, plus some of the stories in the Arkham House books — The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth), appeared in 1987. In 1988, Grafton published a hardcover edition in the United Kingdom. I recently acquired a copy of this book, in quite nice condition despite the slightly yellowing pages. The book is signed by Shepard, a bonus, I suppose. It joins a dozen of Shepard books that I already own, including novellas, collections, and novels. As always, I wonder how this British edition made its way over to the US, and somehow ended up in a bookstore there (in this case, in Phoenix, Arizona).

Although he started out with tales set in Central America, he’s perhaps best known for his Dragon Griaule stories, which include “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” “The Father of Stones,” “Liar’s House” and others. He also wrote a vampire novel, The Golden (Mark V. Ziesing, 1993), plus some interesting horror/dark fantasy stories. He was briefly linked to the Cyberpunk movement in SF in the 1990s, but always seemed to chart his own way.