VIATOR PLUS a collection by Lucius Shepard. Hornsea, East Yorkshire, UK; PS Publishing; 2009. 1st trade hardcover edition. publication date: December 2009. Jacketed Hardcover. Edition: unsigned. Introduction: None. Cover Artist: Jim Burns. ISBN: 978-1-84863035-2. Synopsis / Contents: In this, his seventh major collection, Lucius Shepard is as magisterial in narration and darkly eloquent in style as ever. The stories gathered here conduct the reader from the wastelands of the near future to the zoned-out bacchanals of Hollywood, from the fevered bordellos of Central America to the hallucinated revels of redneck country, from the broken hearts of wandering loners to alluring fantasy realms just beyond the threshold of perception. And when the journey is over, eternal contrasts--of man and woman, bosses and workers, responsibility and escape, conformity and freedom--stand in more powerful definition than ever before... The title novel, Viator, is here published in its full, intended text for the first time, and is revealed as Shepard’s masterpiece of the decade. Five men of Swedish descent, drifters and drunks on the mend, are assigned to live aboard a derelict ship on the Alaskan coast, only to perceive that they are on the brink of a voyage beyond our world, one of beckoning glamour and incipient madness. Long sentences, alternately languorous and urgent, run moodily throughout the tale, in a feast of metaphoric language limning the perils of a soul caught between anchoring love and transcendent illusion. And other stories set out equally resonant crises of the conflicted psyche. A mine manager who knows his domain for the very image of Hell bids for redemption, or at least survival. A scriptwriter in Hollywood finds that false appearances exist not only in films. A veteran rock singer, the “Queen Mother”, confronts apparitions with muddled resolve. A town in Latin America witnesses abasements emblematic of the region’s poverty. A foolish man loses his lover and pursues her image to nowhere. And the emergence of a monster on an American beach is not at all what it seems. Viator Plus is a book of charismatic distinction, one of the finest collections of the year. BIO: Lucius Shepard lives in Portland, Oregon, but that is liable to change. Forthcoming are a new collection, Five Autobiographies, a novella, The Taborin Scale, and the novels Beautiful Blood and The End of Life as We Know It. His previous collection, Dagger Key (also published by PS), won the International Horror Guild Award, and he has won the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, as well as numerous others, for his fiction. 1st trade hardcover unsigned edition LIMITED to 500 copies. Fine in fine dj. |