Lucius Shepard is a grand master of dark fantasy, famed for his baroque yet utterly contemporary visions of existential subversion and hallucinatory collapse. In Dagger Key, his fifth major story collection, Shepard confronts hard bitten loners and self-deceiving operators with the shadowy emptiness within themselves and the insinuating darkness without, to ends sardonic and terrifying.
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Editorial Reviews
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*Starred Review* The phrase "embarrassment of riches" could have been coined for this omnibus of mostly not-so-short stories. Shepard is so good at novella length that the mere short story "The Lepidopterist," a drink-cadging beach bum's rap about the events that made him what he is, is the book's weak sister. At 73 pages, "Stars Seen through Stone," about a scuzzy-but-talented musician and a window on another plane of existence, brilliantly mixes alien incursion à la H. P. Lovecraft and the everyday perils of the rock biz as revealed by the indie record-producer narrator. The 75-page ghost story "Limbo," originally the star of the horror anthology The Dark (2003), masterfully blends the atmospheres of Elmore Leonard and Peter Straub, and the ever-so-gratifying "Dead Money" (73 pages) repeats the trick in a marriage of high-stakes poker and voodoo. The 51-page "Liar's House" exploits such quest-fantasy trappings as a creation myth, dragons, and medievalism for antiheroic purposes. The 53-page spirit-possession caper "Dagger Key" is a far more somber, often bracingly naturalistic answer to Pirates of the Caribbean. Throughout, Shepard's rich prose vividly conjures place, deftly yet scrupulously limns characters, and generally dazzles as it enraptures. Olson, Ray
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