A Handbook of American Prayer: A Novel [Hardcover]

Lucius Shepard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2004

A man walks into a bar. A dispute ensues, and the bartender kills him. He's sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. In prison, the convict, Wardlin Stuart, writes prayers addressed to no god in particular. Inexplicably, his prayers — whether it's a request for a girlfriend or a special favor for a fellow inmate — are answered, be it in days or weeks. When his collection of supplications, A Handbook of American Prayer, is published by a New York press, Stuart emerges a celebrity author. Settling into a new life in Arizona, he encounters a fundamentalist minister. The two are destined for a confrontation. In the interim, it seems that the god to whom Stuart has been praying has manifested himself on the earth. In this short novel about America's conflicting love triangle — celebrity, spirituality, and money — Shepard negotiates the thin line between the real and the surreal, expounding upon violence and redemption along the way. This story of an unlikely American messiah shows why The Wall Street Journal has compared Shepard, an award-winning author, to Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Ward Just.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Having made his reputation with literary SF and fantasy set in the jungles of Central America (The Jaguar Hunter), Shepard embarked on a second phase in his career, exploring the back roads of America (Two Trains Running). Mixing the tropes of fantasy and noir fiction, Shepard has cobbled together a beguiling tale. Wardlin Stuart, spinning his wheels as a bartender just off of Puget Sound, gets into a drunken brawl that ends in death for his attacker. Convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned, he concocts something called "prayerstyle" as a way to survive institutional violence. To Wardin's surprise, prayerstyle works; it even brings him the love of his life. Word gets out, and other inmates ask him to create and chant prayers for them. Wardlin puts together a book of prayers, and A Handbook of American Prayer is published, resulting in parole, unwanted fame and hundreds of pleas from across the country for help. Wondering if the religion he inadvertently created is a blessing or a curse, Wardlin tries to lay low with his lady love in Arizona. But his growing popularity results in a violent encounter with a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Phoenix. And just as he's planning to give up prayerstyle, Wardlin discovers that his fictitious god may be real. This well-paced meditation on the nature of faith and our national obsession with the cult of celebrity finds Shepard at the height of his powers: poetic and pugnacious; metaphysical, yet down and dirty as a back-alley brawl.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Not since Laurie Foos' hilarious send-up of the contemporary American media obsession with unlikely celebrity, Ex Utero (1995), has there been such dead-on fictional scrutiny of what is news. And in this case, what news: the crossing over from pop best-sellerdom to religion to cultish sociopsychology of the titular volume, a collection of pragmatic prayer-poems for specific things but to no particular god save "the God of Loneliness" that murderer Wardlin Stuart develops while in stir. Fortunately, Stuart is paroled in time to pitch the book; not, however, before a prison chaplain marries him in jail to a woman he met via "prayer-speak." It's a pop-lit publicist's dream, and Shepard's arresting tale of a cult celebrity in spite of himself has an elegiac, dreamlike quality. Though filled with introspection, it is punctuated by the kind of sinister edginess and violence that only underlay Ex Utero as it shows an admittedly shallow and indifferent murderer become the focus of sociological, political, and religious pundits, and a cult hero. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press; First Edition edition (September 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568582811
• ISBN-13: 978-1568582818
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,025,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great literate fantasy read, January 8, 2005

By 

squirrel dodger (North Bend, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Handbook of American Prayer: A Novel (Hardcover)

Though I was reminded of both Nabokov's understated humor and Robert Bly's free verse in reading "Handbook of American Prayer," ultimately the book's a satisfying fantasy-genre read, comprising the pleasures of good noir, urban fantasy, and magic realism without neatly fitting any of those categories. "Handbook" doesn't really satirize the TV religion or Hollywood celebrities it involves. Given Shepard's propensity for full-scale attack on media icons, he's surprisingly restrained (though one popular film critic gets a good raking-over). The media trappings merely support the book's exploration of imprisonment -- how the narrator, lacking purpose in his life, falls into jail, goes through a hero's journey to find and exploit the magic that helps him survive it and prosper on the outside, and then extricates himself from that magic to win some psychological freedom. It's a lengthier treatment of the theme Shepard explored so well in the excellent novella "Jailwise" but arrives at a different, more optimistic conclusion, both figuratively and plotwise. Shepard employs a lot of his usual tropes -- altered states of consciousness, obsessive love, seedy locales -- but the narrator follows a different character arc than his usual protagonist, finding his way through an exercise of self-determination and loyalty that his characters usually can't manage, due to their natures or circumstances. "Handbook" is a smooth, coherent, satisfying read, consistently interesting and exciting.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Favorite Novel of 2004, January 21, 2005

By 

Andy Fox (New Orleans, Louisiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Handbook of American Prayer: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was first exposed to Lucius Shepard when I heard him give a reading of a chapter from HANDBOOK, then a novel in progress, back in 2003. I was immediately hooked by the chapter's beguiling mixture of the quotidian (an Arizona souvenir shop) and the eerie (a customer who might be a god) and looked forward to the book's publication with great anticipation. Now that I have read it, I can't say that I'm disappointed in the slightest. This is a literary noir thriller of the highest caliber. During the most recent half-decade of his writing career, Lucius has concentrated on novellas and other shorter forms, and his skill for compacting plot is used to great effect in this full-length novel. The book's first thirty pages include enough incident and conflict to fuel an entire novel, and he's just getting started. His characterizations are full-bodied and introduce you to people you'll feel you've known through a long, fulfilling relationship by the time you reach the book's final pages. Lucius's settings, from smalltown Arizona to the Mexican border to the Chilean coast, are vivid and linger in the mind. His prose is rich and serves a cultural satire that never comes across as tiresome or preachy. But best of all, these virtues, enough by themselves to propel another book to the top of many "Ten Best" lists, are harnessed to a plot that grabs you by the throat and never lets go. Here's a book that's not only good for you, but which tastes good, too. After slogging through many highly-praised novels in recent years which sorely (and often successfully) tempted me to put them aside, the fact that this book, a work of high literary quality and ambition, could be so damn entertaining was a very, very welcome gift from the reading gods.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's JG Ballard...STUNNING, September 1, 2008

By 

Op. 133 (San Francisco, CA, United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Handbook of American Prayer: A Novel (Paperback)

I'm only three-quarters of a way through this book but feel compelled to write up a review NOW. Shepard is truly sui generis and simply brilliant. Gorgeous, lusty prose with storytelling that combines elements of science fiction, magical realism, horror, you name it. The man writes like he's on a mission from ANOTHER WORLD. :) BTW, his short stories are incredible as well (he wrote the greatest dragon story and the greatest post-9/11 story IMO). I mentioned him as America's JG Ballard, because Ballard is the only other guy I know who can write such "out there" stuff with such breath-taking grace *and* audacity.

This book's insights into celebrity-hood, religion and mass media mania are unnervingly spot-on and so much more affecting than something like Chuck Palahnuik's "Survivor" which has many of the same elements, but none of the soul and depth. It's the difference between night and day.

Why Shepard hasn't gotten his due is beyond me. Meanwhile, writers that aren't even fit to walk in his shadow are getting oodles of money and fame. HUH?

If you want to get a quick taste of just how "on-fire" his prose can get, pick up a copy at a bookstore or library and flip to page 114 and read that long gleaming riff of a sentence that starts with: "It had nothing to do with Sharon Stone..." haha! YES!

While boring, over-baked "lit" books like Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union are getting lauded to the rafters, the real good stuff always seems to pass under the radar. Seek this one out!