Customer Reviews

Softspoken

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With Softspoken Lucius Shepard puts his spin on the ghost story / haunted house sub-genre of fiction. Sanie and her husband Jackson are transplants from Chapel Hill, North Carolina down to South Carolina so Jackson can study for the bar. To get away from all distractions, Jackson and Sanie are living in Jackson's childhood home. From the start Sanie hears voices, somebody calling out her name. After ruling out Jackson's brother and sister, who are each living at the house, Sanie starts thinking about ghosts.

Where the average author would tell a simple ghost story and veer into some Hill House related horror, Lucius Shepard does something different. He changes the nature of the game. Softspoken is not a simple ghost story. It is not a simple anything. Shepard presents us Sanie, a well put together woman who is pulled away from everything she knows to support her husband's studies. From a vibrant community she now lives in an insular town where Jackson Bullard's family has a bit of a reputation for madness. It is this madness which Sanie faces along with the voices and as the house and the town begins to exert some sort of influence on her husband and on herself.

Lucius Shepard is a master at packing in the most story and the most feeling into a short novel. Softspoken is, no pun intended, a haunting novel of hidden voices, ghosts, a breaking marriage, and the influence of small towns and family history. In a tight little package, Softspoken delivers a gripping story which gets more complex as the novel progresses and Shepard peels away layer after to layer to reveal far more than the reader initially anticipated. Lucius Shepard is a top shelf writer. Read him.

-Joe Sherry

Shepard effectively uses a haunted house to symbolize a one-sided marriage and the trap it creates for both husband and wife. The Bullard family home seems to afford Sanie's husband the isolation and comfort he needs to finish his legal studies, but it is haunted by his family's ancestral madness, a force that propels the story toward a conclusion that is both inevitable and surprising. Though as engaging as any good genre read, Softspoken has the broad relevance, well-drawn characters, and keen psychological insight of the best mainstream literature.

Shepard is truly a giant in the short story and science fiction fields but I found this a good and interesting read without the power of his other work. It is only a cut above a standard ghost-based thriller, with interesting characters and a somewhat banal plot. Worth a look for Shepard fans and ghost addicts.

I both agree and disagree with the other reviewers. While Shepard maintains his usual high quality of writing, displaying prowess with descriptions and character development, the plot ends up being less than satisfying, the end in particular.

I am a big fan of Shepard's writing and have read most everything he has written. As this story developed, I thought it was a bit too much like the old storyline of girl marries jerk, meets nice guy and bails on Mr. Jerk, ends up dead via Mr. Jerk. But I kept reading because Shepard often lures the reader in with the ordinary, only to go careening off the track into the bizarre and weird before you realize it. Not so here.

In fact, when I finished the read, I felt like I had just been tricked into watching one of those syrupy Lifetime network movies with the aforementioned plot. The ghost story plot goes no where. Even one of the main characters declares that it's harmless, nothing. Simply a voice heard in the house, nothing more, and we never do get anything else.

Shepard is a very skilled writer, filling his stories with lush descriptions of the locations and deep development of the characters. But I suggest you try any of his other works, this one was disappointing.

Or a mystery. It's a situational study, a character study.

SPOILERS!!!!

She died, that terrible pain she was barely aware of below her breast was likely a stab wound. She died in the ditch, her soul was sucked back into the vortex of the house, and now she haunts it with all the other ghosts she'd seen on the peyote. But that's not the point. Her haunting path is to walk downstairs and stare at the calender, same as she did while she was living. While a man, likely Jackson who was likely murdered by Dean, chases after her, just to be sure she is there.

She was a trapped ghost in life same as death. She was no better off in life; she squandered and haunted even when she had a chance not to.

And now that I've written all that out I have to admit it's pretty neat and have to raise the star score.