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. The stories in this book, including six novellas (one original to this volume) are: "Stars Seen Through Stone"—in a small Pennsylvania town, mediocrity suddenly blossoms into genius; but at what terrible cost? "Emerald Street Expansions"—in near-future Seattle, echoes of the life of a medieval French poet hint at cither reincarnation or a dire conspiracy. "Limbo"—a retired criminal on the run from the Mafia encounters ghosts, and much worse, on the shores of a haunted lake "Liar's House"—in the grip of the legendary dragon Griaule, destiny, is a treacherous and transformative thing. "Dead Money"—a small-time New Orleans criminal ventures outside his proper territory, and poker and voudoun conspire to bring him down. "Dinner at Baldassaro's"—a gang of immortals debates the future in an Italian resort, only for events to outrun any of their expectations. "Abimagique"—a glib college loser falls in love with a witch, becoming an involuntary part of a world-saving—or world-destroying—magical ritual. "The Lepidopterist"—a small boy on a Caribbean island witnesses the creation of preternatural beings by a Yankee wizard… "Dagger Key"—off the coast of Belize, the ghost of a famous pirate seems to control a spiral of murder and intrigue; or is someone else responsible? Dagger Key And Other Stories / Copyright © 2007 by Lucius Shepard Introduction / Copyright © 2007 by China Miéville Cover / Copyright © 2007 by J.K. Potter Published in September 2007 by PS Publishing Ltd. by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author. FIRST EDITION ISBN 978-1-904619-74-1 (Deluxe slipcased hardcover) 978-1-904619-73-4 (Trade hardcover) This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. "Stars Seen Through Stone" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2007; "Emerald Street Expansions" first appeared on Sci Fiction, March 2002; "Limbo" first appeared in The Dark, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor, 2003), and has been revised for its appearance here; "Liar's House" first appeared on Sci Fiction, December 2003; "Dead Money" first appeared in Asimov's, April 2007; "Dinner at Baldassaro's" first appeared in Postscripts 10, Spring 2007; "Abimagique" first appeared on Sci Fiction, August 2005, and has been extensively revised for its appearance here; "The Lepidopterist" first appeared in Salon Fantastique, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling (Thunder's Mouth, 2006); "Dagger Key" is original to this collection. Design and layout by Alligator Tree Graphics Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd PS Publishing Ltd / Grosvenor House / 1 New Road / Hornsea, HU18 1PG / Great Britain
FOR
BOB AND KAROL
(warning—spoilers ho.)
Lovers of the fantastic are special.
We, and especially we, can see through the grubbiness of reality. We, and especially or even only we, are attuned to the marvellous, not bowed down by the grinding tedium of quotidian life. It’s no wonder we so love the figure of the special, visionary child who never fits in with her so-boring parents, town and classmates, and who eventually finds her way to the enchanted land she deserves. We are that child. In our passion for the magic behind the everyday, we are an elect.
Yeah.
Right.
Is that a parody of the position? Certainly, a little, but consider the cavalierly nouned adjective “Mundane”. It’s a common enough term used by some SF/F fans to refer to those who prefer their cultural production “realist” and mainstream. Such an epithet bespeaks the ludicrously aggrandising self-image of some fans of the fantastic. Because if they, everyone else, are “mundane”, what are we, but, well…special?
Fortunately there have always been countertraditions. There are, for example, the anti-fantasies of M. John Harrison, or Michael Swanwick’s astonishing The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. These are books with an antagonistic, even punitive relationship with the fantastic they express.
And there’s Lucius Shepard.
Shepard, too, is too tough, too political to let fantasy believe in its own fey daydream of escape. But his strategy is not one of scorching earth. It is a little gentler, no less effective, and altogether fascinating.
It’s hard to put your finger on. You read and reread these stories, and know that something strange is going on, but for a while you can’t work out what it is.
At last it hits you. In the stories of Dagger Key, Lucius Shepard makes the fantastic a bit low-key.
Wait, wait. There’s no cause for alarm. This is high praise, not criticism. This is at the crux of what makes Shepard so exceptional.
Let’s be clear: addicts of the wow-porn we call the Sense of Wonder need not be concerned—Dagger Key contains unspeakably alien creatures, body-hopping ghosts, impossible conspiracies, zombies (a rare treat, “Dead Money”, a follow-on to the astonishing early novel Green Eyes), fallen angels, dimensional portals, lives after deaths, a sex-magic apocalypse, and a story set on and around the flanks of what is perhaps Shepard’s most popular and enduring creation, the huge, nebulously malevolent dragon Griaule.
But despite and alongside the traditional vasty strangeness of these concerns, Shepard brilliantly and provocatively pokes the grandiosity of the strange, in his precise delivery, his bewildered protagonists, his refusal of bombastic catharsis or explanation. He teases the magic.
Take the book’s opening story, “Stars Seen through Stone”. It opens with Shepard’s usual exceptionally acute dialogue and observations, a study of a loathsome little man. Gradually the scene becomes more uncomfortable, at first in ways that would be familiar in “mainstream” fiction, before the gradual realisation that something else is going on. Some entity from beyond is spreading its influence. It is preparing to feed. The wall between worlds is growing thin. Until, at last, in a vivid and dramatic supernatural culmination, those boundaries are breached, and things from beyond emerge, to feast, to harvest humans.
After which, we learn, “there was a hue and cry about leaving the town, [until]…calmer voices prevailed, pointing to the fact that there had been no fatalities”.
Wait…what?
It’s a horror story. What else can it be? That burgeoning foreboding, the creaking of the seams of the world, the maleficent intervention, the breach, the monstrous feeding. But how many horror stories end, in effect, “…and then everything was back to normal and no one died”?
The events described weren’t the apocalypse they appeared to be. They were just something that happened, and that finished without that much lasting impact. It is an absolutely bravura move, that only a writer of supreme confidence and guts could carry off.
Shepard knows well that we have read the same books he has. He knows that we know how that story must end. He withholds, though, because that is not the universe in which his characters live. We may have thought they lived in a story, but actually they are somewhere more real, more natural than that.
