Michael Bishop: Scalehunter: Lucius Shepard and the Dragon Griaule Sequence

A Question of Scale?

Nearly thirty years ago, I was pleased to introduce Lucius Shepard’s debut collection of his mature short fiction, The Jaguar Hunter (Arkham House, 1987). At that early point in his career, he required little or no introduction to savvy enthusiasts of fantasy and science fiction. He had already garnered a host of nominations for Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and in 1985 he had collected a John W. Campbell Award as the field’s Best New Writer.

What could I say about Lucius Shepard that others had not already said? His first novel, Green Eyes (1984), bore this front-cover prediction by writer and critic Damon Knight: “Right now ... I believe I am one of about twelve people who know how good Lucius Shepard really is; tomorrow there will be thousands.” So I wrote that Shepard had a strong grounding in the English classics and a varied history of travel and work experience that lifted him well above novice status. I also wrote that he had already “shown signs of outright mastery that both humble and enormously cheer all of us who believe in the power of imaginative fiction to speak to the human heart.”

Late in my introduction, I confessed, “My own favorite ... is ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’—a story that, in the indirect way of a parable, implies a great deal about love and creativity.” Back then, of course, no one knew that Shepard would ever jump from my misnamed “parable” into a work of the scale of both The Dragon Griaule, a collection of a half dozen long stories, and his posthumous novel Beautiful Blood, which together constitute his own monumental Moby Dick, even if his saga necessarily has an episodic quality lacking in Melville’s epic fish tale.¹

I. The Dragon Griaule

A. “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”

Why did I like “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” so much? Initially, it put me in mind of works by both Gabriel García Márquez and, less plausibly, Jorge Luís Borges. Shepard’s tale is far shorter than the former’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course, and far longer than any of the latter’s essay-like ficciones (e.g., “The Circular Ruins,” “The Lottery of Babylon,” “The Library of Babel”). But it offers a flavorful Latin American backdrop akin to that in García Márquez’s novel and suggested Borges to me by excerpting passages from several books of Shepard’s own invention. (However, excerpting fictional works was something more typical of Frank Herbert in his Dune novels than of Borges, who did allude to imaginary books.) But I also liked Shepard’s story’s promise of heroic world building, and plotting, implicit in the Brobdingnagian dragon Griaule—“that mile-long beast paralyzed millennia before by a wizard’s spell, beneath and about which the town of Teocinte had accumulated” (BB 11).

Also interesting was the fact that, despite his grand ambitions, Shepard declined to jettison from his toolkit standard genre tropes. Green Eyes deals with zombies, and later, in The Golden (1993), he tackled vampirism but did so by borrowing his novel’s setting from the etchings in Giambattista Piranesi’s famous series of plates, Carceri d’invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons,” c. 1745). Clearly, for Shepard, the quality of a story depended less on its category tropes than on the seriousness and originality with which he used them. If zombies, then why not a dragon?

In his story notes for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” all original to The Dragon Griaule, Shepard admits that at the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University, stuck for a story idea, he scribbled in his notebook: “fucking big dragon” because “Big stuff ... is cool” (TDG 423). Had anyone told him that this “idea” was akin to a ten-year-old’s fascination with Godzilla and action-flick explosions, Shepard might well have grinned and invited that person to self-pollinate. So to speak.

However, in the same story note, he also informs us, “Generally speaking, I hate wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity,” but if ever he could justify using a category trope, he slid it into the pot.2 In this case, he persuaded himself that his “immense paralyzed dragon,” overmastering “the world around [it] by means of its mental energies,” qualified as “an appropriate metaphor for the Reagan Administration,” which, in the early 1980s, he saw as “laying waste to [his beloved] Central America” (TDG 423).

Or, at least, Shepard later asserted that he did. Tellingly, however, Reagan had not yet become president when he claims he conceived the tale and presumably its metaphorical underpinnings. Or maybe those underpinnings came to him after Reagan was inaugurated, for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” did not appear in Fantasy & Science Fiction until December 1984. Or, to speculate further, maybe it was not until he began writing “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” (c. 1986) that this metaphor took shape in his mind. Or until “The Father of Stones” (c. 1987).... Or until.…

Purportedly, though, this take on The Dragon Griaule tales provided an extra-literary motive for writing these six stories and Beautiful Blood, but readers today will likely miss this subtext or else engage with Shepard’s saga because his writing seems to transport them to a romantic alternate world that gains force through its steady accretion of real-world details. Further, the scale of his eponymous beast, not to mention that of his whole outsized fictive enterprise, demands a commitment to surface events that allows its self-alleged metaphorical content to crawl into a cave and hide—if not just like the dragon Griaule, then definitely sort of like it. Still, Shepard’s subtext probably holds as little meaning for readers today as do the historical events underlying the satire in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which most of us enjoy for its astonishing surface story.

In The Dragon Griaule’s opening tale, Meric Cattanay arrives in Teocinte to propose painting the dragon with colors tainted by poisons that, over time, will slay it. The town has offered a fortune to anyone who achieves this feat, but the city fathers deny Meric either a go-ahead or the resources to do the job. After all, he’s just told them that his method could take fifty years. So what? Meric scolds. They’ve waited centuries for a paladin to deal Griaule a fatal snicker-snack, whereas his plan’s beauty inheres in its use of local plants, pigments, and labor to fulfill its goal. The council appoints Jarcke, the female mayor of Hangtown (a shanty village on the dragon’s back), to guide Meric to the creature, where he beholds the “glowing humour” in its monstrous eye in a long but evocative paragraph that may explain why Jarcke bothers to live in Hangtown at all (TDG 19).

After Teocinte’s city council approves Meric’s proposal and the town begins its epic effort to paint Griaule, the story focuses on a doomed love affair between Meric and Lise Claverie, wife of Pardiel, the foreman of a paint crew, who nearly kills Meric. But leap ahead four decades: Now in his seventies, Meric must keep a haughty new mayor from proposing a “temporary work stoppage.” This man believes that Teocinte’s bully-boy army has made it a regional power and that Griaule’s poisoning has now become a moot point. Meric protests, “But all your rapes and slaughters are Griaule’s expressions. His will” (31).

Later, Meric meets a young woman perched on a tier just beneath Griaule’s eye. She reminds him of Lise, as most women do, and explains that she remembers having once been intimate with him under Griaule’s wing. Ever since, she has been “a little in love” with him. Then she stands and declares, “He’s dead,” meaning the dragon, an ending much too abrupt. Shepard, sensing its abruptness, ends his story by quoting from an invented book, The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule by one Louis Dardano, an excerpt that throws into doubt the narrative preceding it by leaching Meric’s whole dragon-painting enterprise of its dignity and meaning (31–38).

Or does it?

B. “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter”

The volume’s second tale, “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” limns the early history of Catherine, only child of a widowed scalehunter named Riall. Riall has forced her to sleep every night on a large patch of golden scale—to inoculate her against Griaule’s wrath by inducing some of its baleful essence to “seep into her” (40). The girl’s beauty and self-confidence generate in her “a certain egocentricity and shallowness of character” (41), and she earns a reputation that prompts a man from Hangtown to essay rape. Catherine seizes a scaling hook and kills this attacker.

Brianne, a quasi-friend from Hangtown, a former rival for another man’s affections, happens upon Catherine and tells her to stay put while she summons Teocinte’s mayor to conduct an exculpatory investigation of the scene. Instead, Brianne tells the brothers of the foiled rapist what Catherine has done, and Catherine, seeing the brothers approach, retreats into the dragon’s mouth.

Later, deeper into its gullet, she finds a protector in Captain Amos Mauldry, an odd old man who annoyingly tells her, “We are every one of us creatures of [Griaule’s] thoughts” (51). He claims to have expected her and to know in advance, via the dragon’s occult mental powers, what she will think, say, and do, so that he, Mauldry, may function as her guide and confidant (52). To Catherine’s revulsion, however, this man lives with a colony of devolved parasitical human beings who once saved him from death....

Here, let me pause. When I first read this novella, in a handsome stand-alone edition published by Mark V. Ziesing out of Willimantic, Connecticut, in 1988, I liked it very much. I may have recommended it for a Nebula, and I am undeniably cited on the rear jacket flap of this edition as having regarded Shepard’s first Griaule story as “a parable.” But not long after strewing laurels on “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” I learned something distressing about it.

Lucius Shepard, despite or because of his literary talent, had his quirks and demons. Feeling belittled or balked and hence justified in exacting payback, he occasionally used his gift to attack those who had affronted him or, he felt, disparaged his work. He did this more often earlier in his career than later (or so I assume on report), and I can point to at least one story from three distinct collections that takes this sort of revenge. Sadly, “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” earlier gathered in Arkham House’s The Ends of the Earth (1988), is one such story.

Writer and critic Gregory Feeley—whom Shepard probably respected—published a notice of The Jaguar Hunter conceding his talent but also asserting that he did not yet have it under full control. However, Shepard apparently believed that he did, and Feeley’s review steamed him like a clam. Perhaps thinking to disarm its criticism with ridicule and to warn off others who would deny an emerging “Shepard Is Our Shakespeare” consensus, he stole Feeley’s surname, or a near twin (“the feelies”; later, “the Feelys”), as his label for the human parasites in Griaule’s gut. Discovering this fact did not make me think ill of other examples of Shepard’s work, but it did make me queasy about this novella.3 And, knowing now that he reported a birth date four years later than his real one and often tweaked his own biography to self-legendize, I view these silly characters as misshapen warts on the story’s structure.

Further, to keep his readers from harboring any sympathy for these beings, Shepard describes them as “Harmless creatures” that “pass their time copulating and arguing among themselves over the most trivial matters” (52). He designates as the colony’s prime ancestor “a retarded man,” one Feely (53), and describes his pseudo-clones as having “weepy eyes and thick-lipped slack mouths, like ugly children in their rotted silks and satins” (55). In short, we are told that they are pathetic. But given their origin and their extra-literary purpose, I wish that Shepard had chosen to elevate story over “satire.” But even if this capitulation to one of his demons weakens “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” it does not render it entirely contemptible.

Indeed, at one point, Shepard has Mauldry concede of the Feelys: “they do have moments when they shine” (52)—as, for example, when they saved Mauldry’s life and when, after Catherine begins exploring Griaule’s deep interior, they carry an unconscious botanist named John Colmacos, who was gathering berries near Griaule’s mouth, to safety. Still, these beings mostly discomfit Catherine and often goad Shepard’s narrator to ridicule. But they do have plot uses, and Shepard does try to exploit their literary utility.

After many adventures inside the sleeping Griaule (including witnessing the attack of a giant white worm on thirty male Feelys), Catherine falls in love with Colmacos, who soon becomes addicted to a drug, brianine, that the two often take together in the weird glow of Griaule’s heart wall. Catherine has also tried without success to escape from the belly of the creature and at length somewhat adjusts her attitude toward the bemused Feelys to devise a new escape plan.

Of it, she thinks, “It wasn’t much of a plan, nothing subtle, nothing complex” (57), and here I see Shepard subconsciously critiquing his own failure of imagination and pushing ahead via an act of will rather than one of creative ardor. An erotic scene that follows this passage, however, partially redeems itself by morphing Catherine’s disaffection with her and the botanist’s lovemaking into a credible epiphany: She realizes, while aping the “perturbed and animalistic rhythm” of the ever-lascivious Feelys, that she has reached “the nadir of her life” (89).

Later, Catherine gives each Feely accompanying her and Colmacos to their escape point a fatal brianine-laced cake. (She has failed to consider the slightness of their builds.) Dumbstruck, she senses that “for all her disparagement of them,” the Feelys “were human” (91). In writing his story, then, did Shepard grow fond of these feeble-minded creatures and begin to feel a scosh of guilt for taxonomically appropriating Gregory Feeley’s surname? If so, this line rings false as apology. Further, the fact that other Feelys later thwart their escape hints that Shepard never abjured his sad, private metaphor of critics as parasites. In context, given that his take on these “pitiful half-wits” (116) stems from personal bias, the metaphor may even work. Sometimes. Sort of.

But it still stinks.4

After these and other events, Catherine undergoes a parody of death (or not); revives in the body of a near-perfect double, whom we have already briefly met; and reunites with a resurrected Captain Mauldry, who leads her back into the world that she has longed for years to revisit. She returns to Hangtown and accosts Brianne, whose betrayal immured her within Griaule. And, in this climactic scene, Shepard wrings more charity and rue from Catherine’s pique and bitterness than ever he squeezes from his own.

“The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” ends with a fine, if overladen, paragraph in which Catherine spares Brianne; settles in another town; composes a book called The Heart’s Millennium; attains a fleeting fame; marries a colleague of the late Colmacos; bears this man’s sons; and limits all her later writing to a private journal. Then Shepard puts period to his tale, writing “from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in between” (114).

These, I believe, are the words of a writer disclosing his heart, and, along with the scene preceding them, they echo deep into the volume’s third tale, the 81-page novella “The Father of Stones.”

C. “The Father of Stones”

In this story, Shepard orchestrates a lurid pulp mystery and courtroom drama that you could almost expect to run across in an issue of Weird Tales from the 1930s, perhaps with a Margaret Brundage cover depicting a priest poised to sacrifice a drugged and naked female to his cult’s dragon god while a flock of shadowy acolytes stand behind the altar as watchers. Take note: I mean this characterization as praise, not as putdown, for Shepard treats this scenario with full pulp commitment. He narrates it in a style just far enough over the top to fit his subject matter but just subtly witty enough to sell its readers on the unlikely likelihood of its near-risible plot machinations.

Some have argued that Shepard, in his longer stories, especially those from later in his career, strings scenes together as if making them up on the fly. “The Father of Stones” first appeared in 1988, well before his career midpoint, and thus would escape this criticism, but let me stress that it does escape it, and admirably. Could it be more succinct? Sure, but, in “The Father of Stones,” the stylistic filigree and the melodramatic plot twists contribute to the sultry pulp atmosphere in ways that legitimate their presence. What we read is a Willkie Collins Moonstone-style romp with existential angst stirred in to help us forgive ourselves—or the author to forgive himself?—for relishing such juicy high-camp vittles.

The mystery begins after the murder of the cult priest (Mardo Zemaille) at the hands of the daddy (William Lemos) of the drugged and naked female (Mirielle Lemos) in the cult’s spooky hangout (Temple of the Dragon). Anyway, William Lemos insists that his attorney (our protagonist, Adam Korrogly) must base his defense on his self-excusing but potentially precedent-setting plea, namely: “The Dragon Made Me Do It.” Korrogly both salivates over and quails from using this defense because it could (1) make his reputation, if he wins, or (2) totally undo him, if he doesn’t.

Everyone in Port Chantay, where the trial takes place, knows that Griaule exerts a malefic influence over the entire country, even over citizens living outside the Carbonales Valley where the dragon sleeps—but a verdict finding Lemos not guilty of lethally conking the priest with a stone formed in the lizard’s acidic intestines would allow ne’er-do-well after ne’er-do-well to employ this defense for crimes ranging from mopery to human mutilation. Shepard sets up this situation with great economy in scenes between Korrogly and Lemos, Korrogly and Mirielle (the daughter), and Korrogly and other witnesses. The trial scenes in particular move with tension and snap, and Shepard’s characterization of Korrogly makes him at once sympathetic (in that he feels intensely his assumed class inferiority) and edgily self-serving (in that he has few qualms about using Lemos or Mirielle for his own purposes, whether career-oriented or lascivious).

To summarize at greater length would undercut the reader’s pleasure in discovering the secrets of Shepard’s characters—Lemos’s, Mirielle’s, the priest Zemaille’s, and those of such supporting players as the mysterious Kirin and her maidservant, Janice, whom Korrogly, uncharitably, regards as a “drab.” More summary would also dull the excitements of the trial scenes and the reversals and re-reversals that stun Korrogly and end the tale, for these finally lead him to an epiphany that seems not just a fustian revelation but an event-dictated change of perception that will rule him ever after.

Besides, the tale’s final line—“One way or another, the dragon was loose in Port Chantay” (196)—has a cool pulp fillip that causes this reader, at least, to flash back on certain scenes and to chuckle in malign delight.

D. “Liar’s House”

The opening of this novelette reverberates with the portentousness of Holy Scripture, specifically, the first five verses of the Gospel of John. Hearken to a few of its grandiloquent prefatory phrasings:

In the eternal instant before the Beginning, before the Word was pronounced in fire, long before the tiny dust of history came to settle from the flames, something whose actions no verb can truly describe seemed to enfold possibility, to surround it in the manner of a cloud or an idea, and everything fashioned from the genesis fire came to express in some way the structure of that fundamental duality.... (197)

This paragraph goes more floridly than the famous opening of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” etc.), but Shepard, to cut him some slack, has geared it to explaining the queer duality of Griaule’s soul rather than to establishing the co-evality of Christ with Yahweh the Creator.5 (Dragons, after all, are very different from you and me.)

Anyway, in young Teocinte’s only inn, called by some “Liar’s House” (but formally known as Dragonwood House, a hotel-cum-tavern-and-brothel), lives a troglodytic former stevedore named Hota Kotieb. Rampaging in Port Chantay, he once murdered ten men to avenge the death of his wife in an avoidable coach accident, then fled to Teocinte and rented an upstairs room at the back of this establishment. Its chief notoriety, besides its occupancy by working girls, derives from its owner’s claim that it was built from wood sawn from trees that once grew on Griaule’s back. No one credits this boast, however, because no one can believe that a sane lumberjack or carpenter would ever venture onto such spooky terrain to harvest timber. And so the inn bears the sobriquet “Liar’s House.”

Hota has no skill as a wood carver, but because Griaule fascinates him, he fashions crude images of the beast from scraps of wood and decorates his quarters with them; later, he goes abroad to make bigger likenesses and one day spies a dragon much smaller than Griaule—but a vital, living creature—circling the sleeping Griaule’s snout and maybe trying to communicate with him. Hota thinks of this smaller dragon—which has a body length of nearly forty feet—as female. Soon, he watches her vanish behind Griaule’s sagittal crest and scrambles after her to try to catch her up-close and diabolical. He gets his wish, but not quite as he expected, for he

slapped aside a pine bough and stepped into a clearing where stood a slender woman with bronze skin, long black hair falling to the small of her back, and wearing not a stitch of clothing. (204)

And so begins a peculiar relationship that discloses this avatar of the she-dragon as a quasi-human woman self-christened Magali.6 Hota secures clothes for her and escorts her to Liar’s House to live with him. She cannot help studying the figures ingrained in the timbers making up the establishment, and Hota himself discovers in the wood “narrow wings replete with struts and vanes, sinuous scaled bodies, fanged reptilian heads,” i.e., “[a] multiplicity of dragons” (208).

Meanwhile, Magali develops an appetite and craves meat, her rude consumption of which, one evening in the inn’s tavern, draws hostile stares from three male patrons. When their haughty blond leader derides Magali, Hota mangles the cad’s hand and faces down his friends. Afterward, Hota and Magali learn that the townsfolk have grown wary of them and that the proprietor wants to evict them, even though Magali is pregnant (with Griaule’s child, via Hota’s agency) and the town has no other inns. I will not summarize it, but Shepard gives us another strong ending in his wrap-up to “Liar’s House”: a gaudy, penny-dreadful, climactic scene of enormous power.

In his note for this story, Shepard admits that he “received some criticism for the literate interior life of [my] ox-like protagonist,” a complaint that he finds valid reasons to dismiss. He also admits that after publishing “Liar’s House,” he hit upon an idea that would have explained Griaule’s reasons for wanting offspring and that “would have [also] made the link between this story and the last [‘The Skull’] more apparent.” He adds, “I was tempted to go back in and rework the story,” but decided not to (worse luck), to let his readers discover for themselves “how a writer’s style evolves.” With a candor that blithely excuses the copout, he confesses, “Then perhaps I was just being lazy” (428).

Frankly, I would have more respect for Shepard’s easy self-criticism if he’d removed that “perhaps.” If he could write a substantive note for each story in The Dragon Griaule, what kept him from reworking “Liar’s House”? It’s a good tale, but, by Shepard’s own admission, it could have been better. And now, most likely, we will never know.

E. “The Taborin Scale”

This novella centers on forty-year-old George Taborin from Port Chantay, owner of Taborin Coins & Antiquities, a numismatist who buys a glass jar of items at a junk shop in a district of Teocinte that never gets full sun and who finds in this jar “a dark leathern chip, stiff with age and grime, shaped like a thumbnail” (244), but larger. Later, in a bordello, Ali’s Eternal Reward, he massages it with a cotton ball until it emits a blue-green luster. Sylvia, a prostitute, identifies it as a dragon scale and agrees to provide George her services for two weeks in exchange for the scale, lured in part by his residency in a hotel considerably plusher than her brothel.

During their time there, George continues rubbing the scale and so triggers a fleeting vision of an earlier period in the landscape’s history:

As [their hotel suite] receded, it revealed neither the floors and walls of adjoining rooms nor the white buildings of Teocinte, but a sun-drenched plain with tall lion-colored grasses and strands of palmetto, bordered on all sides by hills forested with pines. They were marooned in the midst of that landscape.... then it was gone, trees and plain and hills so quickly erased, they might have been a painted cloth whisked away, and the room was restored to view. (251)

Sylvia begs George to trigger another such reality break, but he cannot fathom her eagerness to revisit an experience that has so clearly unsettled her.

After telling him that he must heed Griaule or suffer misfortune, Sylvia recites from a book, Griaule Incarnate, purporting that the dragon is an all-controlling god whose “blood is the marrow of time.”7 She also informs George that, when bored at Ali’s, she writes stories about her fellow whores and their supportive sorority. So George rubs the scale again, and this act, the fantasy trigger giving “The Taborin Scale” its status as a bastard hybrid of Wells’s The Time Machine and Doyle’s The Lost World, plunges them back into the prehistoric past—but for how long, neither can imagine.

A hawk soars high above the plain to which they have fallen. Later, trekking through this empty landscape, they find that in swooping from aloft, the hawk has metamorphosed into a dragon with a fiery orange “jewel” in its throat. The hill where Griaule once lay has vanished, but Sylvia recognizes this smaller version of the lizard for Griaule as a youngster, an idea that George resists until his meeting with three other dispossessed Teocinteans, all holding Sylvia’s opinion, forces him to recant his doubts. The dragon, whatever its name or provenance, rules over this desolate plain and makes known to them, much as would God, where in its simmering reaches they may bide and where they may not.

The three adult strangers foraging for mangos have with them, “a gangly young girl in deplorable condition, twelve or thirteen years old” (266), whom George learns to address as Peony and whom he kidnaps because the party’s members have abused her. George takes Peony back to Sylvia, having earlier learned that her crew was transported to this hostile tract soon after her father saw Peony “fooling around with something” that she refused to show him. So both the girl’s party and George and Sylvia have wound up here through an uncanny magical agency.

Their return to latter-day Teocinte occurs in an equally unlikely way, via a vast prairie fire set by the dragon, a fire that Shepard vividly evokes; indeed, it sweeps by like state-of-the-art CGI on a humongous screen. Suddenly back in their present, they hear a “chthonic rumbling” and see pouring from Griaule’s mouth “the creatures that dwelled within,” plus many “derelict men and women who ... had sought to shelter inside” (293), this last group being the “Feelys” that in this 2010 addition to the Sequence, Shepard tellingly chooses not to identify as such. Later, George witnesses “a mountainous transformation, the coming-to-life of a colossus” (294), as Griaule awakens from a millennia-long sleep, shakes Hangtown from its back, and crushes underfoot the shanties of a ramshackle barrio: a remake in prose of an early Godzilla flick.8

In any case, George pursues Peony into what remains of Teocinte, to Ali’s, for the child loved Sylvia’s stories about the place. Upon finding her, he carries her through all the panicked refugees-in-the-making and “all the toxins of dementia” (297) poisoning the town’s atmosphere. And, when the dragon dies, despite Meric Cattanay’s prediction that the paint on its body would cause it to “cave in like an old barn” (297, fn.), it does so more spectacularly than Meric could have imagined. The main narrative concludes in a flourish of apocalypse mixing melancholy and half-assed ecstasy in a show of celebration and redemptive trivia—George’s certainty that he will “find his treasure again” (299), viz., Griaule’s private hoard. Even in rereading the ending of this over-the-top chapter, I could only grin and think, “Hell, yeah, Lucius—hell, yeah!”

But there’s more: Chapter eight of “The Taborin Scale” purports to be an “Excerpt from The Last Days of Griaule by Sylvia Monteverdi.” She notes, ten years after the dragon’s death, that she has spent her time documenting Teocinte’s “rebirth and its newest industry, the sale and distribution of Griaule’s relics, fraudulent and real” (301). She explains that eight years after her last sight of George and Peony in Port Chantay, he told her that the scattering of Griaule’s body all over the world achieved just what Griaule wanted. George gave her the adventure-impelling scale, now in a glass pendant, saying, “We are part of a scheme by means of which he will someday come to dominate the world as Rossacher’s book claimed he already had” (304).

Near her excerpt’s end, Sylvia writes, “I have not yet broken the glass in which the scale is encased, yet ... someday I will, if only to satisfy my curiosity about George” (305). She speculates about his and the adult Peony’s supposed father-and-daughter relationship, which she implies has “sexual elements,” justifying the passage by alleging “I needed to think meanly about something I valued in order to walk away from it” (306). It’s a second ending to a story already over: the coda of a Hollywood movie or an Elizabethan tragedy. I approve it. In my view, Shepard owes Sylvia the last word, and here he concedes it to her.

Finally, I must point out that the theme of an older man protecting a younger female or trying to features prominently in “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” “The Father of Stones,” “Liar’s House” (in an odd but not disqualifying variant), and “The Taborin Scale.” Moreover, a hint of the incestuous erotic in the “protection” that the man offers his female ward enters every story but one. However, in “The Taborin Scale,” it strikes me as unfair to Taborin, who in its climax (a reprise, on a larger scale, of the apocalypse in “Liar’s House”) acts heroically on Peony’s behalf, albeit with an affect-free doggedness that turns every other person in that scene’s encompassing chaos into an obstacle to be flung into the fire.

Yes, there is nonsense in “The Taborin Scale,” just as there is in many a Jacobean or Shakespearean tragedy, but there is also force, much of it stemming from Lucius Shepard’s willingness to take flamboyant, even heroic risks. If nothing else—and, in truth, a great deal “else” inheres—I marvel at his daring.

F. “The Skull”

“The Skull” constitutes the most recent and the longest story in The Dragon Griaule. Its first publication occurred simultaneously with that of this collection. It has to rank as among the last stories Shepard wrote before his death on March 18, 2014. I can hardly claim status as a Shepard specialist, but after three readings, I find this novella the strangest and most oddly beguiling narrative in his canon. Most of it takes place in the early twenty-first century as none of the other stories here comes close to doing, for their settings range from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century and in one case (“The Taborin Scale”) at least partly in a dreamscape two millennia or more ago.

The two main characters in “The Skull,” George Craig Snow (who goes by Craig or Snow) and Xiomara Garza (aka La Endriaga, aka Yara), both embody a recognizable latter-day type. Snow, a seeker-slacker from the States, winds up in Temalagua working for a scam charity and living with a woman named Expectación. (The title of his unfinished memoir is He Lives with Expectation). On the other hand, Yara, when she meets Snow, is a seventeen-year-old Goth girl in Ciudad Temalagua running cash envelopes for a new fascistic group called the PVO (the Party of Organized Violence), which Shepard tells us in his final story note “was an actual Guatemalan entity, very much in the ascendancy when I was first there” (431). Yara and Snow meet near his door stoop when she asks a boy sitting next to him, “Who is this asshole?” (312).

So much time has passed since the events of “The Taborin Scale,” that the opening of “The Skull” includes backfill about the removal of the dead Griaule’s scales, the draining and storing of its blood, etc., and, finally, the transfer of Griaule’s 600-foot-long skull 1,100 miles to the Temalaguan court. (The disposition of the blood directly influences the nation’s history and so the events in Shepard’s last work, Beautiful Blood.) The skull eventually winds up near the palace outside Ciudad Temalagua. In the early 1900s, the palace burns. Vines and other vegetation cover the skull, but tourists visit it anyway and have unsettling dreams in its vicinity. A cult arises. Nearby slums turn into battlegrounds for drug thugs and right-wing army squads.

“The Skull” carves sections out of recent Central American history and plays the magic-realism card like a trump. At the same time, though, Shepard slings around smart-ass detective-fiction metaphors as if he were Raymond Chandler or, more modishly, Robert Crais. Often, these not only amuse but also serve to background Snow against this sinister Temalaguan milieu without emasculating him of his Americanism.

In part II, reputedly an excerpt from his memoir, Snow describes with hard-bitten Elvis Cole snark the women entering Club Sexy: “About four PM each weekday, ‘La Hora Feliz,’ the ladies would come breezing in, all bouncy in their low-cut frocks, sunglasses by Gucci and make-up by Sherwin-Williams” (316). After visiting the jungle where Griaule’s skull resides and fearing that he is falling in love with Yara, Snow sardonically admits that “love was something I had hoped to avoid—she wasn’t the sort of girl you gave your heart to unless you were looking to get it back FDA approved and sliced into patties”(336). But the stink of unease about the skull has instilled in him a paralyzing dread, and when he has to climb a ladder after Yara to reach the dragon’s mouth, he hesitates. On the other hand, when he succeeds in climbing into it, he reports this reaction:

on reaching the top, standing beside the wicked bronze-green curve of the fang and gazing down at the squat, I had an unwarranted sense of power. It was as though I’d scaled some hithertofore unscalable peak and was for that moment master of all I surveyed. Yara took my hand and her touch boosted the sensation. I felt heroin high.... (322)

Just as earlier I speculated that Shepard may have been critiquing his own storytelling when Catherine faults her impromptu escape plan, here Shepard appears to share Snow’s exhilaration and to exult in his working out of his still incomplete tale. It’s as if Shepard recognizes, again, the epic potential of the Griaule Sequence, suspects that he is fulfilling it scene by scene, and hopes that at this point in his climb (up into the dragon’s skull) he is scaling the daunting heights of his own ambition. Moreover, just as Snow beholds the favela-like squat beneath the skull with “an unwarranted sense of power,” Shepard realizes that, this fleeting high aside, he himself still has heights to climb before he reaches either the summit or the prospect of rest.

He may have had this sense of exaltation because his setting and the actions of his characters all reflected his desire, set forth in the last sentence of his last story note in The Dragon Griaule, to highlight the political facets of his project.9 Indeed, Shepard calls “The Skull,” of all his dragon stories, “the most grounded in my life experience and in the political realities of Central America” (431). In his mind, it has its contemporaneity to commend it, as embodied in its autobiographical elements and its political savvy. It is not mere fantasy, but a fantasy with clear links to our presumptively significant Here and Now. Griaule becomes a metaphor not only for nasty Reagan-era colonialism (after all, Reagan is dead), but also, after Griaule’s death and dismemberment, for right-wing Central American tyrannies and—I’m guessing, as perhaps Shepard was too—for the brain-rotting influences of millennial jungle cults. In short, he felt it necessary, as have other genre writers, to justify, or at least to rank, his work by the degree to which it utilizes or comments on the “real world” as it purportedly exists today.

I share his defensive bias, and I find this story, among the six in The Dragon Griaule, its most beguiling and compelling—except for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” my first favorite because the first I read. How autographical is it? Shepard does not tell us, but who really cares? How faithful to modern Central American realities is it? “The Skull” incorporates these realities, but does not illuminate them. It alludes to the autobiographical and the historical but subordinates both to the demands of character, plot, and climax in an off-trail but oddly compelling fantasy.

The major elements here include the disembodied dragon (of course); an American expatriate (Craig Snow); a charismatic girl (Yara) with a powerful psychic link to Griaule; a jungle community of “adherents” devoted to resurrecting at least the spirit of the dead beast; a love story between the expat and the dragon girl; Snow’s ten-year exile from Temalagua to Concrete, Idaho (the inadvertent real-life hometown of writer Tobias Wolff as recounted in his memoir This Boy’s Life); the vanishing of Griaule’s skull from its jungle setting, along with eight hundred adherents and their female leader; the expat’s return to Temalagua; the cold-blooded execution of two of Snow’s gay friends as a direct result of his asking the owner of Club Sexy for sensitive information....

Not to mention ... take a breath....

Snow’s Miami-based affair with the disaffected wife of the PVO defense minister to learn what has happened to Yara; his trip back to Temalagua to a village called Tres Santos, where Jefe, the leader of the PVO, lives; Snow’s meeting with this small, athletic man; his mind-boggling discovery of Yara as a counselor-cum-servant to Jefe, whom all the women in Tres Santos fear, knowing that he has killed their men; Snow’s awareness of a “mechanical grinding” (378) in the stairwell of a lofty structure in Tres Santos to which Jefe retreats “to fly”; the resumption of physical relations between Yara and Snow; Yara’s recounting for him of Griaule’s rebirth in the form of a “beautiful little man, naked and perfect” (381), an event foreshadowed by Magali’s “birth” in “Liar’s House”; and Yara’s conspiring with Snow to slay Jefe in his “lair” (411), the building where, every day Jefe “flies” for hours in, amongst, and through the deluge of silver chains hanging from its ceiling.

That’s plot. What about character? Snow strikes me as a sort of deracinated stand-in for Shepard, but, again, I am guessing. In any case, Snow seems aimless and adrift but for his fixation on and love for Yara. Canelo, an associate of Guillermo, owner of Club Sexy and a friend to Snow, nails Snow when he says, “You go blundering about, thinking you can solve any problem because you’re superior to the pitiful, fucked-up Temalaguans, but all you do is make more trouble for us” (354). Then Canelo says, “You’re like a half-assed method actor, man. One who almost buys into his character, but can’t quite get there” (355). Early on, the reader finds it hard to refute this judgment. Even when Snow begins his dalliance with Loisa Barzan in Miami as a way of learning Yara’s fate and reconnecting with her after ten years, Canelo’s assessment seems spot on.

Yara has more going on internally and historically than does Snow, even though twelve years his junior. Often, mysteriously, people call her “La Endriaga,” and Guillermo tells Snow that this sobriquet signifies “a creature part snake, part dragon, part female” and that “people call her La Endriaga because she lives in the jungle near the skull” (317). Soon, Snow learns that Yara has a diamond-shaped tattoo on her lower back—crudely, he thinks of it as a “tramp stamp”—the central scale of which is “hard,” with a “distinct convexity” (325). Initially, Yara will not let him touch it, so he assumes it an advanced or magical sort of implant, but during sex, touching it elicits from her orgasmic reactions that startle or even horrify Snow (342).

Further, Yara does have a sort of political power. At seventeen, she raised money for the Party of Organized Violence. In the clearing where the enormous skull has its home, she acts as chief spokesperson for Griaule’s disembodied spirit, taking messages from it in a closet behind its brain, dispensing jobs or counsel to its acolytes, and interpreting its agenda: “I know the idea of a renewal is involved. An alchemical change, a marriage of souls” (338). And when Snow asks how she can trust Griaule, “a giant lizard that has a really good reason to hate us,” or believe that anything it does will help them, she says, “Savagery, poverty, and injustice are shoved in our faces every day. We’re fucking desperate! If change makes things worse ... so what?” (339; ellipsis Shepard’s).

Yara’s political power includes appearing to Griaule’s followers from on high, from the mouth of the skull, and summoning them for a silent mass that Snow can describe only as a “zombie-like connection between the adherents and their queen” (341). Although Yara does not speak aloud, the scene recalls Catherine addressing the Feelys in “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” to warn them that the dragon’s heart will soon beat, once, and that they may not wish to remain inside the creature when this weird millennial event occurs. Fearing a like, or worse, imminent disaster, Snow flashes on Jonestown and decides to leave while he can still save himself (342).

Ten-plus years on, he rediscovers Yara in Tres Santos, after first meeting in a cantina the “slim, pale, diminutive man” (371) whom others call Jefe. Jefe harbors the seething anger of an abuse victim in the body of a Latin mighty mite. He announces that his obscure village has no greater attraction than he, boasting, “People come from all over to ask for my advice. I counsel them, and sometimes I put on a little show. An entertainment. It’s only an exercise routine, but I’m told it’s unique” (373).

When Jefe seizes Snow’s backpack to see what it contains and Snow tries to grab it back, Jefe almost crushes his hand. He then swallows five blue pills from a bottle in the pack with no observable effect. In fact, he escorts Snow to the pink building sheltering the village brothel, opens a door to a stairwell to go upstairs for “an hour or two,” and tells Snow that Yara will provide coffee, etc. (376).

Yara! Snow can scarcely believe he’s found her. And, after some initial heavy-duty recriminations and wrangling, Yara fills him in on what occurred during his absence and how she wound up as Jefe’s spokesperson and nursemaid. She describes in evocative detail the heat-engendered miracle (reminiscent of that in “The Taborin Scale”) resulting in “the act of transubstantiation” (380) that this miracle required, namely, the rebirth of Griaule—an event akin to that depicted in “Liar’s House”—as the human avatar now indifferently answering to “Jefe.” To Snow’s dismay, Yara says that Jefe has a recurring dream in which he “stands in an arena before thousands of people” to tell them that “when the dream becomes reality he will undergo a change” that “will enable him to regain his original form and to fly as he once did, without the need for mechanical aids” (383), these being the innumerable chains, in the extraordinary “lair” atop the pink building, that he uses to “fly.” 10 And, persuaded of Jefe’s recidivist lizardliness, i.e., the idea that any further transubstantiation of his baleful self will bode only calamity for humankind, Yara and Snow resolve to bring Jefe down, literally down, by acting in concert.

The story then suspensefully works itself out as it must amid the grinding of chains and later the pouring out of a Greek chorus of village women, like Furies, who help Snow, now armed with a machete, dispatch the die-hard Jefe:

The women descended upon him first, first Itzel with a hoe, blood welling from the trench she dug in his chest, and the rest, stabbing and cutting and pounding, exacting their vengeance for rape and murder and innumerable humiliations. (417)

Unfortunately, more succeeds this scene, and although Shepard clearly knew that he needed something more to bring it safely to rest, part VI, the novella’s—and the entire collection’s—coda consists of four Faulknerian paragraphs replete with sorrowful Latinate bombast and unconvincing self-importance.

I will never forget Jefe flying in his implausible “lair” or the lengths to which Snow and Yara go to halt his noisy flights, nor will I ever dismiss the story’s structure as haphazard or Snow’s character as less than credible, but ultimately the vast metaphorical significance of the dragon Griaule seems too slippery to hang on to and Shepard’s personal implication that it represents the dire influence of the Reagan administration’s—or any administration’s—Central American foreign policy a self-justification that he may have had to believe to finish “The Skull” and to begin writing Beautiful Blood. In any case, despite the novella’s beguiling strangeness and several memorable episodes, it winds up feeling overwrought, fantastic in its least positive sense, and empty. Part VI affirms this judgment by reading as if even Shepard cannot fully approve his accomplishment. As Snow and Yara seek some semblance of safety in their drive toward the north, Snow muses:

It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that—despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death—it would be in the end as though nothing had happened. (420)

And:

although it went against every negative of his former faith in nothing, he submitted to belief and believed ... believed in alchemy, in the marriage of souls, in accomplishment and noble obligation, and believed also that he would never fail her again, nor she him. (420; ellipsis Shepard’s)

Here, Snow strives to persuade himself both that something has really happened and that his former faith in “nothing” has crumbled before the enumerated beliefs he now claims to embrace. But I believe (though I wish I did not) that it is Shepard doing the same damned thing, for all his rhetorical sleight-of-hand does is drive me to think that he would have done better to substitute for his last four overwrought paragraphs something like this: “And Snow and Yara lived happily ever after ... almost.”

II. Beautiful Blood

A. Unanswerable Questions

This novel—as noted, Shepard’s last—takes us back to the origins of the Dragon Griaule Sequence. Its publication by Subterranean Press earlier this year (2014) occurred nearly thirty years after “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” reached print in F&SF (Dec 1984). It hearkens back not only to that fine, seminal story but also to its nineteenth-century time period and its main character, Meric Cattanay, who in Beautiful Blood makes two or three dubiously effective cameo appearances.

In Beautiful Blood, the more or less linear thrust of The Dragon Griaule yields to heavy backtracking and the expansion of the story of Richard Rosacher, a character whom Shepard first mentions in a footnote in “The Taborin Scale” (252; see note 7 above.) The novel’s jacket copy asserts that it has “profound metaphysical overtones” and that it “raises—but does not answer—significant questions,” queries such as, “Is the dragon merely a bizarre but entirely natural phenomenon? Or is he/it the manifestation of some divine purpose? And to what extent are the actions of men ... the reflections of its implacable but enigmatic will?” (rear cover flap; my ellipsis).

As the jacket copy tells us, each question remains moot, and in each instance the resultant ambiguity has the effect of acquitting Shepard of foisting off on us either pat or over-contrived answers. Apparently, having conceived of Griaule as an allusive terrestrial mystery, Shepard cannot answer these questions and thus writes from a platform of narrative agnosticism allowing him to accept, dismiss, or doubt the godhood of Griaule as the loose contingencies of his story demand. In fact, the ambiguity of Griaule’s meaning allows him to create characters unlike himself, or his standard world-weary protagonists, by assigning them philosophical stances vis-à-vis Griaule that encompass belief, atheism, or some posture in between.

I have a hunch, which I cannot substantiate, that this was how, apart from various forms of self-medication, Shepard wrestled with the crazy-making enigmas of life, death, and “God.” That hunch, I confess, is an impertinent one. But if his characters’ perception of Griaule as a malignant force has any metaphorical value other than his own take on the folly of American foreign policy, I would argue that it is what he saw as the stance of the cosmos vis-à-vis humanity. Does it care? Does it not care? Shepard, I’m fairly sure, leaned toward the latter view but loathed having to do so, for the results of cosmic indifference to humanity’s collective and individual fates appalled him.

Maybe that’s why he keeps trying to transmute the problematic Griaule into less than credible human beings—Magali and Jefe, who, after all, are dragon spawn—or, in Beautiful Blood, into the drug mab (i.e., “more and better”), which affords anyone who ingests it a subjective simulacrum of the Good Life. A mab-enriched life never degrades (as Griaule’s golden blood never clots or degrades) so long as one keeps taking it and therefore gives joy and meaning to even the lowliest person, providing a remedy “to the depredations of time itself and thus to every ill associated with aging” (14).

B. This Hematologist’s Life

In essence, then, Beautiful Blood constitutes a biography of the ambitious hematologist Richard Rosacher, who realizes early on that the residents of Teocinte “would pay dearly to see their hovels turned into palaces, their lovers into sexual ideals, and they had no will ... to resist temptation, whatever toll it might extract” (26; my ellipsis). Rosacher also has some trials acquiring blood to test and process into mab (although, as we discover later, it actually requires no processing), as well as an adventure that nearly kills him when, to escape a shape-shifting midnight-black monster from Griaule’s throat, he leaps from the dragon’s lip “into the brush below” (34).

Beautiful Blood unfolds episodically rather than via the premeditated cogitations of a well-oiled “plot.” The one story element possessing the pleasing quality of gears efficiently meshing derives from the first appearance of Meric Cattanay, whom Rosacher meets on a bench outside Teocinte’s council chamber. Cattanay has gone there to persuade the council to approve his strategy for killing Griaule. Rosacher insists on going in before him (although Cattanay arrived earlier), explaining, “[The] council will be in a more receptive mood after I have done than they are at the moment” (44), and makes good on his prediction by offering the city a percentage of his mab profits if it will legitimize the operation. Understanding that Cattanay’s plan will take decades, Rosacher persuades the city fathers that a protracted death for Griaule will allow Teocinte to grow in wealth and power (if they also approve the militia he asks for to protect their investment); further, every connected townsperson will prosper, along with their descendants. Here, in fact, it feels as if Shepard is cannily plotting, not just linking episodes like so many mismatched hopper cars.

Elsewhere, events feel less contingent and as random and often as unsatisfactory as the unfolding of life itself. Chapter 4 opens four years after chapter 3. Rosacher recalls nothing of their passage, but deduces that the mab trade has financed both his regal quarters and the hiring of the courtesan, Ludie, who loaned him the cash he needed to pay Timothy Myrie for securing his first syringes of blood from Griaule’s tongue. Moreover, seven years elapse between chapters 5 and 6, with Rosacher again ignorant of their passage but savvy enough to realize that a dream messenger clad in a black suit has come to warn him of an attempt by the Church on his life. The Church, whose chief deity is not Christ but an entity called the Gentle Beast, resents the impact of mab on the faithful and resists the adoption of Griaule as a figure in its pantheon. The messenger, though, calls the dragon “an incarnation” and tells Rosacher, “His flesh has become one with the earth” (72). After escaping murder, Rosacher has animal sex with a dumpling-faced servant whom he repays with “a coin from atop the dresser” (79). Then Teocinte’s militia, led by Arthur Honeyman, an illiterate henchman of Rosacher’s, attacks a local cathedral as payback to the Church for trying to kill him. It may follow that Rosacher would seek such revenge, but the chapter feels at once perfunctory and melodramatic.

In any event, it abruptly ends, and four more lost years pass between it and the start of chapter 8, in which, seated on one of Griaule’s paint scaffolds, Rosacher speaks with Meric Cattanay about “happiness,” to little real purpose, before visiting Hangtown and Martita’s Home in the Sky, a tavern run by Martita Doan. Now a widow, once as a maid she became the virtually faceless object of his lust and so conceived a son. To her regret, Martita did not carry the child to term. These revelations affect Rosacher but mostly to fill him with anger toward Honeyman and Ludie for failing to tell him of his unborn child’s brief fetal existence. Later, on Griaule’s back, these two rebuke him for his “incompetence,” claiming that mab profits “are down nearly thirty percent” (109) and admitting that they have struck a deal of their own with council leader Breque.

Then, by pushing him from the dragon, Honeyman tries to murder Rosacher, who again escapes death, this time aided by pieces of a shattered scale—a “leaf storm” of golden insects—which so harry and sting Honeyman that he falls. When these glowing flakes beset Rosacher, they trigger in him “a crackling scream,” upon whose noise he surfs “as if it were a wave” (116–18). With the help of Jarvis Riggins, an old scalehunter, Martita saves Rosacher, sheltering him in her tavern from Ludie’s prying. This time, when he awakes, he realizes that he has lost only days, not years, of his life. Also, mab enables him to view Martita as a goddess in whose body he recurrently drowns.11

Five weeks after Honeyman’s attempt on his life, Rosacher accompanies Riggins into Griaule’s gut for a look-see. Riggins accepts the dragon’s divinity, an idea that Rosacher once scoffed at. Now he has an epiphany: He realizes that the creature has become an ecosystem “supporting a vast biotic community” (133); consequently, he begins to suspect that he, too, could profitably adopt the scalehunter’s vision:

He needed a building, an edifice the equal of a cathedral and devoted to a similar purpose, yet constructed in such a fashion so that its function would be unclear to the Church until late in the day.... [The Church] would rattle their sabers and might, in extremis, be provoked to send an army against Teocinte; but the militia had grown powerful enough to defend the city and, once Mospiel’s troops had a taste of mab, it would be a short war. (134–135; my ellipsis)

This desire for a building supports Rosacher’s apprehension that the House of Griaule (as he renames the Hotel Sin Salida upon rebuilding it after its imminent destruction) will supplant every other religion. After all, how can any church “stand against a religion that delivered on its promises in the here and now, whose sacrament bestowed rewards that were tangible and immediate, and not some vague post-mortem fantasy” (133)?

This chapter ends when a creature from Griaule’s biotope, a flat, slimy critter seven or eight feet wide, oozes toward Rosacher and Riggins, and Riggins identifies it as “Armaga lengua,” or “Devil’s tongue” (136). Sadly, this scene reminds me of novels with pasteboard covers that, as a grade-schooler, I checked out of our school library in Mulvane, Kansas, in the 1950s. Ostensibly sf, they bore on their spines either a launch-ready rocket ship or an atom with orbiting electrons, and whenever their pseudonymous authors needed to jog the plot, they introduced the surefire menace of a hostile alien or a hideous planetary monster so that my heart beat faster and hair arose on my nape. Despite his oft-expressed contempt for the cheesy, Shepard uses this same tactic in Beautiful Blood at least three times, and each occurrence made me wince in dismay. 12

After the House of Griaule rises upon the ruins of the Hotel Sin Salida, Rosacher works to “create a fantasy religion [wedding] the sybaritic to a faux spirituality” (142). As he does, Martita tells Rosacher that in ten years, he has not noticeably aged. Meanwhile, the town’s militia readies an attack on Temalagua for reasons contrived to get Rosacher out of town and keep the action rolling. Breque and Rosacher confer, Ludie dies from a fall from her horse, and Rosacher composes two essays that the adherents of his “fantasy religion” esteem as prophetic sermons: “On Our Dragon Nature” (162) and “Is The God I Worship The God I Cause To Be?” (163). Rosacher falls in love with a woman named Amelita Sobral, an agent of Breque’s taxed with locating Ludie’s will. “For the life of him,” writes Shepard, “Rosacher could not fathom why he loved Amelita” (173). Neither can the reader, who, to boot, cannot fathom her attraction to him. Her end comes abruptly and beggars belief (179–85) but involves injecting herself with dragon’s blood after earlier asserting that she would find it “interesting to grow old and wrinkled” (177).

Rosacher purportedly grieves for eight months. Temalagua and Mospiel plot war against Teocinte’s militia.13 Then, at least partly at Breque’s behest, he sets off for Temalagua in search of a former scalehunter, Oddboy Cerruti, whose name appears in a secret folder alongside that of a man called “Carlos,” who, we at length learn, is the enlightened king of Temalagua. Rosacher finds Cerruti on a vast plain and quickly picks up on the fact that he has a friend named Frederick. Frederick is one of Shepard’s hybrid monsters, a man who has metamorphosed into “a black featureless mound half the size of a full-grown elephant” (210). Cerruti communicates with Frederick telepathically, and Frederick, who has a taste for horseflesh, soon eats Rosacher’s steed (albeit with his permission), and Rosacher believes that maybe the monster can kill Carlos and make it look as if some fierce animal has done for him.

Rosacher and Cerruti cross into Temalagua and arrive at a jungle longhouse. Here, Frederick snatches a woman whom Cerruti has taken to a nearby hut for a sexual encounter and spirits her away. The village headman sends a runner to tell the king what has happened, and Rosacher now determines “that if the king could be brought to Becan [the village in question], it would ... be proof that Griaule’s will was at work here” (240; my ellipsis). Even so, Rosacher also realizes that to murder Carlos would be “to kill a man who had done far more good than evil” (237).

Later scenes testify to Carlos’s goodness, even if an odd “variety of narcissism” (271) colors his personality. While hunting Frederick, who has presumably eaten Cerruti’s woman, Carlos suffers a coral snake bite in Rosacher’s company, and Rosacher fears that everyone will suspect him of murder. Before Carlos’s demise, however, he learned from the king that Teocinte’s militia is not as powerful as he believed and that Carlos had “no designs against a country that is ready to tear itself apart” (258); it is Mospiel, rather than Teocinte, that the king feared. Lessoned thus, Rosacher sets off for Chisec, a Temalaguan village, suppressing his anxiety about what “might be following behind” (272).

I felt cruelly yanked about by these narrative jumps. The only aesthetic justification I can imagine for them all would abide in textual evidence that they reflect a like apprehension on Rosacher’s part, and I fail to find this evidence in his oddly unmotivated moves from one place to another throughout the novel. Perhaps this jumpiness reflects that of life itself and also the author’s embrace of existential randomness. And perhaps I have little or no right to complain about this aspect of the novel. But I’ve summarized at such length because I could not otherwise sequence its events, which often feel to me as disconnected as the purportedly scattered pieces of Griaule’s pillaged body.

C. And Yet ...

Only the sixteenth chapter and a brief epilogue remain, and it is hard to find in any earlier passage a scene embodying a climax, grand or otherwise, to the bulk of Beautiful Blood. Chapter 16 opens with the words, “Rosacher remained in Temalagua for eight years” (273; my italics). He passed this time “organizing hunts for the creature” known as Frederick, which the men in Rosacher’s hire drove “south to the Fever Coast,” at which point our protagonist terminated the hunts altogether (274).

Indeed, not until Griaule awakes and reduces Teocinte to ruins (see “The Taborin Scale”) does Rosacher work up the emotion “to visit the country he had once called home” (275). Describing the thousands of people there “picking over the [dragon’s] corpse” (276), Shepard informs us that

Rosacher entertained the notion that he was observing the annihilation of a normal-sized lizard by a Lilliputian race of hominids who performed the functions of ants and beetles, and dwelled in a settlement of dirty gray canvas that hid the bulk of their repulsive habits from view. It was both an epic and [a] dismaying sight, one that called to mind the majesty of nature and at the same time posed an inescapable comment on the vile nature of mankind. (276–77)

Allusions to Brobdingnag and Lilliput illustrate that in Beautiful Blood as well as in his earlier collection of Griaule stories, Shepard made scalehunting a conscious goal of both titles, i.e., raising weighty thematic concerns and highlighting vast existential ironies via imagery and rhetoric.

In the foregoing excerpt, he riffs on a well-known passage from Gulliver’s Travels in which the Brobdingnagian king characterizes Europeans as “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth.” In short, Shepard uses Jonathan Swift’s literary tools as scaffolds to prop up a theologically (not a politically) guyed tapestry that, from part to part, has insufficient thread to make the whole outsized structure seamlessly cohere.

Still ...

The novel winds down with a final meeting between Rosacher and Breque in which the latter character, now “an unrecognizable shrunken personage” (277) in a canopied bed, tells Rosacher, “Death is simply a shabby theatricality at life’s end to which we have all been given tickets ... with the possible exception of you” (278; Shepard’s ellipsis). The two then talk awkwardly until Breque mawkishly announces, “We were great men!” (280) and urges Rosacher not to judge himself too harshly. Auctorially, Shepard baldly notes that “Rosacher could not help being moved by these sentiments” (281), a point that he might more artfully have made by indirection.

Later, Rosacher catalogues Breque’s words to him “under ... the charitable impulses of fiends, men responsible for thousands of deaths who at the end sought to bestow their blessing on the world” (282; my ellipsis). And, indeed, when Breque dies, the tremor that Rosacher feels is perhaps either an intimation of Griaule’s passing “soul” or “a misperceived symptom of [his] own decay” (283).

The epilogue has as its setting “an island far from anywhere” (285), a vague but quiet place where occasionally blood is spilled but where Rosacher can brood on dragon Griaule’s “evolution” through the stages of its conjectural deity. The epilogue and hence the novel concludes with an excerpt from a journal that Rosacher now keeps. This excerpt contains a sketch about a crab in a wooden whistle, a “crustacean genius nurtured by its musical house and taught to seek in all things a grand design” (290), a sort of meaningful minor of Griaule, a metaphor without a clear signifier. The epilogue also contains an equally brief interrupting tale about an island storyteller, one Walker James, who, drunk on the tropical sky, wonders aloud if it doesn’t make Rosacher sad that “we won’t never hear a story to match all that sky and stars!” (291).

Did Lucius Shepard believe that he had told such a story?

Perhaps he recognized that he had not. I would argue that he suspected just that. His epilogue stands not as an apology but as a lament, and it features some of the most touching writing in these two flawed but intermittently beautiful books.

The Dragon Griaule Sequence by Lucius Shepard: A Guide

The Dragon Griaule. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2012, containing:

“The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” (novelette), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Dec 1984).

The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter (novella). Shingletown, California: Mark V. Zeising, 1988.

The Father of Stones (novella). Baltimore, Maryland: Washington Science Fiction Association, 1988.

Liar’s House (novelette). Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2004; previously posted on Sci Fiction (Dec 2003) <bit.ly/1oHyCpV>.

The Taborin Scale (novella). Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2010.

“The Skull” (novella), first appearance.

Story Notes (one entry for each of foregoing stories), first appearance.

Beautiful Blood: A Novel of the Dragon Griaule. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2014.

Author’s Note: This essay-review took me far longer to write than I anticipated, and I grew weary of it owing to the difficulty of getting a grip on exactly what was happening, and why, in both Beautiful Blood and in more than half the stories in The Dragon Griaule. I felt obligated to finish, no matter what conclusions I drew, because I kept a review copy of the collection for nearly two years before asking Bill Shaffer at Subterranean Press for a copy of Beautiful Blood. I hoped that owning the novel would motivate me to do a long piece about both titles for the New York Review of Science Fiction.

Here, then, I thank Kevin Maroney of NYRSF and Bill Shaffer of Subterranean Press for their extraordinary patience.

I thank Gregory Feeley and Bob Kruger for replying separately to questions about either the books under review or their author, Lucius Shepard (1943–2014), whom we each knew in different capacities and from different perspectives. I also thank them for suggesting changes to the text to improve its prose or to correct factual inaccuracies. I tried to resist being swayed by their critical takes on Shepard’s writing, but confess that in a few instances either I agreed with these takes initially or I adopted their readings and tried to address them in my own way, seeking to be fair to both titles and their author without subverting my own standards or becoming either man’s mouthpiece. Still, their help was invaluable, and I cannot fail to note that fact here, even if they dislike, as they have every right to, some—or a lot—of what they now find in this “exhausting” essay-review.

Michael Bishop’s novels Brittle Innings, Ancient of Days, Who Made Stevie Crye?, and Count Geiger’s Blues are available again in new editions from Fairwood Press and Bishop’s own imprint there, Kudzu Planet Productions. A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire and Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas are scheduled to appear in 2015.

1. Shepard’s “The Glassblower’s Dragon,” one of his tautest and most lyrical stories, has no clear link to the Griaule Sequence, but it repays seeking out and reading; go to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (April 1987) or to Nebula Awards 23, which I edited (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989).

2. Bob Kruger, a friend of mine as well of Lucius Shepard’s, tells me in an email dated Oct 28, 2014, that “Lucius’s claim to despise hobbits, et al., was characteristically disingenuous. He admitted to me that he loved The Lord of the Rings so much that he went in search of another book with ‘lord’ in the title and hit on Lord Jim. I think Tolkien and Conrad were his two biggest influences.”

A day later, Bob sent this addendum: “There’s a tad more to it, actually. What Lucius really said was [that] he read the book ‘as a kid.’ Given what we know about his age, that’s very unlikely. The Return of the King didn’t come out until 1955 in the UK, at which time Lucius would have been twelve, but almost no one in the US knew about the series until the Ace edition came out a decade later” (Oct 29, 2014).

3. I heard of this element in Shepard’s novella from Feeley himself, who, in a note, wondered how I could praise a story that mocked his name simply because Shepard resented some of his judgments in his Jaguar Hunter review. I replied, honestly, that I had never made the connection between the “feelies” in this story and Feeley’s surname. But once I understood what had happened, I regarded Shepard’s “revenge” as both petty and lingeringly malicious.

4. Bob Kruger has a slightly different view of the matter as he explains in an email sent on Oct 28, 2014: “It’s not fair that Greg was put to this test by Lucius”—that test being, by Bob’s own definition, an act of malice. But in explanation, not exculpation, a day later he likens the provocation of calling these creatures “Feelys” to dropping “a flaming bag of dog poo” on the porch of someone who has withheld Halloween candy to a trickster. Also, he likens the responses of the victim and others (mine included) to kicking that flaming bag. This analogy strikes me as funny, but I still would not wish to have my name mocked in this public way. (Who would?) Bob ends his first message by observing that “Outside of the text, the Feelys don’t exist. At some level, your take, my take, and Greg’s take on Lucius’ motivations are just projection and irrelevant to criticism. You don’t need to know anything about Greg Feeley to understand the Feelys, or about Lucius himself for that matter.”

5. Dragon’s souls, “unlike the souls of men,” we herein learn, “[enclose] the material form [of the creature] rather than being shrouded with it” (216). The practical effect of this phenomenon is that dragons “‘control [their] shapes in ways [human beings] cannot’” (ibid.).

66. This name evokes that of Mowgli, the boy in Rudyard Kipling’s two Jungle Books, but I have no idea if Shepard means for us to conflate them. Still, the characters Mowgli and Magali share a feral-child nature and an initial apparent innocence that Magali’s later behavior totally subverts.

 

77. This same page features a footnote declaring that the book’s author, Richard Rossacher, a medical doctor, manufactured from the dragon’s blood “a potent narcotic that succeeded in addicting a goodly portion of the Temalaguan littoral” (252). This “fact” provides the basis for the novel Beautiful Blood.

8. Shepard loved movies as a medium but loathed movies that did not come up to his standards. It would be interesting to hear him speculate on what Hollywood might do with a well-funded Griaule adaptation, but if any of its moguls now elect to take on that challenge, he will never see it, never rant about how the idiots have transmuted the gold of its original literary source into special-effects pabulum for studio stooges and slavering fan boys. Still....

99. Shepard: “The important thing ... is that writing ‘The Skull’ returned me to my original motivation in writing about Griaule, and if there are to be further stories about the dragon and his milieu, I think they’ll be more focused upon the central theme, the political fantasy, than those that preceded it” (431).

10. This activity of Jefe’s made me wonder if it had a real-world analog, so I took a few minutes to Google Is there an exercise that involves “flying” in or among chains? The first article so summoned was “Dragonfly Migration,” which reports that every autumn during both dragonfly and kestrel migrations, these species fly south together, with hawks eating the green darners accompanying them. Many green darners predict many kestrels, just as small numbers of dragonflies imply fewer kestrels. No word in my query mentions dragons, but flying by itself was enough to summon them. Thank God that chains did not call up essays with equally irrelevant, but wholly different, subject matter.

11. Despite, as well as because of, her easy sexuality, Martita Doan is the most admirable woman in the two Griaule books. In contrast to most of the other women in these stories—Lise, Catherine, Brianne, Mierelle, Magali, Sylvia, Yara, Ludie, et al.—she has both earnestness and great-heartedness to recommend her. She is clearly of “low birth,” a “drab” who has ascended by dint of a brief marriage and hard work. Albeit star-struck by Rosacher, she is so by virtue of her origins and her generosity of spirit, not the impact of mab. Of course, the man on whom she has fixated cannot truly love her: She is not his intellectual equal, a flaw that he finds less tolerable than pride or sexual duplicity. Sorry: We are in the realm of fantasy here, and only in hip, consciousness-raising twenty-first-century cartoons—think the Shrek franchise—do princesses marry ogres or princes ogresses. Shepard declares that Rosacher and Martita remain “great friends” (149) but dramatizes only two brief subsequent “friendly” exchanges.

12. Yes, I’ve done the same thing in a story or two, and, early in this essay, I praise Shepard for seeking to add life to moribund genre tropes. But these scenes, in a novel obviously meant for adults, lack credibility.

13. In The Dragon Griaule, I supposed Teocinte and Temalagua cities within the same country; in Beautiful Blood, they are separate countries with cities that also bear their countries’ names. (Have I misread?)