Lucius Shepard writes from the darkest, truest heart of America—not the heart of the United States or of North America, but all of America—and he writes of it with rare passion, honesty and intelligence. His earliest stories, the ones that made his name a quarter of a century ago were set in the jungles of South America and filled with creatures dark and fantastical. Stories like "Salvador", "The Jaguar Hunter", and the excoriatingly brilliant "R&R" deconstructed war and peace in South Ame...

When Lucius Shepard passed away in 2014, he left behind a body of work unparalleled in its richness, power, and sheer originality. In 2008, Subterranean Press published The Best of Lucius Shepard, which served as a massive monument to an extraordinary career. Over time, this monument has proved insufficient, so we now have this even more massive second volume. It is a gift that Shepard’s many devoted readers will take to their hearts. Weighing in at more than 300,000 words, spread across n...

More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own “by the thinnest margin of possibility.” There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” the classic account of an artist—Meric Cattanay—and his decades long effort to paint—and kill—a dormant, not quite dead dragon measuring 6,000 feet from end to end. The story was nominated for multiple awards and ...

The late Lucius Shepard was one of his era’s best and most quintessentially American writers. His dark yet grudgingly hopeful worldview gave birth to a treasure trove of fiction that could have been written by nobody else.Crows and Silences collects four select short novels, each totally unlike the others.In Kalimantan, jewel merchant Barnett follows the trail of the expat American fool Curtis MacKinnon deep into the jungles of Borneo, only to discover tha...

Lucius Shepard’s Beautiful Blood is something both special and long awaited: the first novel-length exploration of the world of the Dragon Griaule. It’s a subject that has preoccupied Shepard since the publication of “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” in 1984, and he has returned to it repeatedly over the years, though never before in such a mesmerizing, all-encompassing fashion.Like the initial tale, Beautiful Blood begins in the 1850s in the town of Teocinte, in a world “se...

Lucius Shepard explores the after-effects of trauma in this haunting story.Bobby is a Columbia grad student studying philosophy who has taken a year off from school to help with the meticulous clean-up at ground zero after 9/11. Each day, he enters a nightmarish otherworld of smoke and ash, where pieces of broken lives emerge from the rubble like lost soul fragments. Haunted by what he has seen, he finds himself collecting pieces from the wreckage. Yet he is unable to talk about hi...

The itinerant gun show draws together many subcultures from the margins of society: survivalists, Aryan brotherhoods, and the team of Rita Whitelaw and Jimmy Roy Guy, dealers in collectible arms. Rita has made Jimmy an exception to her general disdain for whites, for Jimmy’s got a storytelling ability that borders on mystic vision, which he delights in applying to the weapons he acquires. When Jimmy makes an agreement with the widow of white supremacist martyr Bob Champion to broker her hu...

Expand your vision of what a fantasy story can be with tales by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Di Filippo, and others.Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best AnthologyInspired by the literary salons of eighteenth-century France, Salon Fantastique brings together renowned authors to create and share new tales that show the fantasy form at its best. The resulting stories form a conversation between esta...

Shapeshifting stories by Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, Midori Snyder, Jane Yolen, and others: "Rich reading that meets the editors' high standards." — Kirkus ReviewsIn world mythology, transformation legends are attached to almost every type of animal: a variety of birds, fish, reptiles, and even insects. In this book, you'll find stories inspired by such myths from around the world, retold and reimagined by some of the very best writers in the realm of fant...

This multiple award-winning anthology of twenty psychological and supernatural horror stories explores the outer limits of fear.To create this volume, renowned horror editor Ellen Datlow wrote to her favorite authors asking for stories that would "provide the reader with a frisson of shock, or a moment of dread so powerful it might cause the reader outright physical discomfort; or a sensation of fear so palpable that the reader feels impelled to turn up the lights v...

Sixteen tales that combine the otherworldly with hardboiled crime fiction—from Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Paul G. Tremblay, Melanie Tem, and others.Here are the femme fatales, the tough guys, the down-on-their-luck detectives—but with a twist. Collected by Hugo and Bram Stoker Award–winning editor Ellen Datlow, these stories of the murderous and macabre will take you onto the dark streets of worlds unlike our own, where the monstrous stalk their prey.

This award-winning horror anthology is the "yardstick by which future ghost fiction will be measured"—featuring Tanith Lee, Joyce Carol Oates, and others ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).Award-winning anthologist Ellen Datlow—praised by William Gibson as "the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions"—is determined to prove that ghost stories still possess the power to chill modern readers to the marrow. So she reached out to a list of varied...