Beast of the Heartland and other stories

by Lucius Shepard (Four Walls Eight Windows) 292 pp. $ 10.95
by Thomas Christian

At the bottom of a gently declining ramp, lay the entrance to a vast circular chamber – I guessed it to be about a half-mile across – floored with exotic vegetation, some of the plants having striped stalks and huge rubbery leaves, unlike anything I’d ever seen; the domed ceiling was aglow with ultraviolet panels. Mists curled above the treetops, rising in wraithlike coils to the top of the ceiling, lending the space a primitive aspect like some long-ago jungle, daunting in its silence and strangeness.
And yet the place was familiar.
-Lucius Shepard

As I entered, Carolyn leaped up from my computer. On the screen was displayed what looked to be a page from my deep files. She tried to switch off the screen, but I caught her arm and checked the page: I had not been mistaken.
‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, yanking her away from the computer.
‘I was just curious.’
-Lucius Shepard

She leaned down, hands on his shoulders, and kissed his cheek, a serpent of brown hair coiling across his neck and onto his chest.
-Lucius Shepard

He cut his eyes toward her. That teardrop ass sheathed in silk, that mind like a sewer running with black bile, that heart like a pound of red-raw poisoned hamburger.
-Lucius Shepard

The fevered temperature of her soiled flesh brightened everything. Even the air was shining. The shadows were black glares.
-Lucius Shepard

He gazed out the window, searching for favorable signs, something to restore his sense of purpose. Overhead, a pair of laced-together sneakers looped over a telephone line heeled and kicked in a stiff breeze, bringing to mind a gallows dance.
-Lucius Shepard

Then, as if jolted forward by the sound of a bell, he steps out into the crowds, becoming part of them.
-Lucius Shepard