Dagger Key and Other Stories

Introduction

Griaule and the Mountains

(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.

That is the key. The signs are there: Shepard’s dialogue; his descriptions of landscape; his focus on human motivations; his political savvy. He is a naturalist (in a particularly American tradition). All the dragons, zombies, ghosts or otherworldly spirit-harvesters do not alter that a jot. What he’s not is a lumpen naturalist—the reality he depicts contains more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy. But it’s still real, still natural. It is a naturalism invigorated but never overwhelmed by the uncanny.

The most brilliant expression of this comes in “Liar’s House”, the recounting of one of the dragon Griaule’s opaque schemes. There is one throwaway clause, early on, which provides a startling insight into Shepard’s project. Describing his sculptures of the great Griaule, the protagonist Hota sees them as “objects that—like their model—appeared to be natural formations that bore a striking resemblance to dragons.”

Run though that implicit description of Griaule. What does a miles-long, vastly recumbent dragon look like? It looks like a mountain range that looks like a dragon.

Here is an answer to the conundrum, faced whether they acknowledge it or not by all writers of the fantastic, of how to describe the magically indescribable. All we have for reference is the everyday.

With this extraordinary sentence—which must surely go down as one of the most incisive, radical and rigorou s examinations of the fantastic in fantasy—Shepard achieves something remarkable. On the one hand, he undercuts the self-big-up of magic. We cast about for similes, but the magic is, and can be, “like” nothing other than the mental furniture we have to hand, that very unmagic stuff all around us.

At the same time, Shepard honours that everyday too often denigrated. What, the analogy asks, can be more extraordinary than a mountain? After all, they are what dragons look like! Dragons, in this radical grammar, aren’t their own end; they are referents to help us visualise rocks. What an astonishing thing to do to the fantastic.

But it is astonishing because we know that dragons are astonishing. And we know that, and Shepard knows it, and the analogy knows it too, though it pretends not to.

So this is no crude rebuke or simplistic reversal of priorities: it is a fractal blossoming of reference and counter-reference, a giddying out- and infolding. Shepard does not invert the mawkish privileging of “magic”: he undercuts the unequal binary itself. We’re too enamoured of hierarchical dyads to give them up tout court. Instead, in that elegant and extraordinary comparison, Shepard makes the distinction self-cannibalising, destabilising.

And he points out that we’ve all been doing this all along. The passage is a canny reversal of one of the most clichéd analogies known to poets of geography: what, after all, does a certain type of mountain range look like but a sleeping dragon? It’s a commonplace for us to so “uncover” the never-very-covered-up-anyway magic under the skin of the natural; here is fantasy that lays bare the natural below the magic.

Lucius Shepard has a name for what he does. In the story notes to “Abimagique”, he memorably describes one of his strengths as a writer as “bungling naturalism”. Read him and you read a naturalist who bungles, repeatedly and almost seemingly inadvertently straying into the unnatural, the supernatural. Fantasy here is a kind of systemic, fecund and felicitous writerly mistake, one that vastly invigorates the naturalism Shepard seemed to be angling for.

“Bungling Naturalism” may the best term for serious non-realist literature ever arrived at. It is a great boon to fiction that Shepard strives for the kind of naturalism he does; and it is a great boon to fantasy that he so brilliantly bungles.

China Miéville