I’ve just finished reading Lucius Shepard’s novella, “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” which took up 90 pages of the 308-page DAW anthology Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake. There are many excellent stories in the book, most notably Robert Charles Wilson’s “The Peaceable Land; or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Goat Variations,” and Paul Parks’ “A Family History.” But the Shepard is the jewel in the crown.

The story is about a writer named Thomas Cradle who discovers the existence of a book, The Tea Forest, written by a second Thomas Cradle, a book, better than anything he’s yet to write himself, that appears to have slipped through from the universe next door, written by a man who seems to be a variant of himself. In fact, there turn out to be an endless number of Cradles in similar universes, all slightly different from this one, and our Cradle abandons his life and goes on a quest through Cambodia and Vietnam to uncover the ur-Cradle and the meaning of it all.

I’ve always loved Shepard’s lush prose, and he doesn’t disappoint here. I’m going to quote a single paragraph to demonstrate the level at which he works, a paragraph more than two pages long that is positively Malzbergian in its syntactical complexity. (And in its bitterness, too.) (more…)