One activity that contributed to the weird, nostalgic mood of “Life Felt Bigger, Then” (which chronicles a recent visit to my childhood home) was cleaning out the upstairs closet. That spelunking unearthed several treasured books from the early days of my reading journey, and while I ended up donating most of them, there were quite a few I couldn’t part with and shipped back to Portland. Given the time and expense of this, I decided I was long overdue to indulge in a re-read now and then, and there was no way not to start with Lucius Shepard’s The Jaguar Hunter (1987), which I’ve long considered a key formative influence on my early passion for short fiction. Shepard’s work was ubiquitous in the SF magazines of the eighties and nineties, and I inhaled his work, which ran the gamut of specfic from SF to fantasy to horror, often indiscriminately combining, all with a sweeping literary sensibility and commitment to detailed setting that made the world feel huge and fascinating. The Jaguar Hunter assembles eleven of his early stories, and while the teenaged version of me who scrawled “unquestioningly the best short story collection of all time” on the inside of the cover (!) may have been punching above his critical weight, I still think it’s a banger of a collection.
The international scope of Shepard’s work always astounded me, and this element of his skillset leaps off the page immediately in the title story, a trippy, eerie fantasy set in one of the many jungles that would serve as the author’s fictional stomping grounds. It’s a solid opener, if also a reminder of what a total dude Shepard was in his handling of gender, sex, and violence in his work; it likely says something about how toxic the eighties were that, on that score, I don’t recall even noticing these tendencies. Still, that tough-guy machismo is key to the tone of his war-set stories, which are some of his strongest here — especially “Salvador” and “R & R,” which both veil the shadow of the Viet Nam war into spooky spec-fic futures in Central America. “Salvador” is an intense encapsulation of war’s madness, a vibe “R & R” expands on in unforgettable fashion. Shepard’s brush paints elsewhere, though, placing compelling horror-infused tales in India (“The Night of White Bhairab”) and Massachussetts (“How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”). “The End of Life As We Know It” brilliantly chronicles the dying stages of a troubled marriage in Mexico, while “A Traveler’s Tale” wraps Shepard’s fascination with remote locations and expatriate travelers around an elaborate first-contact premise. “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” always puzzled me on earlier reads, but its historical allegory proved more resonant this time around. In the end, though, the closing story — “A Spanish Lesson” — remains a favorite, in which Shepard cheekily fictionalizes himself into a Spanish expatriate community in an alternate-worlds story that caps off the collection as something of a thematic summary.
Ultimately, rereading The Jaguar Hunter decades removed from that early exposure was a sheer delight. My tastes have shifted considerably since I fell in love with it, but I can still see why it made such an indelible impression, showing me remote corners of the world in vivid detail — and in a manner that broadened my worldview, while also still satisfying my cravings for imaginative sense of wonder. Is it the singular best collection of all time, as my younger me defaced it to proclaim? Well, from a modern vantage I would question that assessment, but that doesn’t mean I won’t still cite it as a high-ranking favorite.
