We've been taught in recent years to think of mindless brain-eaters when we hear the word "zombies". In 1984, Shepard's first novel inverted the stereotype. A secret medical project, hidden in the Louisiana bayou, has discovered how to revive the recently dead, using a bacterial dose derived from graveyard dirt. Far from mindless, the revived are mentally more vivid and alert than they ever were before dying, and have actually become different people, remembering lives that they never really lived. Their eyes shine with green luminescence from the bacterial activity in their brains and optic nerves. Most expire again permanently after only a few hours; some, after a few months. The story mainly follows one of the latter, Donnell Harrison, as he learns how short his expected time may be, and fights to extend it. A carnival worker dead of alcohol poisoning in his former existence, his false memory is of a life as a poet - and he can actually write new poems having true artistic value. Aided by the young, woman psychologist managing his case, he escapes the project, only to become entangled with the last heir to a sinister Louisiana family long associated with voodoo and other dark practices.

One is struck by how completely Shepard as a writer had become himself, even at this early stage in his career. The heat and humidity of the bayou, the marginal protagonist moving through a series of lushly vegetated, eerie scenes, the liminal menace, the fine writing interspersed with passages of florid description: all present. He's best known for novella-length work, but here and in A Handbook of American Prayer, it's clear he could write novels just as well.

I bought this book in 1984, and just read it now for the first time - pays to hang on to books, no? The year 1984 was vintage for SF&F, seeing the first-novel debuts of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Kim Stanley Robinson (The Wild Shore), both, like the Shepard, "Ace Science Fiction Specials." There's a skippable introduction by editor Terry Carr.

Not in the front rank of Shepard's fiction, but gripping and thoughtful. ( )

I just don't like zombies, sorry...Not a bad book, sort of reminded me of Shelley's _Frankenstein_. ( )

Lucius Shepard's first novel. Only so-so. I don't like his stories that are set inside the U.S. so much; they're like second-rate Stephen King. Read the classic Life During Wartime instead. ( )

Zombies.

*note to self. Copy from A.

ZB7