Lucius Shepard specializes in dark fantasy at novelette and novella length, having produced only a couple of novels over a career in which he has written numerous collections' worth of shorter work. He's always worth reading, but of course quality varies, from the merely good to the extraordinary.

Viator Plus comprises a number of ordinary (for Shepard) shorter pieces, plus an excellent but unusual short novel. Of the shorter ones, "Chinandega" is the best. A young man travels to a backwoods town in search of his missing sister, and encounters Shepard's usual sinister presences, and a vision of the world's essential corruption.

Two stories, originally published under the pseudonym "Sally Carteret," feature the first-person story of rock singer Julie Banks. Shepard often features sympathetic women, but his viewpoint characters are normally men, with the women's interior lives not visible except via word or action. On the evidence of these stories, this choice is best for him; Julie is very masculine in her outlook.

The real reason to read this book is the short novel, Viator, which is a greatly expanded version of the 2005 short novel of that name. Shepard has said that he was depressed while writing that earlier version -- which I haven't read.

The new Viator is a departure for this author. Not so much in theme and imagery, which are usual for him: a socially and economically marginal man is thrown together with men like himself, in a marginal place, and begins to encounter phenomena outside his - or anyone's - experience. Viator is a seagoing freighter which was beached in Alaska years ago. It is now home to several men, hired for obscure purposes, asked to perform investigations with unclear purpose. The freighter's surroundings are improbably tropical for Alaska, and the sounds and sights of otherworldly creatures and places become progressively more apparent as the men's behaviors and obsessions become ever stranger.

Contrasted to this scene is the nearby, quite mundane Alaskan town which Shepard's protagonist visits, and where he begins a romance with the wary owner of the general store. The greater than usual length here allows the author to round out their story more completely than he usually does. Their relationship is appealing and convincing as each dares to hope for more than life has brought before.

Shepard's style here is different from any story of his I have encountered before. He uses many extremely long, complex sentences - often half a page long. Shepard's no Hemingway in any case, but he's never written like this. Example:

He had felt only intermittently connected with her during the call, sparks and flickers, the sputtering of a faulty connection, but after switching off the phone, he felt that a protective envelope had dissolved, the cold rushing in to fill the vacuum, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, gripping the rail at the very peak of the bow (was there a word for that precise spot, the last firm footing behind the prow, some Latinate term, the perigolum, the spitaline, or maybe a vulgar British naval term dating from the days of the lash?) amid the spicy smell of the firs, peering off into the night, unable to make out a trunk, a bough, a fern, and then seeing shapes melt up from the darkness, amoeboid blotches of a shinier black than the air, shiny like patches of worn velvet, drifting and jittering across his field of vision, a whole zoo of them slipping about, and he thought that here in the forward position, at the edge of Viator, aloft from the world, he should have a perfect angle on things, a true perspective in every direction, even inward, unless such an angle was impossible and no matter what promontory you scaled, hoping to penetrate the incidental distractions that blinded you to your life, to understand its central circumstance, you discovered that you had no central circumstance, no fundamental issue, no rational compass by which to steer -- it was all a distraction, all a flowing (according to Heraclitus, at least), a flux impossible to navigate, and you were borne along on unknowable currents and tides until you, the mad captain of your soul, ran yourself aground on the reef of a heap of white powder, a homeless shelter, an abandoned ship, an abandoned relationship...and sometimes that tactic worked out for the best, as it may have for Lunde, as it might have for Wilander if he'd had the good sense to strand himself on the shoal of the trading post and cultivate the illusion of a central circumstance with Arlene.

If you weren't keeping score, that was a single sentence. Does this work? For me, at least, it neither adds nor detracts from a fine Shepard story. I don't place it among his very best, e.g. "Surrender," "No Mans Land," "Skull City" or A Handbook of American Prayer. However, four stars for the book, based on this short novel. ( )