SOFTSPOKEN by Lucius Shepard (Nightshade Books/179 pages/$23.95)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Readers familiar with the writing of Lucius Shepard – from his many short stories to novels like Green Eyes, Trujillo or A Handbook of American Prayer—know he is, perhaps, one of the few writers to emerge from the SF field who writes the same sort of powerful prose as do mainstream stalwarts like Robert Stone, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. The best of his fiction packs the power of myth and wields the magic of poetry. His latest novel, Softspoken, brings all of that and then some to the telling of a southern gothic tale filled with mystery, madness and plenty of hauntings.

Sanie Bullard, a writer, and her lawyer husband Jackson move into his South Carolina, ancestral home, sharing it with his siblings. The place, as Sanie observes, is “Cobweb central,” dilapidated at best. Jackson’s father, a lawyer himself, was supposedly mad as a hatter. When Sanie begins hearing a distinct voice, she thinks it’s her peyote-chewing, prankster brother-in-law; then she realizes Will has heard the ghost as well. Trying the drug herself, Sanie actually sees the spirits inhabiting the antebellum home: “Half bodied ladies in evening wear mingle and merge in pale, penetrating intimacy with eyeless gentlemen and soldiers with missing limbs that are not the result of battle.” Sanie also begins to realize what the ghost is trying to tell her. Apparently, there is more than one secret, one mystery, hidden in the Bullard family closets. The revelation, when it comes, results in a stunning, bloody and surreal denouement. It’s an ending that seems inevitable in retrospect, and which plays out perfectly. The beauty of Shepard’s prose is that while it never flinches away from describing the gritty, low-end of the new south, it does so with the sweetness of a Magnolia in full bloom, as when the author describes Sanie’s view of the Bullard home after a stroll:

“…the house emerges from behind the screen of two water oaks, ramshackle and many-eyed with black windows, presenting the impression of a ditsy old matriarch, her torso rising from waist-high yellowing weeds of skirts so ragged, the corroded wrought-iron fence of her bustle shows through.”

Further down, on the same page, Shepard turns Sanie’s nearly imperceptible feeling about the ghost she has encountered into something feline:

“Anxiety bristles up in her, but she also feels a mild burst of affection for the voice, and she thinks she detects a faint vibe of devotion, as it it’s been waiting inside to squeeze out the cracked door, nearly tripping her up, and rub against her ankles.”

Ranking up with the haunted house novels (which are rarely about haunted houses)—The Haunting of Hill House, Ghost Story, Bag of Bones—Shepard’s Softspoken is a classic ghost story that comes off like a collaboration between Shirley Jackson and Tennessee Williams, with just a touch of James M. Cain. The end result is, of course, all Shepard. Softspoken is both a taut psychological thriller and a beautifully rendered portrait of the New American South, told with unflinching honesty, humor, insight and compassion.