"When speaking of Lucius Shepard, you’re speaking of an author who deserves the attention of a scholar or a critic. Because, when speaking of this author, you’re talking about a man who has produced a body of work since the 1980s that is prodigious in volume. A body of work critically lauded for the intensity of its vision and the complexity of its treatment of cultural values, its commentary on morality and violence. ... He ranks among the most tireless and consistently excellent authors of the North Amercan canon of science fiction and fantasy. It is a matter of record. If you examine that record--the awards, the chorus of critics who avow his importance, the volume of his output over three decades--it is plain we’re looking at the CV of a writer who stands shoulder to shoulder with the Wolfes, the Disches, the Tiptrees, and the Bradburys."

Weirdfictionreview.com: What weird writers did you grow up reading? How did they influence or not influence your writing?

Lucius Shepard: I read Tolkien when I was a kid, also a few random books like A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, but they didn’t make much of an impression. I didn’t really like Tolkien. My father forced me to read James Branch Cabell, which almost ruined me for fantasy. ... Most of my independent reading tended toward non-fiction travel books, mostly old ones, which are definitely weird by any definition, and adventure fiction, but I managed to sneak in a good bit of Jack Vance--with his ornate backdrops and lowlife picaresque heroes, he fired up my imagination. Then there was Lafcadio Hearn, the author of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. He was an ex-pat who lived in Japan and even published a good portion of his fiction under a Japanese pseudonym. The exoticism of his stories fascinated me and the awkward baroque-ness of his descriptions frustrated me--even at an early age I could almost see how to make them more precise. My genre reading in childhood and my teens was limited, so these men remained my strongest influences."

"Writing is not about the truth; it is a reinvention of the truth."

"Stories just come to me, sometimes over a period of years, sometimes over a few days. I’m not into self-analysis, so I don’t explore their origins, but in this case it was obvious. I was an abused child, and a very angry teenager and young man. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over being angry—so in this case I was more or less blending some autobiographical stuff with fantasy. When I was a kid, I believed anger was magic of a kind, power, and I wanted to convey that feeling in the main character. I got angry when I was writing it."

"Shepard’s body of work often felt to me to be divided into two camps, that of the eighties and early nineties, and that which came after a break, in the late nineties until now. The early work, defined by novels like Green Eyes and Life During Wartime, and collections such as The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth, did not seem as focused in its intent as the later work to me. At times, it felt very visual, as if the strangeness of his worlds held him captive, and this is probably best examplified in the excellent novella, ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’, in which a woman enters the body of the huge and comatose dragon Griaule, and discovers the life within it. There is a hallucinogenic quality to it, one that while still present in the later work, feels more prominent in the first half of his career, as if it were often guiding and informing his work, and not merely a part of it."

"It was in the new century, though, that Lucius Shepard got really, really good. His work deepened, darkened, thickened."

"...around the time that the story ‘Barnacle Bill the Spacer’ won a Hugo, I began to feel that some energy, some engagement, had gone out of his writing. I suspect Shepard felt the same, because for a few years there his career went into abeyance. By the time it revived, I wasn’t following him with the same devotion I once had shown. He was still an extraordinarily fine writer, and there were still good stories, but they felt thinner to me than the earlier pieces that had made his name, as if he had stopped being a star and settled for being a very good character actor. Too often in the stories I did read, I felt that he had exchanged lived experience for filmic experience."

"At first, when I was writing, I really just was writing. I didn’t have any expectations. That’s probably one reason that I took a break. I was getting a lot of offers to do things that I didn’t want to do. Someone even offered me a Conan franchise. I told them I’d do Conan the Intellectual. I just was confused and I wasn’t liking what I was writing. Now I think I have some expectations that were engendered during my gap. I know what I want to write. I know what I like. I can relegate doing money things with doing the things that I want to do. I kinda went unbalanced during the first go-round. I don’t know what expectations I have: hopefully, to make a living and to do some good work."

"The biggest difference between my writing 20 years ago and now, I don’t write as many terrible stories. I've learned not to go down so many wrong roads. I’m more precise with my language and I have a larger emotional palette. I use less adjectives, and I’ve learned to use adverbs. I don’t write quite as descriptively as once I did (there’s less emphasis on sensory detail) but that’s by choice and I do a much better job at evoking psychological nuance. Thus my characters are more well defined though where they are at any given moment is less so. I’m not proud of anything I’ve written and I’m downright ashamed of quite a bit. I aspire to be proud of something someday."

"[Shepard] was a youthful contributor to Collins' For Boys and Girls, later renamed Collins Young Elizabethan. Shepard's story 'Pasture for a Horse' was the winner of the Overseas Prize for the paper's short story contest in 1953. By the time the story appeared the following year, Shepard had already been a growing star in the paper for around 14 months.

His final tally was four short stories and four non-fiction pieces: 'We Meet a Native' (June 1952), 'Camp Greenville' (January 1953), 'Fidgets' (September 1953), 'Florida Island' (October 1953), 'A Journey to Cuba' (May 1954), 'Pasture for a Horse' (August 1954), 'Losing and Finding Fidgets' (September 1954) and 'The House in the Woods' (January 1955)."