Crocodile Rock, a story told by an Oxford-educated American black expat by the name of Michael who has been in Africa, the Congo region, for several months, drinking, taking drugs, and enjoying women, all thanks to his grant money.
Michael receives a call from Rawley, a buddy he's known since his Oxford days, a burly blonde dude who needs his help with a prisoner, an older man who confessed to killing and eating people while in the form of half man, half crocodile. Although Michael's specialty is snakes, he knows a thing or two about crocodiles, and, partly out of friendship, partly out of the need to do something constructive, he agrees to speak with this man held prisoner, Gilbert Buma.
As you can perhaps imagine, Michael's meeting and conversing with Buma, the killer when in the form of half man, half crocodile, is intense, frightening, and unnerving. I wouldn't want to say anything further--the details of the conversation are best learned while actually reading Shepard's tale.
After the meeting, Michael walks to the hotel where he'll be staying. "Farther to the west, separated from this district by mud flats, lay the hotel Rawley had mentioned, the Hotel de Rive Vert, a venerable structure dating from the 1900s, when European traders had plied the river, exchanging cheap modernities for skins and ivory. The rive was no longer vert, the grounds having deteriorated into patches of parched grass crossed by muddy tracks, sentried here and there by dying, sparsely leaved eucalyptus. Standing isolate amid this desolation, the building itself, a rambling white stucco colonial fantasy of second-story balconies and French doors and a red tile roof, had the too-luminous incongruity of a hallucination, a notion assisted by the presence next to the front entrance of a lightning-struck acacia with a hollow just below its crotch that resembled an aghast mouth--it looked to be pointing at the hotel with a forked twig hand and venting a silent scream."
I quote the above passage to draw attention to Lucius Shepard's lush, eloquent language that brings to mind Joseph Conrad. Crocodile Rock is 50 pages and the author's rich vocabulary, vivid descriptions, and poignant metaphors add an expansive dimension to this tale containing themes that bind the turbulent political history of Africa to its traditions of witchcraft and sorcery.
Crocodile Rock is one of fourteen tales in THE BEST OF LUCIUS SHEPARD, Volume Two. I can't recommend this collection highly enough.
Comments
Post a Comment