The Ends of the Earth

A second collection from the author of Life During Wartime and Kalimantan, with settings that range from Guatemala to Nepal. Even when a story's setting is urban Detroit ("Life of Buddha") or New England ("The Exercise of Faith"), there are aspects of behavior or circumstance that make the territory bizarrely alien, truly the ends of the earth. And if remote places are the settings of these pieces, then their theme is transformation, the corruption or enlightenment of characters in ways that far exceed normal experience - straying, as in "Shades," beyond death and back again, or, as in "Bound For Glory," to a place where spiritual transformation is matched by the physical. All are disturbing and deliberately ambiguous. Are the events in the story "The Ends of the Earth" the result of ancient Mayan magic or mental illness? Is "The Black Clay Boy" a magical agent of deliverance or the onset of senility? Does the high-tech future war of "Fire Zone Emerald" also have room for psychic jungle queens or are they a byproduct of military-issue drugs? These stories stray from dark fantasy to science fiction to horror, but Shepard never strays from his purpose - hammering his characters against the anvil until they've broken, brittle, or transformed, hardened, into something else. (Kirkus Reviews)