One piece of advice that the aspiring writer hears frequently is “avoid unnecessary words”. Lean prose is essential; include nothing that doesn’t drive the plot or develop a character, exclude flowery language and excess description. Lucius Shepard ignores this cardinal edict—almost every single story in this collection could be told with greater brevity—but the mark of his talent is that the reader doesn’t get bored or distracted; you forgive him the slow spinning of the yarns because he does it so well. It is the skill of the raconteur, the inveterate teller of tall tales… and of the soloist musician who can extemporise on a theme without drifting off-key.

Which figures: Shepard spent a decade as a professional musician, and his passion for music manifests itself frequently throughout this collection. The opening story, “Stars Seen Through Stone”, is told from the point of view of a small-time small-town music producer who stumbles across one of the horribly flawed geniuses that the industry feeds upon, and is completely free of the false glamour that outsiders usually bring to such settings, as is the passing portrait of a small-time bar singer in “Limbo”.

Also plain is Shepard’s love of poetry. At the macro level, this reveals itself in “Emerald Street Expansions”, wherein a jaded self-made man becomes partly possessed by the soul of a fifteenth-century French poet-cum-vagabond. But it is at the level of words and sentences that Shepard’s poetic voice truly manifests, so ubiquitously as to appear perfectly natural. Knowingly or not, every line rings and resonates with itself, its neighbours, and the story of which it is a part.

And this is where the excess length comes from. When Shepard finds a riff that fits the theme, he’ll squeeze in as many notes as he can without bloating the flow of the piece as a whole. Take this description of a trophy fish from “Stars Seen Through Stone”:

“It occupied a place of honour in his office, a hideous thing mounted on a plaque, some sort of mutant trout nourished on pollution. Whenever I saw it, I would speculate on what else might lurk beneath the surface of the cold, deep pools east of town, imagining telepathic monstrosities plated with armor like fish of the Mesozoic and frail tentacled creatures, their skins having the sheen of an oil slick, to whom mankind were sacred figures in their dream of life.”

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It’s not irrelevant to the plot, but it’s not entirely essential either. But as I said before, I’m inclined to believe this is simply Shepard’s natural writing voice. As the voice of Vernon, the thoughtful music producer speaking above, it fits pretty well. In other cases, it’s a little mismatched, as in the narrative and dialogue of the New Orleans criminals of “Dead Money”; these aren’t characters you’d expect to think or speak in the crisp muscular English which they use.

But chances are you won’t really notice, because the characters themselves are fascinating. Shepard seems to have a fondness for loser leads cruising toward their inevitable doom, and he has a way of making them end up longing for the death (or damnation, or both) that they come to, and then pulling the metaphysical rug from beneath their feet. The deeper implications of this underlying theme I shall leave to critics far more experienced than myself to discuss—but I will say that it makes for strong endings, all the more believable for the absence of happily-ever-after.

And there’s the thing: Shepard doesn’t do trite. He doesn’t do wish-fulfilment. And when he sets out to break the rules, he makes sure he does it properly—as in the second-person present-tense monologue of “Abimagique”, which only disappoints in its overly ambiguous ending,

I should be upfront about one thing: I am not a regular reader of ‘dark fantasy’, to the extent that I’m not entirely sure what the term defines. I cannot place Dagger Key in the context of other works of the same genre. Instead, I must approach it as a reader with no preconceptions, and as a reviewer with no agenda beyond examining Shepard’s writing on its own terms. And on those terms, these gritty and subtle yarns of occult goings-on—sometimes leavened with sf-nal tropes, and all but one of them set in the real world—are the work of a man who knows the language like a blind old bluesman knows the fretboard of his guitar. And while I may not be an established fan of the genre in question, I know and appreciate a fine player when I hear one. Lucius Shepard is a writer’s writer. Read him and weep.