Five Autobiographies and a Fiction, the long-awaited new collection from master storyteller Lucius Shepard, is a significant publishing event, a volume equal in every way to such earlier Shepard classics as The Jaguar Hunter and The Dragon Griaule. Its six long stories offer narrative pleasures as diverse and profound as anything to be found in modern imaginative fiction.

“Ditch Witch,” set in rural Oregon, concerns a young man on the run in a stolen car, a hitchhiker who may or may not have witch-like powers, and the bizarre inhabitants of the seemingly innocuous Elfland Motel. “The Flock” is a tale of high school football and small town malaise set against an impossible intrusion from the natural world. A washed-up actor and a Malaysian “woman of power” stand at the center of “Vacancy,” the account of a man forced to confront the very real demons of his past. “Dog-eared Paperback of My Life” follows a writer (Thomas Cradle) on his erotically charged journey down the Mekong River, a journey enveloped in a maze of multiple, interpenetrating realities. “Halloween Town” tells the story of a small, extremely strange town and one of its denizens, Clyde Ormoloo, a man who sees too deeply into the “terrible incoherence” of human affairs. The final story, “Rose Street Attractors,” takes us into 19th century London and the heart of the steampunk era—in the richly atmospheric tale of a most unusual haunting. Rounding out this generous volume is an Introdution in which Shepard offers a startlingly frank assessment of his own troubled adolescence, identifying the “alternate versions” of himself that appear in these pages and illuminating those points at which fiction and “near-autobiography” converge.