The Dragon Griaule

The left-wing group holding the embassy was reacting to the fact that when the owners of immense ranches in the north of the country found that Indians had settled on their land and lived there long enough to establish legal rights, they did not take the matter to the courts, where they were certain to lose, but simply hired the military to massacre the Indians and destroy their settlements – the left-wingers hoped by taking action to initiate a dialogue about land reform. The government’s reaction was to firebomb the building several hours after the takeover, killing everyone inside, including the Spanish ambassador and the ex-president, and thereafter to shut down Guatemala City for a week, closing the airport, burning all the buses that attempted to leave or enter the city, making a show of power. It was an extremely nervous time, people jumping at the least unexpected sound, a heavy military presence on almost every street corner day and night. I’d been planning to leave for Honduras the following day and, prevented from this, I spent a good bit of time at the nightclub during the week. Though I wasn’t as adventurous as my protagonist with regards to the women who habituated the place, I did have a number of conversations with some of them, and it was on these that I based the character of Luisa Bazan and the dynamic that serves a key plot point in the story.

Of all the Griaule stories, this is the most grounded in my life experience and in the political realities of Central America, a place where I’ve spent a considerable amount of time. Temalagua is, of course, a scramble of Guatemala, and the Party of Organized Violence was an actual Guatemalan entity, very much on the ascendancy when I was first there. I could point out a dozen other correspondences between fiction and my Tru-Life Adventures in this piece, but that would be overkill. The important thing, at least to me, is that writing ‘The Skull’ returned me to my original motivation in writing about Griaule, and if there are to be further stories about the dragon and his milieu, I think they’ll be more focused upon the central theme, the political fantasy, than those that preceded it.

Author Biography

Lucius Taylor Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1947. He travelled extensively in his youth, and has held a wide assortment of occupations in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America, including rock musician and night club bouncer. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1980 and made his first commercial sale a year later. His work covers many areas of fantastic fiction and has recently encompassed non-fiction, as well. For over a decade, he has contributed a regular column on SF cinema for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Lucius Shepard has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon and International Horror Guild awards. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Also by Lucius Shepard

Novels

Green Eyes (1984)Life During Wartime (1987)The Golden (1993)

Valentine (2002)

Louisiana Breakdown (2003)

Floater (2003)

Viator (2004)

Trujillo (2004)

A Handbook of American Prayer (2004)

Softspoken (2007)

Short Story Collections

The Jaguar Hunter (1987)

Nantucket Slayrides (with Robert Frazier) (1989)

The Ends of the Earth (1991)

Kalimantan (1993)

Barnacle Bill the Spacer and Other Stories (1997)

Two Trains Running (2004)

Trujillo and Other Stories (2004)

Eternity and Other Stories (2004)

Dagger Key and Other Stories (2007)

The Best of Lucius Shepard (2008)

Skull City and Other Lost Tales (2008)

Vacancy & Ariel (2009)

The Dragon Griaule (2012)

Five Autobiographies and a Fiction (2013)