Love and Hydrogen

Starred review from January 1, 2004
Although Shepard's mordantly funny, unsettling, yet immensely gratifying short stories race off in unforeseeable directions, they always veer into the crimson glare of trauma or death. As the ludicrous collides with the profound, the two axes of the human condition, the reader experiences a weird elation because Shepard, shrewdly deadpan and witty, gets it exactly right as he riffs on historical events and raids the junkyard of pop culture. In the extraordinarily imaginative title story, for instance, he vividly re-creates the flight of the doomed "Hindenburg "airship, on which two male crew members conduct a taboo affair. Elsewhere, Shepard enters the minds of The Who's John Entwhistle, the creature of the Black Lagoon, and John Ashcroft. Daringly inventive, as skillful as a top surgeon, and as clever, quirky, and right-on as David Byrne and Warren Zevon, to jump art forms, Shepard is breathtaking. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)