You Think That's Bad: Stories
*Starred Review* Inclined toward tales of obsession and risk, exceptionally imaginative Shepard is fascinated by the nexus of landscape and mindscape, passion and emotional paralysis. In his fourth highly original collection, stories set in the present dramatize debilitating isolation. A master of the demanding, hence, rare genre of historical short stories, Shepard portrays the bold explorer Freya Stark as she treks across the stony wilds of Iran in the early 1930s. All-but-forgotten scientific and military ventures are the catalysts for two breathtaking stories about  love triangles; one involves avalanches in the Swiss Alps; the other, the devouring jungle of New Guinea during WWII. Japan�s postwar trauma is beautifully evoked in a story about the special-effects genius and creator of Godzilla, Eiji Tsuburaya, who, like most of Shepard�s male characters, thrives at work and fails miserably at home. Of particular eeriness is Shepard�s take on Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French serial killer who preyed on children. Shepard also envisions a catastrophic future in a tale about a Dutch hydraulic engineer battling family crises and rising sea levels. There is so much knowledge, insight, feeling, and artistry in each engrossing Shepard story, he must defy some law of literary physics. --Donna Seaman