We Think it’s Great: The TFT Review of Jim Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad

To describe Jim Shepard as a writer feels somehow insufficient. Literary alchemist, magician, archeologist, historian, time traveler, and/or scientist are perhaps more apt, given not only the vast range and scope of his stories, but also his mind-bendingly impeccable ability to inhabit such unlikely characters. A servant to Gilles de Rais, the Breton knight most famous for also being a child murderer in the 1400s, a contemporary American soldier suffering from PTSD, and Tomoyuki Tanaka, the creator of Godzilla, are only three of a multitude of the vivid, realistic people who populate the prolific novelist and short story writer’s latest, the so-good-it’s-shocking eleven-story collection You Think That’s Bad. [Ed. note: it really is that good]

Shepard covers a wide range of ground in time and space as well as character, from the Tethys Ocean (though there’s a twist) to the Netherlands of the future, from Japan to the Middle East. In “Poland is Watching,” the reader isn’t only transported to Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas, but travels there with a small group of Polish mountaineers. Whether inhabiting the consciousness of a “black world” operative at Los Alamos or a female Western explorer traversing the Arabian deserts, Shepard seems to dream up the most ambitious projects a writer could aim to pull off, and then not only pulls everything off but makes it so alive that it’s tempting to keep checking the label on the back of the book to remind yourself that it is fiction, not artful immersion journalism or historical account. Historic accuracy serves as springboard for riveting feats of imagination.

Blame the author’s extensive research process. The acknowledgements—an interesting read on their own—speak to this process, naming works such as Waterplan 2 Rotterdam, MacArthur’s Jungle War, Everyday Life in Medieval Times, and Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas. Shepard’s astounding ability to infuse descriptions and scenes with knowledge culled from the impressive list of sources yields such absorbing moments as the death-risking team’s climb in “Poland is Watching:” “Night and winter this high are like outer space. The other mountains below look like whitecaps on the ocean. … Even at this time of day—is it noon?—the sky above is indigo, fading into a pink upper atmosphere. … A cloud mist leaves us in the half-light, like a waking dream.”  Precision in description and detail makes it hard to believe the story was not actually written by a Polish climber on Nanga Parbat but a self-described “nerd who just takes books like that out of the library.”

The interest in snow-based catastrophes isn’t limited to Nanga Parbat. Shepard also gives us “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” in which a Swiss researcher in the Alps believes he caused the avalanche that killed his brother, Willi. He tries to talk about it with his mother. “I told her I thought I might have started the avalanche. She said, ‘You didn’t start the avalanche.’ I told her I might have, though I hadn’t yet explained how. She reminded me of the farmers’ old saying that they didn’t make the hay, that the sun made the hay.” To complicate matters, he happens to be in love with Willi’s former girlfriend.

“The Track of the Assassins” follows an Englishwoman explorer through the most unexplored area of the Middle East, “the Persian mountains west of the Caspian Sea,” accompanied by two guides. Whether desert or mountain, the idea of man facing the elements, the more extreme sides of nature, pervades the collection: “The descent to the valley was hair-raising. It was as if the entire range on which we’d been perched was a giant breaking wave, and having ascended the gentle backslope, we next had to negotiate down the much steeper face.” Information gathering and epic quests provide a connective device between stories that span such a range of time and place. In “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” it’s the mother: “Form as early on as we could remember, she’d always gathered information of one kind or another.” And in “Low-Hanging Fruit,” about a particle physicist: “The key is to go after the major stuff. Otherwise, you’re one of those guys who’s looking for what we call low-hanging fruit: the questions that are easiest to answer.” Such moments seem to speak to Shepard’s process.

You Think That’s Bad demonstrates the boundlessness of Shepard’s proven gifts. He is author as moonwalker, bounding lightly across such varied terrain, effortless and graceful. As unique as his characters, historical periods, and settings are, Shepard could write a story about a plastic bag and make it fascinating. Like many of his characters, the notion of journey emerges to the forefront. As his desert autodidact in “The Track of the Assassins” puts it: “The main thing the traveler carries about with her is herself. There’s my home, and then the world: the sea is much stronger than the anchor.” Shepard navigates the sea of story in a nautical spacecraft, charting a course by the brightest stars of an ancient night sky.