Sometimes the gods—all of them—smile down on you and bring you some fiction that you hadn't expected and would never have seen. (An aside may be appropriate. As a collector by nature, I acquire quite a few books over the course of a year. However, the old librarians' cliche "so many books, so little time" figures in here, along with the addendum, "so little money." That is, sometimes books I would otherwise snap up in a moment go unpurchased, perhaps lost to me forever in a sea of new small press publications, many of them limited print runs and rarely available at discounted prices.) And so the gods did smile but for a moment, and I was treated to a double dose of voodoo as filtered through the pen of Lucius Shepard (The Jaguar Hunter, Colonel Rutherford's Colt), and there are few voices as well-suited to the task.

In Floater, Shepard weaves a fascinating tale around a police shooting greatly reminiscent of the controversial New York Diallo shooting, in which an innocent Haitian immigrant was gunned down by three officers. In Shepard's short novel, William Dempsey is a cop on the edge. Officially cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting, but wallowing in guilt and psychological trauma, Dempsey watches as his two partners spiral in different directions. Haley eats his gun, while Pinero seems almost amused by the whole thing and appears to be living a second, secret life of rave culture and something much, much darker. And Dempsey? Well, things would be brighter if his girlfriend hadn't dumped him, and if the floater in his eye weren't getting bigger day by day, obscuring his sight and maybe even causing hallucinations. Then Dempsey begins to doubt Pinero's innocence, wondering whether the accidental killing was indeed an accident—or a hit. And when the victim, Israel Lara, starts to look less like an innocent and more like a voodoo practitioner, Dempsey becomes desperate to learn whether the floater is some kind of revenge from behind the grave. Or perhaps something even more bizarre, if he is to believe what he's told. Can he stop the loss of his vision and recover the threads of his life? Dempsey's migration through the backroom temples and raves of a very weird New York is slightly reminiscent of Falling Angel, the William Hjortsberg novel filmed as Angel Heart, especially with the beautifully melded noir and voudon motifs. A winner from page one, Shepard's convincingly hard-nosed magic realism will give you shivers.

In Louisiana Breakdown, Shepard brings the magic closer to one of its sources, as troubled musician Jack Mustaine's BMW breaks down in the sleepy backwater town of Grail, Louisiana, a place where psychics are a dime a dozen and some sort of fertility festival weirdness is about to occur on St. John's Eve. It is then that a ten-year old girl will be crowned Midsummer Queen by the outgoing queen, and for the next twenty years will draw all the town's bad luck to herself—results of a pact made with the Good Gray Man, who is either a voodoo god or a swamp spirit, but who must in any case be obeyed. After running afoul of the corrupt law, Jack meets Vida, the beautiful Midsummer Queen who is at the center of a tug of war between two forces—an abusive ex-lover whose magic torments her and some darkness she cannot fathom. In Jack she senses a third force, a Form which will save her from the other two. Thrown together in a steamy, sultry bar packed with weird locals and the blues, there is only one outcome for the couple's shared destiny. Jack's immediate love for Vida seems to confirm her sense that his fate is not wholly in his control, and their pairing is as full of portent as it is lust. Rolling with inevitability toward a mysterious confrontation in a weirdly recreated '60s Saigon set, Shepard's second outstanding short novel of 2003 makes excellent use of atmosphere, employing the animated mist that pours off the water and spreads through the swamp like a completely separate character. Louisiana Breakdown plays for a while like a voodoo "Wicker Man," pitting a clueless outsider against a townful of strange locals and their quaintly horrifying customs, but in the end it's a successful and sexy blend of secret motivations and secret knowledge.

Both novels benefit from their sharp focus, though the wordy among us might have liked fuller versions complete with subplots and increased character backstories. On the other hand, Shepard's movie-like approach to scenes that move the plot along like a rocket-propelled steamroller fit today's rapid lifestyle just fine. More notably, both novels triumph with settings doubled by elements overlaid on the mundane, places revealed only by special vision and knowledge—indeed, the central conceit of all magic realists. Lucius Shepard's work stands with the best of them.