Beautiful Blood, by Lucius Shepard

At the sentence to paragraph level, Lucius Shepard was a brilliant writer, with an elegant prose style and a honed worldview that delivered acute observations of humanity in quotes like epigrams. He seemed most successful working at the novella length. His longer works, which include several novels, often start brilliantly, but at some point two-thirds of the way through Shepard's interest seems to wane, and while the reader gets an ending, it doesn't really satisfy the promise of the beginning. Such is the case with Shepard's final novel, Beautiful Blood, which is part of his series about the Dragon Griaule--whose immensely large corpse, situated vaguely in Central America, shelters cities at its side, while Griaule's malefic influence permeates the entire land and peoples. Over a thirty year period, Shepard wrote six Griaule novellas (published as a fix-up, The Dragon Griaule, 2012), followed by the novel Beautiful Blood. Here a man named Rosacher makes a business out of stealing Griaule's blood and selling it as a mostly harmless but always pleasant drug. He builds this business into a quasi-religion, but once Rosacher moves into the scheming realms of politics, the novel loses steam. The story does wind up, with a conclusion, but one feels that the whole is something less than the sum of its parts. The first half of the novel is brilliant, the rest merely so-so, in a way that may be true to life, but unfortunately (as with too much of Shepard) it doesn't deliver on the promise that the reader has been led to expect. There is an observation about Rosacher at the end of the book that nearly defines the novel itself:  "he is rankled by the fact that his life seems to have no sum, no coherent shape, to be nothing more than a sequence of imperfectly realized scenes in an ill-conceived play."