SOURCE: King, Francis. “Splinters and Doodles.” Spectator 277, no. 8783 (16 November 1996): 51.

In the following review, King compares Shepard's fiction in Cruising Paradise with his dramas, faulting the stories as the “literary equivalent of doodles.”

A few writers—Chekhov, Pirandello and Maugham at once come to mind—have achieved equal distinction in fiction and drama. But on the evidence of this collection of ‘tales’ (as the dust-jacket terms them), fiction is no more than a subsidiary occupation for the brilliant American dramatist Sam Shepard, along with his other subsidiary occupations, acting, the directing of films and the playing of rock music.

Shepard has always been obsessed with barren lives in barren places. Out of the emotional desert in which his characters subsist, a geyser of violent feeling suddenly erupts, in most cases not to irrigate their existences but to obliterate them with its scalding force. The most memorable story [in Cruising...