Lucius Shepard's Beautiful Blood is something both special and long awaited: the first novel-length exploration of the world of the Dragon Griaule. It's a subject that has preoccupied Shepard since the publication of ''The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule'' in 1984, and he has returned to it repeatedly over the years, though never before in such a mesmerizing, all-encompassing fashion.Like the initial tale, Beautiful Blood begins in the 1850s in the town of Teocinte, in a world ''separated from our own by the thinnest margin of possibility.'' It is a landscape whose dominant feature is the massive, long-dormant body of an ancient dragon that has lain there, motionless, for millennia, exerting a powerful but mysterious influence on the surrounding area.
