This perceptive study analyzes Sam Shepard’s thirty published playscripts from Chicago and Rock Garden to A Lie of the Mind and States of Shock - not as realistic dramas, but as fantastic satires. Using criteria forthe fantastic in literature developed by Tzetvan Todorov and Eric S. Rabkin - with corroborating commentary from Northrup Frye and Cedric Whitman - this study will prove valuable to literary scholars, as well as actors and directors.