Reviews

• Another perfect story collection from Jeffrey Ford

  I love short fiction, but there are few single author collections I will read straight through—after four of five stories, you start noticing the little tricks and tells the writers use, the repeated ideas and effects. It's like watching a magic trick too may times, until the illusion starts to fade. That's never true of a Jeffrey Ford collection, though, and this is a perfect example of why: Ford's astonishing breadth of ideas and styles means he never repeats a trick. The stories here range from laugh-out-loud funny to heart-breaking to terrifying, from the town next door to distant lands to impossible places. Keep a stock of short story collections like this one in Kindle and you'll never be bored.

• A master of the bizarre: Highly Recommended

  Jeffrey Ford - Crackpot Palace (2012, Morrow) The inside of Jeffrey Ford’s head must be a strange, disturbing and slightly scary place. Crackpot Palace, his fourth collection, gathers together 20 stories published between 2008 and 2012, including one original to this collection, prefaced by a brief introduction and all but one followed by an author’s note. From the first story, ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’, we are firmly in Dream Country, that odd place where logic follows its own internal rules which appear to make perfect sense at the time but twist your brain into knots when you wake or step back and try to unravel them from the perspective of the ‘real’ world. This is continued in ‘86 Deathdick Road’ in which the narrator who has gone with his wife to see “The Smartest Man in the World”, stepping outside for a smoke, finds himself lost in the grounds outside the house, variously attacked by owls and lost in a blizzard. Relic, the longest story, is told as a number of intersecting and overlapping narratives (which, it harly needs to be mentioned, are often contradictory and unreliable), by a priest (who isn’t really a priest), a Sister (who isn’t really a nun) and a student of antiquities (who isn’t really a student), centred around the mummified foot of a saint (who may not really be a saint) housed in the shrine of a remote dilapidated church. The uncorrupted body of a beautiful young woman fished from a creek which bears a striking resemblance to a portrait painted nearly half a century earlier poses a mystery for the coroner in the haunting tale ‘The Wish Head’, while the doppelganger games of ‘The Double of my Double is Not my Double’ move subtly and gradually between playful farce and unsettling violence. ‘Dalathree’ one of the more overt SFnal stories in the collection, features a miniaturised city in a bottle that nods towards Sturgeon’s classic ‘Microcosmic God’ and, when the inhabitants of the miniaturised city discover how to make their own bottled cities, also to Flann O’Brian’s The Third Policeman or Greg Egan in its dizzying infinite regression of ever smaller Mariochka worlds. If that isn’t enough to make your brain start to leak out your ears, in ‘The Dream of Reason’ a scientist searches for a method to slow light down to walking pace, convinced that when trapped, it will crystallise out the diamond of which is convinced the stars are formed. Hugely recommended.

• Didn't turn my crank the way other reviews suggested it would

  Bought this based on an Amazon recommendation and the attendant reviews and wound up reading it on a cross-country plane. Many of the stories didn't especially grab me, though a few have stayed with me for a few months ("Down Atsion Road" is one I'm going to have to re-read). A friend to whom I loaned the book had the same take on it. I sort of hate to be the odd man out after all these five-star reviews, but, while I enjoyed some of the stories and I really liked "Down Atsion Road," others just didn't "grab" me all that much. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'll certainly be interested in Mr. Ford's next offering, though I might check it out of the library instead of just buying it when Amazon suggests it to me.

• Great Fantasy Short Stories

  I'd never heard of Jeffrey Ford before stumbling upon this collection. Lucky for me it turns out he's an established author with a lot of different works to buy, because I found Crackpot Palace to be a great group of stories. Balancing horror, fantasy, and a dreamlike sense of reality, the stories in this collection hit the right tone and last for days. Personal favorites include "Relic", "The Coral Heart", and "Down Atsion Road".

• More first-rate short stories from a master

  The collection has it all- a great vampire hunter tale, a crime story, a supernatural thriller, even something similar to swords and sorcery. And of course there are plenty of the surreal, dreamlike short pieces Ford is famous for. If you are familiar with Ford's short fiction, you already know you want to read this. If not, this is as good a place to start as any.

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