Crackpot Palace

“Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen….A rare and wonderful talent.”—Jonathan Carroll, author of The Wooden SeaEclectic is certainly an adjective that can be used to describe the work of the phenomenal Jeffrey Ford—along with imaginative, provocative, mesmerizing, and brilliant. His powerful dark fantasy, The Physiognomy, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; his novel, The Girl in the Glass, won the Edgar® Award, mystery and crime fiction’s most prestigious prize. Crackpot Palace is Ford’s fourth superb collection of short fiction, and in it, his prodigious talent shines as brightly as ever. Here are twenty tales both strange and wonderful, filled with mad scientists, vampires, lost souls, and Native American secrets, from an author who has been glowingly compared to Kafka, Dante, and Caleb Carr (The Alienist).

From Publishers Weekly

Edgar-winner Ford's (The Girl in the Glass) latest is a collection of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery tales that emerge from the "crackpot palace" of the author's macabre imagination. The 20 stories‚--îmost previously published‚--îveer from tired imitations like the teen vampire romp "Sit the Dead" to the more adult allegory of a threatened marriage in "86 Deathlick Road". Ford creates dense alternate worlds filled with magic, curses and dangerous technology in stories such as the Asimovian "The Seventh Expression of the Robot General" about a sentient killing machine that longs for its own destruction, or the excellent "The Wish Head," about a scarred detective who investigates the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman. Themes of science and religion also abound, as in "The Dream of Reason" about a scientist who destroys a mind for knowledge, or in the narratively ambitious "Relic," in which a flawed priest loses his church's saintly artifact to a thief. The volume's strangest feature is the self-reflective post-scripts that follow most of the stories, giving the author's commentary on each one's provenance and meaning. Scattered throughout are shivers, smiles, and thought-provoking conceits, but with the proliferation of time-worn pulp themes (e.g., Indian curses and doppelgangers, the stories' over-earnestness and superficiality are distracting.

School Library Journal on THE DROWNED LIFE

“Unusual and provocative…sometimes shocking, sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes humorous, this collection will please fans of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor. Recommended.”

New York Newsday

“We should be grateful that alongside the firm of Updike, Cheever, Ford & Company there exists, in both fiction and film, an American tradition that depicts the suburbs as places of wonder rather than stultification, discovery rather than predictability.”

Rocky Mountain News

“Think Ray Bradbury’s Green Town stories, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Stephen King’s The Body (made into the film Stand by Me) and you get an idea of the tone of Ford’s latest fine work. Grade: A”

Terri Windling, "Top Twenty Fantasy Novels of 2001" from Year's Best Fantasy & Horror vol. 15

“The trilogy [The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond] is simply brilliant and constitutes a modern masterwork of fantasy.”

Nick Gevers, Locus

“The Shadow Year captures the totality of a lived period, its actualities and its dreams, its mundane essentials and its odd subjective imperatives; it is a work of episodic beauty and mercurial significance.”

Booklist

“Surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue.”

Library Journal

“Spooky and hypnotic...Recommended for all public libraries.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too.”

who think the indispensable element for good genre fiction is good writing, this is not to be missed.”

“Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too. For those of you―and you know who you are

Louisville Courier Journal on THE SHADOW YEAR

“Jeffrey Ford’s latest triumph, THE SHADOW YEAR, is as haunting as it is humorous…readers will recognize real talent in Ford’s vivid, unerring voice.”

New York Times on THE SHADOW YEAR

“Ford travels deep into the wild country that is childhood in this novel …the observations and adventures of these sharp, wayward children provide more than enough depth to be satisfying.”

Boston Globe on THE SHADOW YEAR

“Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford.”

Gawker on THE DROWNED LIFE

“A collection of surreal, melancholy stories dealing with everything from worlds of the drifting dead to drunken tree parties. Ford is the author of the superlative, creepy Well-Built City trilogy and his writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.”

io9 on Jeffrey Ford

“[Ford’s] writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.”

Rocky Mountain News

“The 16 stories in this collection are a perfect introduction to Ford’s work and illustrate the vast range of his imagination…If you haven’t discovered Ford, it’s time you did. His carefully crafted novels and short stories are all top-notch. Grade: A.”

From the Back Cover

From the unparalleled imagination of award-winning author Jeffrey Ford come twenty short stories (one, "The Wish Head," written expressly for this collection) that boldly redefine the world. Crackpot Palace is a sumptuous feast of the unexpected—an unforgettable journey that will carry readers to amazing places, though at times the locales may seem strangely familiar, almost like home. Whether he's tracking ghostly events on the border of New Jersey's mysterious Pine Barrens or following a well-equipped automaton general into battle, giving a welcome infusion of new blood to the hoary vampire trope or exposing the truth about what really went down on Dr. Moreau's Island of Lost Souls, Jeffrey Ford has opened a door into a dark and fantastic realm where dream and memory become one.

About the Author

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the Edgar Award–winning The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah, and his collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He lives near Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.

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