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Crackpot Palace: Stories
by
Jeffrey Ford
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, alm...more
Paperback, 352 pages
Published
August 14th 2012
by William Morrow Paperbacks
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Sep 09, 2012
Alan
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Cracked pots and holy fools
Recommended to Alan by:
Previous work
Jeffrey Ford makes me envious. His prose is proof positive that it does not take flowery language to make literature. The words Ford uses are by and large ordinary ones—apart from individual coinages that betray a sharp ear for what names should sound like. The sentences Ford writes are usually simple, his vernacular often common (he uses "busted" frequently to mean "broken" or "burst," for example). It seems as if almost anyone ought to be able to write the way he does. But the skewed stories t...more
Jeff Ford does not need praise from the likes of me. But I'm bothered that Crackpot Palace hasn't gotten more and better reviews here on Amazon.
Jeff has taught American Lit - the old stuff. And that's here in the writing: Irving, Hawthorne, Melville a solid splash of Poe are present as he shows us the Wonder and Hell of exurban New Jersey in "Down Atsion Road," "The Double of My Double is not My Double," and "86 Deathdick Road."
But he's not just a spec fiction Updike or Cheever. The range is wi...more
Jeff has taught American Lit - the old stuff. And that's here in the writing: Irving, Hawthorne, Melville a solid splash of Poe are present as he shows us the Wonder and Hell of exurban New Jersey in "Down Atsion Road," "The Double of My Double is not My Double," and "86 Deathdick Road."
But he's not just a spec fiction Updike or Cheever. The range is wi...more
I liked this collection. I find that more and more i'm moving away from novels and towards short story collections.
This collection is part surreal fantasy, part embellished memoir, and part random.
I can only pick out a couple of stories that i absolutely liked and I think those were the "weirder" ones like: "Relic","Daltharee" and "The Wish Head". Some others fell absolutely flat. However the completed collection I feel seems to be more than the sum of its parts. The stories are subtly connected...more
This collection is part surreal fantasy, part embellished memoir, and part random.
I can only pick out a couple of stories that i absolutely liked and I think those were the "weirder" ones like: "Relic","Daltharee" and "The Wish Head". Some others fell absolutely flat. However the completed collection I feel seems to be more than the sum of its parts. The stories are subtly connected...more
Ford has the keys to the landscape of our dreams. Taking the ephemera of our pop culture such as comic books and strips, pulp science fiction, the drudgery of day to day living, our dreams, our myths, and turning them into a startling dreamscape filled unsettling evocative images, characters, wonder, and terror, a rich and occasionally quite horrific world. Each of his short fiction collections is a wunderkammer, a cabinet filled with curiosities, grotesques, and eerie beauty but presented with...more
This is an outstanding collection of weird fiction. The twenty stories include horror, magical realism, fantasy, and even a steampunk one. Some are outright fantasy from start to finish; others are so subtle that it’s like they are our normal world, but someone has pulled it just ever so slightly out of kilter. My favorite was “Down Atsion Road”, in which an aging artist is pursued by a Native American demon. The scariest? “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening”, which will give anyone with arachnophobi...more
Jeffrey Ford's "Crackpot Palace" is an odd collection of short stories that range from the enlightening to the downright bizarre. The stories themselves have all appeared in other works & after most of them there is an epilogue describing the origin of the story. As someone not all that familiar with Ford's works, I'm honestly not that impressed by a lot of this although this collection is still more or less an interesting read. It's jut not a book I'd recommend for anyone not familiar with...more
A wonderful collection--Ford's best stories are an amazing combination of wistful, funny, gorgeous and melancholy. He has many styles, including the grouchy alter-ego narration of "86 Deathdick Road" and "Down Atsion Road", but my favorite is his "straight" fantasy, which I put in quotes because it's unlike any other I've read. "The Coral Heart", "Relic", "The Dream of Reason", "Dr. Lash Remembers", "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening"--Ford has hit upon a sweet spot here, the perfect combination of...more
This series of short stories that have (mostly) appeared elsewhere all have some element of odd twist (think "Twilight Zone" or Bradbury's Illustrated Man). The problem for me was that they felt forced, as though the author was given a task - say, a vampire tale (as in "Sit the Dead") - and wrote to fit that task rather than writing a story that just happened to have some twist. By twist, I mean something a little off: a sermon with heavier overtones, a trip to a magic show that goes awry, etc.....more
About half way through this book I realized I had tried to read it when it first came out. I decided to go ahead and give it another chance, but I have to say it just didn't really appeal to me. I found myself being more intrigued by the explanations at the end of each story than by the tale itself.
Jeffrey Ford, how I adore you. You have never let me down, you never disappoint. Sometimes I wonder where the hell you're going with a story, but wise from experience I lean back and enjoy the ride, and it always ends up somewhere unexpected and wonderful. You are unpredictable, but not whimsical. I trust you completely. This is more than I can say for most of your collegues, who lure me in with false pretences and then leave me dissatisfied. Not you. You always follow through. You sweep me up a...more
My full review of the book is here:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/08/like...
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/08/like...
This was pretty middle of the road for me. A few of the stories I very much disliked, two were fantastic, and one I wish could have been the whole book.
Jeffrey Ford comes through yet again, with a big heaping table full of beautiful, weird, fantastic stories that range from dark to light, from humorous to dead serious, and everything in between. One moment he reads like a postmodern John Collier, the next he's a Bradbury-infused Kafka. You won't get better fusion stories than these. Eat up.
I was about to give this 4 stars after the first 100 pages or so. Then a string of more conventional stories took over.
I have to love "After Moreau", which begins:
I, Hippopotamus Man, can say without question that Moreau was a total asshole.
I have to love "After Moreau", which begins:
I, Hippopotamus Man, can say without question that Moreau was a total asshole.
If you've not yet read anything by Jeffrey Ford, I envy you. This is yet another excellent(!) collection.
Surprised the wish head was not previously published, it's the best in the collection.
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Jeffrey Ford is an American writer in the Fantastic genre tradition, although his works have spanned genres including Fantasy, Science Fiction and Mystery. His work is characterized by a sweeping imaginative power, humor, literary allusion, and a fascination with tales told within tales. He is a graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he studied with the novelist John Gar...more
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Aug 30, 2012 09:25am