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Shirley Jackson Award winning and World Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July-August 2012. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran, and The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Five (2013), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collection A Natural History of Hell (2016).

World Fantasy Award-winning Collection

Emily Dickinson takes a carriage ride with Death. A couple are invited over to a neighbor's daughter's exorcism. A country witch with a sea-captain's head in a glass globe intercedes on behalf of abused and abandoned children. In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, a boy sees ghosts. Explore contemporary natural history in a baker's dozen of exhilarating visions.

Table of Contents:

• The Blameless
• Word Doll
• The Angel Seems
• Mount Chary Galore
• A Natural History of Autumn
• The Fairy Enterprise
• The Thyme Fiend
• The Last Triangle
• Hibbler's Minions
• Rocket Ship to Hell
• The Prelate's Commission
• A Terror
• Blood Drive

"A Terror", by Jeffrey Ford, is a dark fantasy/horror novelette about a strange encounter Miss Emily Dickinson has one early September morning, and the consequences for her and others.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #19 April 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace, and Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (2011), edited by Paul Tremblay and John Langan. The story is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

"Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen." - Jonathan Carroll

A bold and intriguing fabulist novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature--Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick--from the critically acclaimed Edgar and World Fantasy award-winning author of The Girl in the Glass and The Shadow Year.

At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab was not pulled into the ocean's depths by a harpoon line, and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his untimely death have caused him grievous harm--after hearing about Ahab's demise, his wife and child left Nantucket for New York, and now Ahab is on a desperate quest to find them.

Ahab's pursuit leads him to The Gorgon's Mirror, the sensationalist tabloid newspaper that employed Ishmael as a copy editor while he wrote the harrowing story of the ill-fated Pequod. In the penny press's office, Ahab meets George Harrow, who makes a deal with the captain: the newspaperman will help Ahab navigate the city in exchange for the exclusive story of his salvation from the mouth of the great white whale. But their investigation--like Ahab's own story--will take unexpected, dangerous, and ultimately tragic turns.

Told with wisdom, suspense, a modicum of dry humor and horror, and a vigorous stretching of the truth, Ahab's Return charts an inventive and intriguing voyage involving one of the most memorable characters in classic literature, and pays homage to one of the greatest novels ever written.

Jeffrey Ford's stories often start out as seemingly everyday realist and then the weird comes crashing in, maybe a tiny small unexpected light in a dark house, maybe a hole that a kid finds they have to explore. Big Dark Hole is about the big dark holes that we might find ourselves in right now and maybe, too, those inside us.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (2012), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection A Natural History of Hell (2016).

World Fantasy Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the collection The Empire of Ice Cream (2006). It can also be found in the anthology Best Short Novels: 2007, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Eclectic 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.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Jeffrey Ford
• Polka Dots and Moonbeams - (2010) - short story
• Down Atsion Road - (2010) - short story
• Sit the Dead - (2011) - short story
• The Seventh Expression of the Robot General - (2008) - short story
• 86 Deathdick Road - (2010) - short story
• After Moreau - (2008) - short story
• The Hag's Peak Affair - (2011) - short story
• The Coral Heart - (2009) - short story
• The Double of My Double Is Not My Double - (2011) - short story
• Daltharee - (2008) - short story
• Ganesha - (2010) - short story
• Every Richie There Is - (1993) - short story
• The Dream of Reason - (2008) - short story
• The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper - (2009) - short story
• Relic - (2011) - novelette
• Glass Eels - (2011) - short story
• The Wish Head - novelette
• Weiroot - (2009) - short story
• Dr. Lash Remembers - (2010) - short story
• Daddy Long Legs of the Evening - (2011) - short story

WFA winning and Hugo and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2002. It can also be found in the antologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Fantasy: The Best of 2002 (2003), edited by Karen Haber and Robert Silverberg, and The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: 60th Anniversary Anthology (2009), edited by Gordon Van Gelder. The story is included in the collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (2002).

Read the full story for free at Fantasy Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy (2011), edited by Ellen Datlow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2017. It is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Sixteen Original Works by Speculative Fiction's Finest Voices (2008), edited by Ellen Datlow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Volume III (2009), edited by Matthew Cheney and Kevin Brockmeier, Year's Best Fantasy 9 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton. It is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

A small-town librarian witnesses a murder at his local deli, and what had been routine sleep paralysis begins to transform into something far more disturbing. The trauma of holding a dying girl in his arms drives him out of his own body. The town he knows so well is suddenly revealed to him from a whole new perspective. Secrets are everywhere and demons fester behind closed doors.

Worst of all, he discovers a serial killer who has been preying on the area for over a century, one capable of traveling with him through his dreams.

There are worse things than a local gangster's cronies lurking in New Jersey's wetlands...

Originally published on 24 May 2023, read it for free at Tor.com

The story of a secret, privately funded, late 60's space mission as told by the science fiction writer who was aboard.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

These are Jeffrey Ford s personal selections spanning the decades of his career and representing his many styles genre hybrids, literary approaches to SF/F/H tropes, forays into the New Weird as one of its early practitioners, realist-auto-biographical/fantastic/ horror mash-ups, and straight-on fantasy stories. Ford is at home across the map of speculative fiction but is tied to, and claims allegiance to, no country.

If you are looking for a collection in which every story is a window on a new world, this book is for you. Within these pages, you ll visit with the mythic jinmenkins of Japan (dogs with human heads), the great poet of Amherst, Emily Dickinson, the Beautiful Gelreesh, a monster of sympathy, a young man who suffers from a rare form of synaesthesia, Stoodtladdle, the enormous flea mayor of Exo-skeleton town, and Charon, the boatman of Hell. You will travel to strange locales a bottled city, under the bottom of the lake, the Hotel Lacrimose, and the Idiot Planet. In the words of Joyce Carol Oates: Jeffrey Ford is a beautifully disorienting writer, a poet in an unclassifiable genre his own.

This volume includes an entirely new tale (Mr. Sacrobatus), an eloquent note on each story, and brilliant header sketchesby Derek Ford, the noted fantastic artist and son of Jeffrey Ford.

Table of Contents:

• The Best of Jeffrey Ford • interior artwork by Derek Ford
• 3 • The Blameless • (2016) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 21 • Word Doll • (2015) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 37 • Daltharee • (2008) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 49 • Creation • (2002) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 63 • Daddy Long Legs of the Evening • (2011) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 75 • 86 Deathdick Road • (2010) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 93 • The Beautiful Gelreesh • (2003) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 103 • Under the Bottom of the Lake • (2007) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 117 • The Honeyed Knot • (2001) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 135 • Exo-Skeleton Town • (2000) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 161 • The Angel Seems • (2012) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 175 • The Night Whiskey • (2006) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 203 • The Seventh Expression of the Robot General • (2008) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 213 • Blood Drive • (2012) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 227 • The Dismantled Invention of Fate • (2008) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 247 • Bright Morning • (2002) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 273 • At Raparata • short fiction by Jeffrey Ford
• 305 • The Dreaming Wind • (2007) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 323 • Boatman's Holiday • (2005) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 341 • A Man of Light • (2005) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 367 • A Terror • (2013) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 397 • Mount Chary Galore • (2014) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 419 • The Emperor of Ice Cream • short fiction by Jeffrey Ford
• 451 • A Natural History of Autumn • (2012) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 469 • Relic • [Thackery T. Lambshead] • (2011) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 495 • The Annals of Eelin-Ok • (2004) • short story by Jeffrey Ford
• 519 • Mr. Sacrobatus • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 531 • Stories Notes (The Best of Jeffrey Ford) • essay by Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey's Ford's extraordinary new fantasy novella, The Cosmology of the Wider World, is a beast epic, a talking animal story in the vein of The Jungle Books and The Wind In The Willows; but this is no ordinary fable. The protagonist, Belius, is a minotaur, a wanderer in strange labryrinths of the mind and body, and his story features sex, drugs and a healthy dose of pyrotechnic metaphysical profundity. There's murder too, an instance of bestiality, and quite a few references to Dante's Inferno...

This novella was reprinted in two parts in Lightspeed, May and June 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Best Short Novels: 2006, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Sturgeon and Nebula Award nominated short story. It was first published in the anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (2007), edited by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and the collection The Drowned Life (2008).

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry--and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it....

There is a life lived beneath the water--among rotted buildings and bloated corpses--by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under....

In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, The Drowned Life showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.

Table of Contents:

• The Drowned Life - (2007) - novelette
• Ariadne's Mother - (2007) - short story
• The Night Whiskey - (2006) - novelette
• A Few Things About Ants - (2006) - short story
• Under the Bottom of the Lake - (2007) - short story
• Present from the Past - (2003) - novelette
• The Manticore Spell - (2007) - short story
• The Fat One - (2008) - short story
• The Dismantled Invention of Fate - (2008) - novelette
• What's Sure to Come - (2002) - short story
• The Way He Does It - (2006) - short story
• The Scribble Mind - (2005) - novelette
• The Bedroom Light - (2007) - short story
• In the House of Four Seasons - (2005) - short story
• The Dreaming Wind - (2007) - short story
• The Golden Dragon - (2008) - short story

Mixing the mundane with the metaphysical, the pairings of the everyday and the extraordinary in this collection of short fiction yield supernatural results--a young musician perceives another world while drinking coffee; a fairy chronicles his busy life in a sandcastle during the changing tide; a demonic 16th-century chess set shows up in a New Jersey bar; and Charon, the boatman of hell, takes a few days of vacation. Storylines both conventional and outlandish reveal humdrum routines as menacing and imaginary worlds as perfectly familiar. Allusions to authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne reinforce the fantasy tradition in these tales, while understated humor and moments of sadness add a quirky unpredictability. Each story is followed by a brief afterword that details its genesis, offering insight into the many autobiographical elements found within.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2006) - essay by Jonathan Carroll
• The Annals of Eelin-Ok - (2004) - shortstory
• The Annals of Eelin-Ok: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Jupiter's Skull - (2004) - shortstory
• Jupiter's Skull: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• A Night in the Tropics - (2004) - shortstory
• A Night in the Tropics: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Empire of Ice Cream - (2003) - novelette
• The Empire of Ice Cream: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Beautiful Gelreesh - (2003) - shortstory
• The Beautiful Gelreesh: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Boatman's Holiday - (2005) - shortstory
• Boatman's Holidy: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Botch Town - (2006) - novella
• Botch Town: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• A Man of Light - (2005) - shortstory
• A Man of Light: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Green Word - (2002) - novelette
• The Green Word: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Giant Land - (2004) - shortstory
• Giant Land: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Coffins on the River - (2003) - novelette
• Coffins on the River: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Summer Afternoon - (2002) - shortstory
• Summer Afternoon: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Weight of Words - (2002) - novelette
• The Weight of Words: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Trentino Kid - (2003) - shortstory
• The Trentino Kid: Story Notes - (2006) - essay

Nebula Award winning and WFA, Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared at Sci Fiction, February 26, 2003. The story can also be found in the anthologies Science Fiction: The Best of 2003 (2004) edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan, Nebula Awards Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann and The Secret History of Fantasy (2010), edited by Peter S. Beagle. It is included in the collection The Empire of Ice Cream (2006).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2000. The story can also be found in the anthology In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2004), edited by Gordon Van Gelder and the collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (2002).

At times literary, at other times surreal, this collection offers a diverse range of stories that deal with real-life conflicts, human values, and coming-of-age experiences, all placed within fantastical settings. An author's search for an elusive Kafka story leads to a potentially cursed book in "Bright Morning," while in the award-winning "Exo-Skeleton Town," humans dress in protective exoskins conveying the personas of bygone Hollywood movie stars in order to barter old Earth movies for an alien aphrodisiac. A young boy comes to term with "Creation" when he molds a man out of the detritus of a nearby forest, and in the title story, a great fantasy writer loses touch with the world he has created and pleads with his young assistant to help him visualize the story's end and enable him to complete his greatest novel ever. An eclectic offering, these witty and modern fables blend mundane surroundings with eerie situations.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Comprehending Strangeness of Jeffrey Ford - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Creation - (2002) - short story
• Out of the Canyon - short story
• The Fantasy Writer's Assistant - (2000) - short story
• The Far Oasis - (2000) - short story
• The Woman Who Counts Her Breath - (1994) - short story
• At Reparata - (1999) - novelette
• Pansolapia - (1999) - short story
• Exo-Skeleton Town - (2000) - novelette
• The Honeyed Knot - (2001) - short story
• Something by the Sea - novelette
• The Delicate - (1994) - short story
• Malthusian's Zombie - (2000) - novelette
• On the Road to New Egypt - (1995) - short story
• Floating in Lindrethool - (2001) - novelette
• High Tea with Jules Verne - (2000) - short story
• Bright Morning - (2002) - novelette

The Great Depression has bound a nation in despair -- and only a privileged few have risen above it: the exorbitantly wealthy... and the hucksters who feed upon them. Diego, a seventeen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant, owes his salvation to master grifter Thomas Schell. Together with Schell's gruff and powerful partner, they sail comfortably through hard times, scamming New York's grieving rich with elaborate, ingeniously staged sances -- until an impossible occurrence changes everything.

While "communing with spirits," Schell sees an image of a young girl in a pane of glass, silently entreating the con man for help. Though well aware that his otherworldly "powers" are a sham, Schell inexplicably offers his services to help find the lost child -- drawing Diego along with him into a tangled maze of deadly secrets and terrible experimentation.

At once a hypnotically compelling mystery and a stunningly evocative portrait of Depression-era New York, The Girl in the Glass is a masterly literary adventure from a writer of exemplary vision and skill.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2001. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (2002).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy (2006), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It can also be found in the anthologies Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link. The story is included in the collection The Drowned Life (2008).

The toast of 1893 New York society, the portraitist Piero Piambo has his pick of choice assignments. Acclaimed by his peers and his "betters," he is a fixture in the city's most opulent salons, yet he fears he has sold his soul to arrive there. But then comes a commission unlike any other -- one that will test Piambo's talents, his will... and his sanity.

The client is a Mrs. Charbuque, and the offer she makes to the artist is as bizarre and intriguing as it is financially rewarding. Piambo must paint the lady's portrait, and for the service he may name any price. However, though he may question her at length on any topic, he must never look upon his subject. And if the painting ends up a true likeness, his payment will be doubled.

With sketchbook in hand and his "model" hidden behind an elegant screen, the artist begins his haunting descent into her life and mind. Carried by her words through a strange childhood in a world of ice -- where she aided an obsessed, perhaps murderous, father in his study of the divine language of snowflakes -- and across a history marked by fame and despair, desire and rage, phantasm and myth, Piambo is alternately seduced and repulsed by the story she has to tell. Yet each session leaves him more determined than ever to unwrap the enigma that is Mrs. Charbuque.

But while he struggles to capture in oils the face of a woman he has never seen, a series of horrific and inexplicable deaths rocks the outside city. On street corners, in the alleys off the bustling shopping areas, and between the crumbling tenements, anonymous women are dying, their lifeblood flowing freely like tears from their eyes. And the deeper Piambo is drawn into Mrs. Charbuque's world, the more he begins to suspect that these terrible events, his impossible task, and his odd "benefactress" are somehow intimately connected.

An astonishing amalgam of the works of Henry James and Raymond Chandler, Jeffrey Ford's The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque is a rare and rewarding reading experience -- equally satisfying as a hypnotically compelling literary work, a richly atmospheric historical novel, and a page-turning thriller. It will leave an indelible mark.

This short story originally appeared in Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2018. It can also be found in the anthologies Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution (2012), edited by Ann VanderMeer, and Deserts of Fire: Speculative Fiction and the Modern War (2016), edited by Douglas Lain. The story is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

On New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy spends much of his free time in the basement of his family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with figurines representing friends and neighbors. Their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas... and, unbeknownst to her siblings, moves around the inanimate clay residents.

There is a strangeness in the air as disappearances, deaths, spectral sightings, and the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car mark this unforgettable shadow year. But strangest of all is the inescapable fact that all these troubling occurrences directly cor-respond to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in their basement.

The Thyme Fiend by Jeffrey Ford is a dark fantasy novelette about a young man who can only prevent seeing visions by eating or smoking thyme. When he finds the skeleton of a missing man the skeleton begins to haunt him. What does it want?

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

All Maggie, Russell, and Henry wanted out of their last college vacation was to get drunk and play archaeologist in an old house in the woods outside of town. When they excavate the mansion's outhouse they find way more than they bargained for: a sealed bottle filled with a red liquid, along with the bizarre skeleton of a horned child

Disturbing the skeleton throws each of their lives into a living hell. They feel followed wherever they go, their homes are ransacked by unknown intruders, and people they care about are brutally, horribly dismembered. The three friends awakened something, a creature that will stop at nothing to retrieve its child.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Electric Velocipede, Issue #10, Spring 2006. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best of Electric Velocipede (2014), edited by John Klima. It is included in the collection The Drowned Life (2008).

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Leviathan Three (2002), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre. The story is included in the collection The Empire of Ice Cream (2006).

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November-December 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Who was the mad inventor Scarfinati? Whence came his mysterious powers? What dark secret caused him to meddle in innocent lives? His bizarre life story unfolds at the Carnival of the Dead, where a young woman seeks his spirit's forgiveness for accidentally killing him -- and nothing is as it seems!

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories (2011), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and was reprinted in Apex Magazine, December 2012. It can also be found in the antholgy The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012). The story is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Apex Magazine.

The nightmare metropolis called the Well-Built City exists because the satanic genius and Master, Drachton Below, wished it so. And few within its confines hold the power of Physiognomist First Class Cley. With scalpels, calipers, and the other instruments of his science, Cley can divine good and evil, determine character and intelligence, uncover dark secrets and foretell a person's destiny, through the careful study of facial and bodily features.

But now the Master has ordered the great physiognomist out of the City on a seemingly trivial assignment into the rural hinterlands. but there, removed from Below's omnipresent scrutiny, even the most loyal servant of logic and order can fall prey to seductions of the flesh and spirit. And in this strange and unfamiliar place possessing terrors uniquely its own, there are stark truths awaiting the eminent Cley -- and inescapable revelations that could shatter his perceptions of himself, his profession, and his world.

After beholding the destruction of the Well-Built City, physiognomist Cley is now a simple healer seeking peace and atonement in the happy village of survivors. When the town falls into a deadly sleeping sickness, Cley must make a dangerous trip to the ruins of City—now beset by mechanical birds and werewolves—to seek out an antidote. The evil Master Below is still alive, but an accidental exposure to the sickness that he created has put him into a coma. With the help of Below’s adopted demon son, found in the wreckage of the laboratory, Cley ventures into the mind and intricate memories of Below to search for a cure. Cley will encounter wonders and dangers undreamed of in the second installment of this classic trilogy.

Shunned by the village he saved and seeing no future in the ruins of the Well-Built City, the reformed physiognomist, Cley, ventures into the wilderness to seek forgiveness from a woman that he once hideously harmed. Wandering through this eerie land known as “The Beyond," he encounters ghosts, monsters, omnivorous trees, and more on his quest. Meanwhile, Cley’s demon friend pursues his own dangerous, drug-induced journey to seek out his own humanity. This is the conclusive leg in the bizarre life-journey of one of the most gripping and complex characters in the fantasy genre.