Crackpot Palace

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 by theme, motifs, or characters. Doppelgangers abound and so do severed feet, and in the words of Ford himself “secret passageways abound” between his stories. The most interesting part however is the reuse of Ford himself and his wife Lynn as characters. It makes reader feel like we get an almost intimate glimpse into the workings of their long marriage. Maybe that's true, maybe its not, but it kept reading all the way to the end.

Other than that, as other reviewers have commented, Ford's language is not complex or verbose, but that does not diminish the effect of his stories, in fact it may enhance them.

If your looking for something a little different, read this collection.