THE LITBLOG CO-OP

LBC Podcast #2: Jeffrey Ford

Nominator: Gwenda Bond

Nominee: The Girl in the Glass, Jeffrey Ford

Subjects Discussed:  On writing a book with "everything but the kitchen sink," baroque vs. simple language, the influence of Hammett, Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, Rex Stout, creative serendipity, eugenics, on "playing it safe" in light of the extraordinary research unearthed, the "literary" inspiration behind the character names, Rupert Thomson, auctorial voice, on being a student of John Gardner, confrontational vs. direct prose, Sturgeon's law, Harlan Ellison, on young writers drawing attention to themselves, Chuck Palahniuk, beleaguered college students, Dave Itzkoff's "reading list," the influence of the New York Times Books Review, The Girl in the Glass being pigeonholed as a young adult novel, reviewers overanalyzing the word "mawkish," and genre classification.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC and The Bat Segundo Show.)

I Love A Mystery

Guest post deux from Jeffrey Ford:

When I was a kid, my mother had a policy about school.  You didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to.  One year, either 4th or 5th grade, I was absent 45 days.  The principal of the school wasn’t going to pass me, but that was all before my mother went to see him.  After her visit, there wasn’t a problem.  The principal knew better than to say no to my mother.  During those days off, I did a lot of reading, I remember that.  But the real attraction was at lunch time, she’d make a big pot of spaghetti with butter and salt and pepper and we’d watch whatever Mystery movie they were showing on the television that day.  This was back in the late fifties, early sixties, when all of television was in black and white, perhaps the best way to fully appreciate the shadows of those dark tales of revenge and crime and treachery.  The ones that come readily to mind are the Mr. Moto films with Peter Lore as a sauerkraut eating Japanese detective.  Not exactly PC by today’s standards, but still cool as hell back then.  There was also The Whistler, Sherlock Holmes, The Thin Man, as well as the great gangster flicks like I Was a Prisoner On A Chain Gang with Paul Muni (I see him still, falling back into the shadows, hissing, “I steal.”) or anything with Edward G. Robinson.  All of these existed as Mysteries to us although I’m aware today that there are different sub-genres.  Of one thing I am absolutely certain, as cracked as this might seem to some, I know for sure that my mother thought that a diet of these Mysteries, in educational value, far exceeded anything they’d have been teaching me in school.  Whatever concept they would have been grinding out in Mr. Karp’s Math Class, could it have even approached the existential wonder of watching that certain film, the title escapes me, that was shot entirely from the main character’s point of view?  You only saw the character when the camera came across a mirror, otherwise that camera was eyeing gams and duking it out with the bad guys.  Or how was Social Studies ever going to give me as clear a view into the depths of human depravity as when Richard Widmark pushes that old lady down a long flight of stairs in her wheelchair and then laughs his ass off?  If I wanted to learn critical thinking, who could have been a better teacher than Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes?  And always Muni, falling back into the shadows. 

Perhaps when I’d grown up I’d have come to think about my mother’s attendance policies as daft, but I learned in college that she was absolutely correct.  When I attended the State University of Binghamton for my Masters degree, I had a teacher by the name of William Spanos.  He was a deconstructionist or de-constructionist, a post modernist, literary critic, and a good guy in spite of it.  Yeah, he had the Derrida and Foucault, etc. but he was also a well respected writer of essays in his own right.  He’d written this essay “The Detective and the Boundary” which had some interesting things to say about Mysteries.  He wrote about the fact that pretty much all of Western Literature (novel-wise) borrows the form of the Detective Story in that the reader begins not knowing what will come and then embarks on a journey of enlightenment, discovering clues, so to speak, as he/she travels toward a point at the end that is a moment of revelation for both character and reader.  The reason why these works are like Mysteries is because the writer knows what is going to happen but does not reveal it all at once at the beginning to the reader.  The importance of the story is the process of detection, the process of revelation, and the final solution or denouement is not nearly as important.  The fact that there is a beginning and end to the mystery story makes certain objects or events seem fraught with significance, though they may or may not be.  But think how this is very much like life.  We can not really know the importance of some things until our lives are finished, and it is only readers of our lives, those who live past our days and knew us who will be able to interpret the significance of events we lived through.  We have a feeling certain people and places and events have significance as clues to the meaning of our lives, they seem imbued with an intensity of significance, but we can never be sure they are at all important until the end.  They could be red herrings. So at the very axis mundi of existence is the Mystery. Of course, Spanos’s whole point was that the sense that we are living a mystery is all false, a prison in many ways.  Yeah, OK, but it doesn’t make the experience feel any less true or dissuade us from envisioning our days as the chapters of a book. 

All of this my mother knew, although she held no PhD.  Instead of Dick and Jane and geometry my grade school education was car chases and shoot outs, snappy banter, shadows, great legs, a shiv in the kidneys, the long odds, the low down, and a bowl of spaghetti.  It prepared me well for high school, at which I failed miserably both academically and socially, setting me up for success later in life. I knew how to read the clues, and I knew who to avoid, looking for that Richard Widmark gleam in stranger’s eyes.  And then eventually my mother got old and got cancer as old people are wont to do.  I’d say that was a significant clue.  But in her last days of cognizance I saw in her expression a look that told me that after having lived an entire life, she still had not solved the Mystery of her own existence.  Like Muni, she fell back into the shadows, and I realized that it was up to the living, the readers of her life to apply significance and meaning to her days.  After all, we had the entire story – beginning, middle and end.  Those days in front of the black and white television, during my grade school years, I have decided are an important clue to my mother’s life and perhaps my own.  They are fraught with significance, especially now that I have written this.      

Scratching the Surface: Ditherings About Digging History

This is Jeffrey Ford's first guest blogger post. There will be another later, and he'll be responding to questions in the comments, so chime in.

When I first started writing novels, I never pictured myself working with any themes that would be remotely historical.  My first four books were out and out Fantasies and I liked it that way, because although I did not mind scouring the library shelves for big ideas and odd tid bits of information I could throw into the mix of my speculative worlds the thought of doing actual historical research in an attempt to create a convincing fictional facsimile of a time period I had not lived through seemed like an overwhelming amount of work.  I could build complete and convincing fantasy realities out of sheer imagination that more or less adhered to their own laws, and that was a blast, but even the freedom of that, or I should say especially the freedom of that had its limitations, and I wanted to try something new.  What it was, I wasn’t sure.   

After finishing the third novel, The Beyond, in the trilogy that began with The Physiognomy, I had an idea based on a little bit of info I’d read about Emily Dickinson.  She’d supposedly been a great recluse and would hide behind screens and in her room when visitors came to see her.  In a book I had, it made the claim that Emily’s good friend, Mabel Loomis Todd had only ever seen her in her coffin.  The secretive Emily gave me the idea for the novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque – the tale of a painter commissioned to pain the portrait of a woman he is not allowed to see.  She sits behind a screen and he questions her and from her answers, which are never about her physical appearance, the painter is to intuit what she looks like and render her portrait.   

Initially I saw the book as a fable-like story, set in a faux-Germanic, Hoffmannesque reality with no bearing upon any actual time period.  When I pitched the book to my editor at Harper Collins, Jennifer Brehl, she loved the idea, but she asked me to think about setting it in a definite time and place.  At first, I was put off by the idea, mainly because it seemed like it would be tough to do.  I’d never done any kind of real focused research before.  El drago, I thought, my fiction writing is turning into fucking homework.  Still, Jennifer’s suggestions had always been on the money in the past, so I gave myself over to it and really gave it some thought.  During that time, I had a glimpse one day of the painter character, Piambo, on the street in old, 19th century New York.  I only saw him for a few seconds, but the vision returned later that day.  It returned more times and remained for longer durations until I began to think of the story set in that time period.   

I told Jennifer that I was going to set the book in late, 19th century New York, specifically 1893.  Why 1893?  I had no idea what made me pick that exact year.  So I started doing the research.  Now if you’re going to write something that at least pretends to historical accuracy, and I never promise more, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration.  There are the big events that shape the time.  There are famous personages.  One must be aware of the economic status of one’s character and what the every day life of a person living in that time period would have been like.  Clothing.  Scientific inventions.  What had or had not been invented yet?  My painter lived in Grammercy  Park and Grammercy was one of the first places, in the early 1890’s, that was fitted out with electric lightbulbs and door buzzers, but you probably wouldn’t have thought it of the time.  Then I had to know a little about Grammercy.  The development’s attending park was, at the time, only for residents, and they each had a gold key that unlocked the gates of the park so they could use it at their leisure.  Once I’d gotten inside Piambo’s home and studio, I had to figure out what kind of materials he might use, what kind of techniques he might use, what subject matter would interest him beside the money making portraits.  In my research about painting I found out that old masters, much older than the age of my painter, would grind their own materials to make paint from.  My painter bought it either pre-packaged or in fish bladders.  But those ancients, the great masters, knew how to grind the substances for their colors to certain thicknesses which would make the light refract and reflect from them in certain ways at certain angles so that the application of different colors in different fields in a painting would cause the light to refract and reflect in ways where the beams would cross or meet and it would make the painting glow from within.  That’s what I call painting.  But, alas, I couldn’t use that tidbit to any good end.  And that’s the way things went, the need to research new items and practices and ideas and events and personalities of the time burgeoning out in all directions (this was the year of the famous Chicago World’s Fair – the Crystal Palace) and my falling in love with pieces of information that would end up being totally useless to me (completely nude reviews on Broadway).   

1893 went from being a year I’d never even thought about to being the most interesting damn year on record.  The research brought so much more to the table of this story than I’d ever initially imagined it involving.  Just one thing that gave another layer to the story, setting it in this time was for me to become aware of the role of women in society – as it was, as it was depicted in the contemporary art of the time, as it was hoped to become by many woman with their sights on the future.  Most women of this time were expected to be seen and not heard, and I love that Mrs. Charbuque circumvents that convention.  Here’s a little fact I found that will give perspective as to women’s standing at the time.  Women in mental institutions of the day were, each night, administered a warm whiskey douche.  Now, I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure this was not a treatment conceived of by a woman.  Seems like an awful lot of trouble for one thing, and crazy in a kind of sexually perverted way for another.  By the time a couple months was up, I had boat loads of research.  I had anecdotes out the wazoo.  I had photographs, art books, strange tidbits you couldn’t beat with a stick.  The most difficult thing to find was stuff on everyday life in New York in the early 1890’s.   

I’d looked high and low for something that would give me some info on the layout of the city then as opposed to now.  I had to start writing soon, and I was desperate for this info, not finding it anywhere.  Here’s where something happened that every future writer of an historical type novel should know.  There is this thing that happens in research that is completely metaphysical.  It defies random chance.  Do you know the word Kismet?  It can only be described as a kind of otherworldly luck.  For instance, I was at the end of my rope on finding a good source of info about 1890’s New York.  After I suffered for a good long while, my karma must have gotten right, cause I found, sitting on a shelf in a local Barnes & Noble of all places, completely mis-shelved in the wrong section, a copy of Moses King’s Guide to New York, a facsimile edition from 1892. This book offered up every bit of info about the city I could want – where to buy the best coffee, who was in charge of the Department of Health, where all the statues were, what they served at each individual restaurant… I almost crapped em on the spot.  No lie.  That weekend I went with Lynn and the kids out to the shore and stayed in a rented beach house.  Whoever owned the beach house had left only one set of videos for the television – the Ken Burns four volume set on the history of New York.  I was rolling in it.  Amazing.  And that same kind of thing has happened to me numerous times since where strangers will mention weird facts from history to me that I had been researching or that had to do with what I was writing about.  Or the one book that has been left out on the library table where you sit down to work is the exact book you would have been looking for had you known it existed.  Keep your karma right if you intend to write historical type novels.   

The next problem I had was when I started to write the damn book.  I had done so much research, had so many cool facts, that, baby, I was determined to use every fucking scintilla of it.  Big mistake.  The book looked like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.  Jennifer looked at the early pages and she told me, “Get rid of this stuff.  When you’re writing a novel, it’s the story that counts first.”  That there was a real lesson.  So I looked around to see if I could find anyone else who was doing similar work (historical) that I could get a clue from.  I found the answer in my own home town of speculative fiction.  The short story writer Andy Duncan, one of the best damn writers around, had done a number of historical stories and to my mind had a pitch perfect blend of story and historical detail.  I noticed the dispersion of details was very fine.  At the same time I was reading novels of the time period I was writing about – like Edith Wharton and Henry James, and what I noticed was that I got a sense of place and time more from the style and voice of the writing than I did from any historical detail.  I read Wharton’s novel, Summer, and I was there, in that time, but all by the power of her line and her voice.   

All of this instruction from Jennifer, Andy, Edith, conspired to help me understand that you can’t forget the story.  And you can’t clutter it till it chokes by dragging in useless monuments and architecture and famous personages, etc.   

When it came time to start researching The Girl in the Glass, my next novel, I had a few clues as to how to proceed.  I went straight for the language.  There are these great sites on the internet that explain lingo from the 1930’s.  Those were a blast.  I had to learn to lay-off the snappy phrases after a while – too much of a good thing.  I did manage to get in “coffin varnish” “the blower” “cheaters” etc.  And once I got in the groove I made up my own phrases from the time period, like Antony saying of how slick a con was and describing him as “smoother than gin shit.”  I think I’m more proud of that confabulation than just about anything else in the book, cause I still crack about it sometimes (I know, calm down, throw some saw dust under myself).  Also for the sound of the voice, I read Hammett, Chandler, and though they weren’t from that time period other mysteries like the James M. Cain books or James Crumely’s The Last Good Kiss (if you haven’t, read this freakin book).  I also watched a lot of movies from the early 30’s, because that was the date I’d decided on – 1932.   

There were quite a few avenues to go down in the research for Girl in the Glass – spiritualism of the time, Long Island and New York, Prohibition, The Gold Coast on LI, butterflies, Coney Island, Side Shows, etc.  But this time out I was far more effective in gathering material.  It’s still good to simply spend a few weeks, 2 or 3, and immerse yourself in the time period generally, reaching for anything that piques your curiosity. Then when you get down to work, you want to have some direction.  It was in the last days of this general searching on Girl in the Glass that I plugged the year, 1932 and perhaps another term into google, and I came up with a site about something called The Mexican Repatriation.  Ever hear of it?  If you’re like me or most people I’ve spoken to, you have no idea what this was or when it took place.  For some reason it struck me as an interesting piece of history because at the time there were murmurings of trouble coming from Arizona and New Mexico about the border (nothing like what it would turn into of late).  I read about it, was amazed by it, and then filed it away.  The next thing I found mention of right after that was an essay from the site of the Long Island newspaper, Newsday, about the prevelance of the KKK on Long Island in the 20’s.  I found it rather unnerving to know that 1 out of every 7 natives of Long Island (where I grew up) was involved in the Klan.  Following this discovery, I found a site that talked about the history of the Eugenics Record Office; an institution funded by the wealthy elite of the country to cleanse the nation’s bloodline through sterilization, deportation, and scientific discoveries.  Once I discovered these three issues, I knew I had to use them in the book.  I immediately saw all kinds of correlations to today’s world and they shared a theme of persecution.  I had a feeling that these themes would resonate with certain readers.   

This is one of the most important aspects of historical research, and it really applies to everyone, not just writers.  All you have to do is scratch the surface in history and you’ll be rewarded with information about amazing people and events that you never knew existed.  It absolutely changes the way you look at the world.  For instance, after getting to know about the Mexican Repatriation of the 30’s I can put what is happening on the border today in some perspective. We never learned this in the schools I went to.  We were never taught that many of our grandfathers on LI were part of the KKK.  No one mentioned it.  The Eugenics Record Office, the precursor and most likely the institute that put the seed of genocide in Hitler’s head through Henry Ford, we never heard a peep about.  Shit, Henry Ford was considered a hero of America in our text books.  All (this one’s for VanderMeer) BULLSHIT.  Our history is so different than the popular line affords – it is more terrifying, more beautiful, more insane and more full of hope than is ever taught in school.  All of these things blew me away.  The fact that the issues on the border flared up right after the book came out, that Bush’s grandfather was one of the many money brokers behind the ERO, the idea that in times of economic duress this country always seeks out and finds scapegoats to persecute (and believe me, times of economic duress are on the way), all made me feel how alive the past was.  When I was researching Mrs. Charbuque I went to New York one day to look at a few places, and because I’d been studying its history, it struck me that the city was like a palimpsest, where one layer covers another and peers through from beneath, still breathing, still full of influence.  That’s how I see history now after writing these books.   

And the last thing I’ll mention about this research is that you often get a chance to actually speak with people who were there, like I did with my father and uncle for The Girl in the Glass.  And they told me about Long Island in the 30’s, about the mansions and the Motor Parkway and Coney  Island, bootleggers on the beaches and the Nazis goose stepping in rows out in Yaphank.  I think people are the best resource because although memories can fade, it helps somehow to know that there were real people living through these things.  You sense first hand them brushing up against the past and see it manifest itself in their laughter and tears and secrets, and in this way you can almost touch it yourself.   

From Niall Harrison

Quiet is the new Loud is the new Quiet

Let's say there are two types of Jeffrey Ford story. This is a simplification, of course, as it would be for any writer worth reading, but let's say that it's so, and see where it gets us.

Type one would be the quiet stories: the stories that sit alongside our world, or nest inside it. The prose in these stories is often deceptively simple--calm, almost languid, unfussy--and the atmosphere somehow heightened. The sense is that only one stray spark will be required for the fantastic to flare into life--

I was entranced by that painting and could sit and look at it for long stretches at a time. I'd inspected every inch of it, noticing the bend of the palm leaves, the sweep of the women's hair, the curling edges of the grass skirts, which direction the breeze was blowing and at what rate. I could almost feel it against my face. [...] The most curious item, though, back in the shadows of the bar, just before paradise came to an end by the bathroom door, was a hand, pushing aside the wide leaf of some plant, as if it were you standing at the edge of the jungle, spying on that man in the rowboat.

-- from "A Night in the Tropics"

--or that it would only take one missed opportunity to lose it forever.

Here were young people, my age, gathered in groups at tables, talking, laughing, eating ice cream--not by night, after dinner--but in the middle of broad daylight. I opened the door and plunged in. The magic of the place seemed to brush by me on its way out as I entered, for the conversation instantly died away. I stood in the momentary silence as all heads turned to stare at me.

-- from "The Empire of Ice Cream"

Wonder, in these stories, is not fragile so much as slippery. It is rarely where you expect it, and usually not in the same place for long; little surprise that many of these stories revolve around the creation or appreciation of art. In The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, a painter in 1890s New York is commissioned to produce the portrait of a woman he is not allowed to see. He must discern her likeness from her conversation, from the stories she tells; he sits with her in her studio, and listens to her relate oddities and miracles, and then goes away to work. The novel is a mystery of equipoise; it uses art to seek truth; it feels haunted.

A subset of the quiet stories are laced with the steel of autobiography. These are traps, and they bite. "The Trentino Kid" is harrowing, a horror of lost youth. "A Night in the Tropics" is about what you find when you do go home again. And "Botch Town"--a long and brilliant novella, original to Ford's most recent short story collection, The Empire of Ice Cream--simply never ends, the detritus town at the heart of the tale persisting after the final page is turned:

As for Botch Town, it's still there, sitting in the cellar astride the sawhorses. Through the years, the clay citizens have carried on with their lives, and although the wizard's dust is deep and the sun no longer shines, they still, from time to time, stare up into the darkness, half-hoping, half-dreading, they'll see the eyes.

-- from "Botch Town"

The quiet stories, in other words, bind us to the world as we know it (or almost know it), leaving us wishing and wondering.

Then there are the type two stories. The stories where extravagance and fabulation are left to run wild. The big lies.

Beneath a yellow sky that fizzed like quinine, staring out to sea from the crenellated tower of his own construction, stood Belius, the minotaur, shedding globes of water from his eyes. Life germinated inside these transparent spheres, civilizations rose and fell in clouds of war, colors of love grew vibrant and then washed away. A million seasons raced round within the see-through boundaries, until, rolling off his snout, they smashed against the ledge and shattered.

-- from "The Cosmology of the Wider World"

Belius is a big, bold character in a big, bold world: a wider world than our own, in which everything is intoxicatingly alive. The talking animals are charming (particularly Thip the flea), and Belius himself, with his desperate longing to understand, to prove that he fits into the world--to invent his own cosmology--is a model of solitary nobility. Like "Boatman's Holiday", with its dismantling of myth, or "The Beautiful Gelreesh", with its astonishing slingshot ending, or like the trilogy of novels set in the bleak baroque grandeur of The Well-Built City, "The Cosmology of the Wider World" is a story to ignite, and invite, passion.

These are the loud stories, and they set us free.

Except of course Jeffrey Ford doesn't write just the two types of story. The subdued rumbles of summer thunder in a quiet story can give way to a full-on downpour; and the most beautiful, most precisely human stories can be the ones about the most astonishing characters. (And there are the pure confections, like "Summer Afternoon", in which those words, spoken aloud, shatter, and then travel the universe before returning to Earth and each other.)

Let's take one last example. It's the story that opens The Empire of Ice Cream, the story of the life and death of a Twilmish, a fairy who lives exactly as long as the sandcastle in which he has made his home. His home is as magical as Belius's tower, his life as strange, and as moving. He keeps a diary, right up until the inevitable end.

"What does it all mean?" I have always asked. "It means you've lived a life, Eelin-Ok." I hear now the walls begin to give way. I have to hurry. I don't want to miss this.

-- from "The Annals of Eelin-Ok"

That's the quintessential Jeffrey Ford moment, right there: the realisation of the sweetness and sadness of life, bound up together as the tide is coming in. Always quiet, always loud, always true.

-- Niall Harrison of Coalescent (who also does lots of other things)

From Jeff VanderMeer

The No B.S. Ford

It started in South Carolina, at the South Carolina Book Festival. I was moderating a panel on Fantasy with Michael Bishop, Karen Joy Fowler, and Jeff. I'd scrupulously prepared questions ahead of time and sent them out to Mike, Karen, and Jeff. I'd even asked them if they thought there should be other questions or if the questions I had were stupid. No, no--they're great was the consensus. For some reason I was still nervous.

The night before the panel, I had traded in my preparedness for about seven vodka-and-orange-juices at the open bar at the reception. I had spent most of the next morning turning a rather violent shade of red and feeling horribly sick. Still, everything was going well until I asked a question about metaphysical landscapes in fantasy and how some fantasy landscapes don't need a map.

Despite having okayed the question before, the panel turned on me like a pack of wolves, culminating in Jeff Ford saying "I think that's bullshit." After which he gave a very articulate answer that I can't remember.

The point of this story is that the reaction to "bullshit" was so overwhelmingly positive that for awhile it became a catch phrase for Jeff. And for some reason, I was always around when it was said. We had books coming out from Pan Macmillan at the same time and so we did a few events in England together. In London, I can't remember the exact context, but the scene itself must have been classic. We were sitting on this leather couch at a Borders as part of the Cadigan reading series. Jeff had perched strategically on the edge of the monstrosity, while I'd sat back and was now trapped in the folds of the damn thing. A question was asked. I gave a thoughtful, long, probably a bit precious response. Jeff's answer to the same question was "I think that's bullshit." Again to enthusiastic reaction.

Blackpool. EasterCon. Engelbert Humperdink and David Cassidy were going to be doing a dual concert in the same convention center as the convention. We were on a panel on magic realism. It wasn't going well. I'd lost my research on the origins of magic realism. John Clute asked a question that was just a statement. And I could see it coming. I could see from the look in Jeff's eyes what he was going to say. And, of course, he was sitting right next to me. And, of course, I still answered the question that came at us with a longish, serious answer.

I turned to Jeff and handed him the microphone and, as if in slow motion, Jeff's mouth opened and out came the words, "I gotta say--I think that's bullshit." The question, not my response. But, still. Why was I bothering? Jeff's bullshit was getting a great response. Even more important--he was right! He was absolutely right. In each case--it was bullshit. Total, utter, unadulterated bullshit.

It got to the point that every time he said the word bullshit I broke into spontaneous laughter. I sent him On Bullshit, a book by an Ivy League professor. I sent him a postcard of a frog in a classroom raising its arm and shouting "That's bullshit!"

And, ultimately, I appropriated his response. At the end of a panel on New Weird at WorldCon in Boston, I said, "I think something Jeff Ford says a lot is appropriate here." Hopeful glances from the other panelists (I'd been a little cranky about the term "New Weird".). Surely Jeff Ford had something erudite to say.

And from my mouth came the words, "It's all a load of bullshit."

Except, it didn't work for me.

Because Jeff Ford is the Lord of Bullshit and his reign is eternal.

-- Jeff VanderMeer, author of Shriek: An Afterword (and many other fine books)

From Brian Overton

I want a Bugatorium of my own.

In Jeffrey Ford's "Girl in the Glass," the conman Schell has one room of his house devoted to his collection of butterflies. The Bugatorium, as Antony Cleopatra calls it, is a place of repose, where the heroes retreat after the latest revelation. It's where conman Schell gives birth to his schemes.

And, for the book itself, it's a hotbed of metaphor. From the Bugatorium springs the themes of transformation and parasitism that run through the book. But I love the Bugatorium for how Ford evokes it. It's a beautiful, magical place. Here are two descriptions of the room from the chapter titled "The Bugatorium":

The air was alive around us with the flutter of tiny wings, a hundred colors floating by, like living confetti, to mark our success. An orange albatross, Appias nero, the caterpillars of which had arrived from Burma some weeks earlier, lighted on the rim of Schell's glass, and he leaned forward to study it.

...

I sat quietly, surveying the veritable jungle of plants and potted trees surrounding the table and chairs. The blossoms were as varied in color and shape as the insects. Up above, I could see the stars through the skylight. In his room, Schell had exchanged the platter on his Victrola for some equally melancholic piece, and the serenity of the scene made me ponder this turning point in my life.

Here is a world of fantasy within the home. It's a place where the air stirs with all the colors of life. Lessons will be learned here, but also it's a retreat -- a coccoon -- to hide from the world's terrors. And like any coccoon, it's destined to be broken open.

The Bugatorium is a glimpse of the fantastic created from the everyday world. It is that kind of vision, among many other pleasures, that keeps me returning to Ford's work.

-- Brian Overton of Weirdwriter

From Meghan McCarron

Now that I am an Enslaved Office Worker, I do most of my reading in bed.  Usually I read a few pages, maybe even a whole chapter, and conk out.  Usually.  When I was reading The Girl in the Glass, I would stay up for HOURS, promising myself "just one more chapter," like I was twelve and hiding from my Mom under the covers way past my bedtime. When I finally laid the book on my nighttable and collapsed onto my pillow, I would have DREAMS about the Girl in the Glass, where everyone spoke in snappy 30s dialogue and got into car chases and sought out ghosts, despite themselves.   

 

When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I'd been longing to dream the 30s for years -- hell, I used to wish VH1 would make a show called "I Love the 30s" and let me be on it making snarky comments about the Walls of Jericho-- but Jeff's vivid, hilarious, and near-perfect book was the thing that finally wormed itself into my subconscious.  Thanks for writing a totally awesome book, Jeff, and thanks for giving me the sweetest dreams this side of the time Buffy AND Faith showed up in my room and -- well, okay, suffice to say this book is great, and you should force your friends to buy it in bookstores across America.  And remember, be sure to read it late at night to acheive the full effect.

-- Meghan McCarron of Some People Think It's Okay (and several fine short stories)

From John Picacio

“Jeffrey Ford is one of the greatest writers we have in this country right now, bar none.” I said that in an interview last year, and those words seem more and more true with each passing month, and with each creative burst from Jeff. This certainly isn’t news to well-read fans of his work, but if there was one writer I wish that the whole world knew, it would be Jeff Ford. I’ve illustrated a lot of covers these last several years for a lot of great books and a lot of great authors, and I’m ever-so-grateful for that honor. However, the bottom line is, for most folks out there, I hit their collective radar when I did the wraparound cover for THE FANTASY WRITER’S ASSISTANT AND OTHER STORIES (Golden Gryphon, 2002). I don’t exactly know why that cover connected with so many folks, but I suspect much of the reason is the sheer magic of Jeff’s writing. The book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2003, and it contains the short story “Creation” which also won the World Fantasy Award that year. It seems to me that a lot of great opportunities started to slowly come my way, after I did that cover.

Then last year, I got another chance at a Jeff Ford cover. In my humble opinion, THE EMPIRE OF ICE CREAM (Golden Gryphon, 2006) is an even better collection than FANTASY WRITER’S ASSISTANT. Hard to imagine that Jeff could have crafted an even more amazing collection of stories, but he did it. If you don’t own EMPIRE OF ICE CREAM yet, then stop reading this, and go snag one for yourself. If you don’t, then all of your cool friends will be pointing and laughing at you at the end of the year, when everyone is trumpeting this book as the Best Story Collection of 2006. I don’t have enough hyperbole for this book. After I read it, I knew I had to raise my own game another notch, and the resulting cover is one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was one of those rare endeavors where I did the best thing possible — surprise myself. And I give all the credit to Jeff’s stories for that inspiration.

This man is a master of story, and his powers know no limits of genre or content. THE GIRL IN THE GLASS just won the prestigious Edgar Award (Best Mystery Paperback Original), and I couldn’t be happier for Jeff. We sometimes don’t appreciate greatness when it’s smack-dab in our midst, and I’m glad to see more and more people realizing the consistent greatness of Jeff’s work. He’s the best. Keep it coming, man!

-- John Picacio, World Fantasy Award-wining artist

From Tim Pratt

Jeffrey Ford's The Girl in the Glass is one of the best books I've ever read. I was lucky enough to borrow an early review copy, and I devoured it in an afternoon. Then I had to restrain myself from telling people how incredibly good it was, because it seemed cruel to taunt them with something so wonderful that they couldn't read. Ever since it came out, of course, I've exercised no such restraint, and I've recommended it to anyone who'd hold still long enough to listen. It's a murder mystery, a historical novel, a love story (familial rather than romantic), a glimpse into a fascinating subculture, and it's even science fiction, if you squint at it just right. That list of descriptors might make it sound like a hodgepodge, but it's not -- it's a beautifully unified book with the kind of characters you'd want to spend a weekend with (well, except for the bad guys, and even they're complicated). Ford is one of the finest writers working today, and in The Girl in the Glass, he's working at the top of his game.

-- Tim Pratt, author of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

From John Klima

My favorite thing about Jeff is that when you talk to him in person he seems like such a normal blue-collar guy. Comfortable to talk about sports or whatever, and in the next breath you can go off on a tangent and talk about John Gardner and his influence on modern-day fantasy. And then, THEN, you dip into the fiction and your head is blown completely off your neck.

I remember breaking down in tears at points while reading Jeff's story "Creation." There are some beautifully poignant phrases that I would kill to be able to create. "Creation" is perhaps the best starting off point to get into Jeff's literary world. That or the amazing "The Weight of Words" which uses a fantastical setting to explore the concept that words are more than letters, they carry meaning, and that meaning can be different depending on the reader, the situation, or the creator.

-- John Klima, Editor of Electric Velocipede