Author: Jeffrey Ford
Cover Artist: John Picacio
Publisher: Golden Gryphon
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: April 2006
The Empire of Ice Cream represents Ford’s second collection of short stories, and if you liked the first, no doubt you will enjoy this one as well. Not because they’re the same kind of stories but because they represent the same kind of quality and eclectic mix. It’s presented in the same format as The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant in that a brief note by the author follows each story giving some background information or inspiration for its origins.
Many of the stories obviously draw from Ford’s memories and experiences, and the fact that he often writes in the first person and the protagonist is usually a struggling writer lends a certain credibility and familiarity to the tales. It’s as though you’ve just sat down with an old friend who is relating some experience to you, and on the surface, nothing seems out of place, but then you slowly start to realize there’s something about your old friend’s story that is a bit bizarre or just plain eerie. You start to wonder if your friend the author has been smoking a few too many of those funny smelling cigarettes or if there is really something supernatural about it.
The stories run the gamut from little faeries who live in sand castles to ghost tales to a coming of age novella-length story, Botch Town, which was my favorite. Botch Town seems to be a nostalgic childhood recollection of a particularly eventful Halloween. One of the neighborhood kids has disappeared without a trace. Alarming but not fantastic in itself. Except that as our young narrator and his brother try to investigate the crime by recreating the scene on their model of the neighborhood street, the little clay figures representing their neighbors seem to move on the board of their own volition. The unbridled imagination of kids and a mysterious stranger in a car help to further the feeling that there’s more to this story than the tragedy of a missing child.
The title story The Empire of Ice Cream is about a young man who suffers from synesthesia, a neurological condition in which things are perceived simultaneously by more than one of the senses. For example, aromas may be accompanied by sounds, sounds may be coupled with visuals, and colors may invoke scents. For this young man, ice cream, specifically coffee flavored ice cream, manifests the presence of another person. However, by the story‘s end, everything gets turned on its head, and it seems neither the young man or the reader is exactly sure if his perceptions are indeed real or imagined.
Which seems to be Ford’s hallmark: making the reader question everything he’s just read and thought he understood, but then just as the tale winds down, the reader starts wondering anew. Ford has a way of making ordinary events seem fantastic, sometimes even terrifying, and often they are tinged with sadness. He is the master of the “story with a twist” and the “ironic ending.” The Empire of Ice Cream is an intriguing and diverse collection that only further solidifies Ford’s overall mastery of the short story.
