Name: Big Dark Hole
ISBN: 9781618731845

Jeffrey Ford

A new collection from Jeffrey Ford, author of Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award-winner A Natural History of Hell.

And Other Stories

Big Dark Hole

A Jeffrey Ford story may start out in the innocuous and routine world of college teaching or evenings on a porch with your wife. But inevitably the weird comes crashing in. Maybe it’s an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it’s a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.

and Other Stories

Mark Wadley

I really dig the dark blend of domesticity, humor, and flat-out weird shit in this collection. Even the spookiest stories have funny moments, and everything strange that happens kind of unfurls from this lovingly rendered mundane everydayness.

Ford's straightforward, loose style really makes the speculative elements pop. The writing never gets in the way of the ideas, but also doesn't shy away from the poetic. There's a tenderness to these stories that sets them apart from the more bleak work in this vein.

My favorite stories here feel the most personal--the autobiographical(ish) ones that begin with a long-married couple in their Ohio farmhouse. They're self-aware without being meta, and interweave a meditation on aging and marriage with ghosts and monsters.

I don't usually like this kind of comparison, but if you put it to me this way I would definitely want to see what's up: this is like George Saunders meets Brian Evenson. Dry whimsy and a heavy dose of dread. That's a tough jazz to pull off but Ford has serious chops.

I had never read Ford's work before I picked this up in last year's big Small Beer Press sale. Small Beer is batting 1000 on genre-bending literary fiction collections I go into blind and end up loving, and the streak remains intact. Bless this Press.

Big Dark Hole And Other Stories

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