The Drowned Life

Jeffrey Ford has long been one of my favorite short fiction writers, and this new collection confirms my opinion that he excels at the short form. I confess that I am not the fan of the title story that many are, but I very much enjoy “The Night Whiskey,” “The Dreaming Wind,” and “The Scribble Mind,” which I’d read before, and was delighted to come across new stories I’d previously missed. Most intriguing to me, though, were short pieces scattered throughout the book that might – it’s not clear, and one should never draw any conclusions about a fiction writer – but pieces that just might be autobiographical, and if not, are certainly linked pieces about an extended family. These include “A Few Things About show more Ants,” which really is nothing more, but nothing less, than the title suggests; “Present from the Past,” about the narrator’s mother, her spurt of creativity after she ceases drinking, her death, and its aftermath; and “The Fat One,” about how the narrator quits smoking. If these are portions of a memoir, I definitely want to read that book. If they are fiction, they are wonderful fiction, and I hope they become a novel. Whatever they are, combined with the three stories I mentioned, they are worth the price of the book in and of themselves. show less

I read and loved The Well-built City trilogy on my early explorations of New Weird. This collection of short stories is my first meeting with Jeffrey Ford’s writing outside the world of Cley the physiognomist, and I was not disappointed. This book has everything I love about literature: gently or blatantly tilted reality, enigmas, eeire ambience, mind-boggling weirdness and endings that kind of makes sense without really answering anything. Many goose-bump incidents here. Most of these stories are very good, a few are excellent. None are bad. Among my favorites are the one about the annual death berry fest, where a few chosen people in a small town get the chance to talk to their dead relatives, the surreal dreamlike kaleidoscope show more about the astronaut and his alien lover, and the merely page long snap shot of the mother and her severely disabled daughter in the writing class.

Highly recommended if your enjoy the short stories of Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan or China Miéville. But Ford is one of a kind. I put down the book knowing I need to read everything by this author. Eve-ry-thing. show less

Channeling the gravitas of Borges and Calvino, Jeffrey Ford's collection of short stories titled The Drowned Life, though at times overreaching in scope, sublimely conjures a sense of sheer wonder and befuddlement when confronted with the intersection of everyday life and the dreams that shape it, or are shaped by it.

Ford alternates his stories between the subtle and grandiose, the mundane and the outlandish, incorporating through each a pervasive sense of mystery and weirdness. When he is not detailing the wisdom of a soothsaying octopus, a town’s dependence upon an annual, magical breeze, and the peculiar behavior surrounding the annual “deathberry” drinkers, he describes the power contained within an overlooked scribble, an show more apartment's potentially haunting flicker of light, losing a Chinese curse in a poker game, and the dictated writings of a comatose daughter through her mother.

This see-saw between the highly fantastical and the merely strange begs careful attention and even patience of the reader, noting the eternal truth that things are never what they seem. Several stories, especially that which introduces the fascinating Madame Mutandis, are deserving of their own novels. The Drowned Life is a deep and resonating read. show less

I've been reading Ford's short stories in a few places over the last year or two, and have enjoyed every single one. So I was very glad to snag an ARC from the author.

There is a range of stories: allegorical and highly imaginative, as in "The Drowned Life", where a man literally goes under(water) from the stresses of life; some that tell a story that feels very real-world but has fantasy seeping in through the sides to lesser or greater degrees, as in "The Night Whiskey", where a drink made from berries harvested from a plant that grows from some dead animals leads to disturbing occurrences, or "The Golden Dragon"; the flat-out bizarre and wonderful "The Way He Does It", about a man's unstated knack; surreal and beautiful, as in "The show more Dreaming Wind", where a playful wind blows through a town and temporarily turns people into animals and other fun hijinks, until one year it stops blowing; the curious, as in "The Scribble Mind", where some people can remember what it was like in the womb and are thus able to draw a certain scribble; and more. This range keeps the collection lively. You never quite know what to expect from the next story.

Not every story thralled me, but I expect that from any collection of stories. This one's success rate was very high; there were none that I disliked, only some that I found less strong. I recommend The Drowning Life, especially if you've read some of Ford's stories and think you'd like to read some more. show less

These short stories are all over the place...there is no single thread to tie them together, other than a kind of dark morbidity that underlies them all. The stories range from spooky mood pieces about a couple in a haunted house, to straight sci-fi about aliens and their dreams, to tortured metaphors, as in the title story about "Drowned Town" where people live when they 'go under.' I thought some of the stories ended abruptly, with too many ends left untied, but the ideas are so incredible that they linger in your mind. I especially enjoyed a story about a dream wind that comes once a year and causes chaos in a small town, and another about an extremely rare berry that produces a strange liqueur with odd side affects.

The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

This is a collection of 16 stories by the author. The settings range from bizarre to everyday life. One of the more well-known tales is ‘The Night Whiskey’, it tells of a town where a strange berry concoction is given to a handful of citizens once every year and the unique experiences they have under the influence of this “death berry”. There is much imagery intertwined in the stories and they would make for good conversation pieces at a book club or in a literature class. Sometimes you wonder if the author was drinking a strange berry concoction while he was writing them!

I loved some of these stories, some of them were just stories, that’s all, and some of them were just plain disturbing, like show more the first story (and books namesake, The Drowned Life, disturbing). I’ll throw in a few quotes from a few of the stories so you can get a feel for some of them.

“He bit with his molars but found it had nothing to do with dirt. It was mushy and tasted terrible more like a sodden meatball of decay then a memory of the sun” (from The Drowned Life).

“Eventually the mother of the village came to him and asked if he would take the challenge of commitment….he was lowered by a long rope off the side of the plateau into the depths of the sea of red grass” (from The Dismantled Invention of Fate).

“He did it in sold-out concert halls and stadiums so large that people in the back rows and top bleachers looked on with binoculars. He did it before royalty and heads of state” (from The Way he does it).

“Tomes of wonders, testaments of melancholic horrors wrought by the gale have been recorded…..” (from The Dreaming Wind).

Some of my favorites in this collection were ‘The Way He Does It”- just fantastic, the author has a gift for hyping you up for the something, although you never actually find out what it is! Another of my favorites was ‘The Scribble Mind’; it took me on my own mind journey. I also really liked ‘The Dreaming Wind’.

If you don’t like swearing you may be put off a bit by Mr. Ford, because all of his works seem to have a bit of swearing in them. I am not a big fan of this but I like the author well enough to still read his work anyway. show less