The Empire of Ice Cream gathers 14 stories, including the mind-blowing title story, about a man afflicted with a bizarre form of synethesia, which won a Nebula award for best novelette in 2003, and a previously unpublished novella (really almost a short novel), "Botch Town," a prequel of sorts to the elegiac family drama "Present from the Past," which appeared in 2003's Silver Gryphon anthology and more recently on the author's addictive blog, 14theditch.

There is not a clunker in the bunch, but among the standouts are "The Annals of Eelin-Ok," a riveting fairy tale richer in event and feeling than many fantasies of 20 times its length, "The Weight of Words," wherein an Aspergian genius develops a formula of prose composition that exerts a subtle but irresistible influence over readers, the hilarious yet mordant "Coffins on the River," in which the pursuit of fresh inspiration takes two burned-out artists into some very disquieting places, and the Conradian ghost story "The Trentino Kid," set in and around the waters of Long Island's Great South Bay.

The author, in the expansive tones of a man sharing a few beers with his buddies, also provides illuminating and often amusing notes to each story.

Something authentic this way comes

In his introduction, Jonathan Carroll writes that "Ford sees wonder everywhere and embraces it fully." But not only that. Ford finds the human in the strange and the strange in the human and embraces both with equal fervor. Some of the stories here, like "The Beautiful Gelreesh" and "Boatman's Holiday," are very strange indeed, operating at an almost mythic level of mystery and significance reminiscent of Kafka's numinous parables and short fictions. Some, like "The Empire of Ice Cream," begin in the familiar and then veer into the weird or horrific or surreal in the manner of the best Twilight Zone episodes. Others, like "Botch Town," barely seem to brush against the fantastic, yet are steeped in it nevertheless.

Wherever they begin, and whatever surprising directions they go, they always end up illuminating or questioning some aspect of human experience, and they do so in an elegant, considered prose that is never mannered, often earthy and quite funny, and notable for a meticulous attention to detail, combined with unexpected angles of attack, in descriptions of objects, emotions and characters, even when these things move into realms that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would dissolve into hopelessly muddled metaphysics. There is a quality of old-fashioned storytelling to Ford's writing; he is a descendant of the great adventure writers and yarn-spinners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, yet there is also a dreamlike quality to the logic and imagery of his work that is distinctly post-Freudian.

"Botch Town" is the central story of the collection, a masterful addition to the series of semi-autobiographical stories Ford has been producing for some time, the earliest chronologically that I am aware of. (It would be cool to see all of these collected at some point.) The story takes place in the late summer and through the fall of a year in the early '60s and concerns the adventures of a young boy, Jeff, his older brother, Jim, and their younger sister, Mary, who live with their alcoholic mother and well-meaning but overwhelmed father, and their grandparents, Nan and Pop, in a small New Jersey town.

It's a coming-of-age story that invites comparison to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine in its reverent evocation of everyday childhood wonders and terrors and to Something Wicked This Way Comes in its aura of creeping menace and flashes of sudden horror as an excitingly mysterious neighborhood prowler morphs into a creepy man in a white car who may or may not be abducting local children. A model town and its tiny inhabitants, set up in the cellar of Jeff's home, begins to mirror—or perhaps cause—events in the larger town outside. It is an interesting peculiarity of Ford's fiction that his shorter work frequently reads as more densely structured with levels of intent and symbolic resonance than his novels, and "Botch Town" is no exception; it opens wider and sinks deeper the further in the reader goes, and its images and events continue to haunt long after the last page is turned. Like all of Ford's best work, "Botch Town" is a story that has the power to change the way readers think about themselves and the world.