Memoranda

In his World Fantasy Award-winning New York Times Notable novel, The Physiognomy, author JEFFREY FORD conceived a genius, satanic mind that, in turn, conceived, constructed, and dominated a nightmarish metropolis called the Well-Built City. That mind is the dark landscape that we now traverse and intimately explore -- as the acclaimed author returns us to a shadow purgatory of surreal horrors and striking moral ambiguities.Once Cley held a position of respect and fear in Master Drachton Below's cruel autocracy. As physiognomist, Cley practiced a sanctioned, twisted science that condemned men and women to death for the size of their foreheads or thrust of their chins. Yet Cley emerged from the ruins of the Well-Built City a better man, dedicated to healing the physical ills of the simpler agrarian society he has chosen to join. Below's great evil, however, has never abated -- and he was not destroyed when his dark social experiment exploded. For his own senseless reasons, he has unleashed a plague of sleep upon Cley's friends and neighbors -- a disease that, ironically, has felled the Master as well. And the only antidote lies in a terrible place the former physiognomist fears to enter but knows he must: in the illusory house of a madman's dreams, imagination, and remembrances; in the intricate palace of memories Drachton Below has scrupulously constructed in the Stygian depths of his mind.