Looking
back through history, some of mankind’s most intriguing pseudosciences are
those that draw connections between appearance and value. Judging the human book by its cover,
phrenology and physiognomy purport to be able to measure morals through the
dimensions and attributes of body.
Somehow maintaining plausibility for centuries, it wasn’t truly until
the turn of the 20th that the practices were quelled from the public eye. But what a tool of power it would have
been. A malleable concept if ever there
were, a king or high-minded official might condemn a person based solely on the
dimensions of a nose—even if their own physical characteristics fit that of a
murderer or rapist. Taking the idea and
putting it to use in fiction, Jeffrey Ford’s 1997 The Physiognomy (re-released by Open Road Media in 2015) is the
redemption of one such high-minded official.
His story defining the word ‘malleable,’ it’s about as swimmingly
macabre as dark fantasy gets.
Cley is a
physiognomist living in the Well-Built City.
A despicable, bilious, narcissistic criminal of an official, he is the
right-hand man of the city’s even more despicable ruler, the sorcerous Drachton
Below. Falling out of favor at the
outset, however, Cley is sent on a punitive assignment to a small mining town
in the distant, dirty reaches of the realm to weed out the thief of a strange
white fruit. With miners petrifying in
the blue dust they collect each day, demons in the nearby forest, a beautiful
young woman with greater physiognomy talent than he, and a strange thing
calling itself the Traveler haunting his dreams (or his reality), Cley’s time
in the town of Anamasobia spins his already bizarre world to the surreal.
Catching the thief is only a doorway to stranger things.
