Accepting The Strange: Review of Jeffrey Ford’s Pandemonium Waltz

Sam Reader Under Review:Pandemonium Waltz. Jeffrey Ford. Lethe Press, February 2026. When approaching a work like Jeffrey Ford’s Pandemonium Waltz, a recent collection from an author who’s been putting out master-level work for decades, it’s a little intimidating—with so much already said about Ford’s short fiction, how does one approach it in a new light, or add to the conversation? Thankfully, Ford makes it easy. Pandemonium Waltz comes at an interesting point in Ford’s work. The collection is a synthesis of sorts for Ford’s literary corpus—it combines the occasionally unnerving and surrealistic vision of works like The Emperor of Ice Cream and Crackpot Palace with the more grounded, personal, and intimate tone of Big Dark Hole. It’s a book that shows Ford has an immense gift for the most surreal of images, but adds a more grounded, human approach that makes accepting the strange premises in Ford’s stories that much easier: a synthesis of past Ford and modern Ford that shows exactly…