THE PHYSIOGNOMY - Softcover

Winner of the 1998 World Fantasy Award, a prestigious novel of literary fantasy and disturbing imagination.The nightmare metropolis called the Well-Built City exists because a satanic genius Drachton Below, the Master, wished it so. And few within its confines hold the power of Physiognomist Cley. With scalpels, calipers and the other instruments of his science, Cley can divine good and evil, determine character and intelligence, uncover dark secrets, and foretell a person's destiny. But now the Master has sent the great physiognomist out of the City on a seemingly trivial assignment in the rural hinterland where, removed from Below's omnipresent scrutiny, even the most loyal servant of logic can fall prey to seductions of the flesh and spirit.And in this unfamiliar place, possessing terrors uniquely its own, await stark revelations that could shatter Cley's perceptions of himself, his profession, and his ordered world.

Jeffrey Ford is a professor of writing and early American literature at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey and the author of MEMORANDA, THE BEYOND and of THE PORTRAIT OF MRS. CHARBUQUE (also published by Macmillan).