But, really, I knew it wouldn’t be as easy as all that, because I already knew Almond’s writing. His collection of short stories, My Life in Heavy Metal, is one of the best bunches of little fictional tidbits I’ve ever read, and I knew that Almond has the power to pull a reader into situations he doesn’t exactly want to be pulled into and, against all odds, make that reluctant reader enjoy the pulling.

Thus went my journey into Almond’s world of candy. By the time I finished it, I was, like Almond, haunting the candy racks at the local grocery and drug stores, looking for new, untested treats and seeking out old, long-forgotten friends.

Almond’s book starts out innocuously enough as a sweet-tempered ode to candy. A self-confessed candyfreak, Almond explains that he is more than just a run-of-the-mill consumer of chocolate. The first chapter begins with the explicatory heading, “Some Things You Should Know About the Author,” and the subsequent list includes “1. The author has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his entire life” and “3. The author has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times.” No doubt about it, Almond thinks about candy more than most of us do (at least once an hour, he claims), and he is therefore more than qualified to write an entire book about it.

Almond, though, isn’t content to muse and reminisce about his past and present encounters with sweets, although he does so extensively and hilariously. No, Almond is deeper than that, and he quickly finds himself delving into the intricacies of candy marketing and the dog-eat-candy bar world of the confection industry. He grows increasingly disturbed as he discovers the way that the Big Three candymakers - NestlÈ, Hershey’s, Mars - dominate American candy shelves, and his book becomes a quest for the little guy, the small regional candymakers that once, not too long ago, filled our sugar-fueled fantasies with various and sundry niche candies. He seeks out the survivors, visiting on his journey the makers of Iowa’s Twin Bing, Kansas’ Valomilk, Boise’s Idaho Spud, and California’s Big Hunk. Along the way, he also stumbles upon Nashville’s Goo Goo Cluster, Philadelphia’s Peanut Chew and a few others. It’s a wonderful, laugh-out-loud, sugar-high stomachache of a ride.

But in the middle of it, Almond does something that savvy readers will have seen coming but that might take joyriders by surprise: he gets serious. In the middle of an early mid-life crisis, he begins to think that his current life-state - romantically unattached, alone, and, basically, sad - might be attributable to his upbringing. He does a little finger pointing at a difficult father and cruel older brothers, but he shoulders a lot of the blame himself. The significant part of his introspection as it is relevant to the Candyfreak project, though, is that he sees a pattern in his escapism: when he was a kid he used the joys of candy to escape from the trials of his life, and, as an adult, he uses the easy career move of writing about candy to, once again, escape from the trials of his life. What’s more (and what’s more frightening), Almond starts tosee a parallel between himself, a guy struggling against the current of his life, and the small candymakers who are struggling against the current of big business. It’s a dark discovery, but it is a sweet contrast to the light, fluffy candy journalism.