City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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In this case? I'd call this a tightly interwoven series of stories and faux academic papers surrounding the fictional city of Abergris. Expect strange mushrooms that range from hallucinogenic to graphically horrific to a high-grade fever dream of a Lovecraftian occultist. A living creature which has the power to transform and to be transformed by the act of being read. VanderMeer is a character himself, but as he says, "It's not a one-to-one relationship”. He is all of the characters, therefore would not also the reader be an integral part of the story, changing the story, perhaps changed by the story…? Lake ’s tones are, as Venturi has noted, ‘resonant rather than bright, and the light contained in them is not so much a physical as a psychological illumination.’" For a short collection, you might be tempted to way what's here equally and end up with basically a quarter of the collection as lame and forgettable. But that would be foolish. At least two of these stories are show stoppers, A+ Hall of Fame genre-fiction short stories, with two more high quality ones bringing up the rear. To which Dradin explained that he sought a gift for a woman. “Not a woman I know,” he said, “but a woman I should like to know.”

A highly sophisticated work of post-modern metafiction which uses a range of fictional documents (psychiatric reports, magazine articles, family histories, letters, essays, bibliographies etc) to construct a multidimensional collage, full of hundreds of fully cross-referenced stories-within-stories. Use of the word, “literary”, would not be unfounded, however meaningless that term may be. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.

Whether the entire story is an expression of Dradin’s psychosis or Dradin is merely psychotic within a crazy story, madness, as the title of VanderMeer’s book suggests, is an integral part of Ambergris. I can’t wait to move on to the History. And VanderMeer set a monumental task for himself--there are a lot of moving pieces here, and keeping them all spinning is a master's work. The structure itself is obsessed with metafiction, all of these 'in-world' documents that are supposed to come together and produce a greater whole: a scientific article about squid, a series of art critiques, a pamphlet about the history of the city, an asylum doctor's interview, letters, a story written in secret code, &c. But what, then, to do? Dradin’s thoughts tumbled one over the other like distraught clowns and he was close to panic, close to wringing his hands in the way his mother had disapproved of but that indicated nothing unusual in a missionary, when a thought came to him and left him speechless at his own ingenuity. One of the things I like most about fiction is the concept of world building. To create an alternate reality so captivating & fully realized that it not only feels like a real place, but a place almost preferable to reality. It's why I've been drawn to fantasy & sci-fi writing, it's why I'm such a huge D&D nerd & it's certainly a part of why I love video games. Worlds like Ed Greenwood's Faerûn, Terry Pratchet's Discworld, William Gibson's Sprawl & video games like the Suikoden series are places where my mind has often wandered & wondered what it would be like to actually live within them. I'm sure I'm not alone here & this collection of short stories of VanderMeer's Ambergris only proves that.

The Cage" is short, yet very visceral and effective. Probably the most overt horror story of the collection, though they're all varying levels of depraved. If Proust had been a hella Dungeon Master and then dropped all the monsters and sword play…you might end up with something like City of Saints and Madmen. Perhaps, there can be no truth in a story told by or in the first person, unless it is verified by the second person. The book concludes with an Appendix almost as long as all the previous novellas that features twelve different sections ranging from an amateur squidologists research on squids to a glossary of Ambergrisian people, places and things. All written from unique points of view. Although I admire and appreciate the connected quality of these stories, it’s not what I generally seek out. (And if you don’t think the glossary was written by someone who was once a personal friend of E. Gary Gygax, then you don’t know your saving throw from your +2 long sword.) Imagine a city, the city of Ambergris. An old city, with a strange and bloody history. Imagine the people who populate that city - an idolized composer, a dilettante politician, a mad writer, a steadfast merchant and so forth. Imagine a city built on genocide and violence. And squid.Women are largely absent, except as objects of desire. We're not allowed into their heads, to see their point-of-view, we aren't asked to explore their struggles or concerns. Even as objects of desire, there's never any relationship or intimacy, just distant, creepy obsession. Indeed, the only genuine, long-term romance represented in the book is between two men. In all the world, Ambergris stands as a beacon of hope and mystical wonder; built on the ruins of an ancient conquered paradise by the first of the great Cappan John Manzikerts, whose lineage would rule Ambergris for generations. Jeff VanderMeer's first book of Ambergris is a complex, humorous, awesome, inspired, boring, redundant, over-foot-notey, groundbreaking, self-absorbed and very pretty book. I can't quite call it a novel, nor a book of short stories: it's more of a patchwork, novellas and fake historical pamphlets and short stories and other bizarro little experiments that succeed at times with flying colors. At other times, they crash and burn.