"The main achievement of City of Saints and Madmen is the city of Ambergris itself. Mr. VanderMeer has given Ambergris an unbelievably vibrant culture, complete with celebrity composers, academic journals, heated intellectual debates, famous artists, publishing houses, coffee houses, competing religious faiths, and more. At the same time, the city, and its inhabitants, can be extraordinarily violent, and the city's history lends the place an ambivalent and often sinister feel."

Read the rest of this review at Speculative Fiction Junkie ( )

A collection of longish stories and associated bits and pieces detailing the fictional weird city of Ambergris. e.g. Letters, research studies, histories, etc. Some of the author-insertion metaness gets eye-rollingly tedious at times and spoils the cleverness of the rest.

A range from horror to humour, and the length of the Glossary at the end is quite impressive.

City Of Saints and Madmen : Dradin in Love - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Transformation of Martin Lake - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Strange Case of X - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : Appendix - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : A Letter from Dr. V to Dr. Simpkin - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : X's Notes - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Release of Belacqua - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : King Squid - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Hoegbotton Family History - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Cage - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : In the Hours After Death - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : A Note from Dr. V to Dr. Simpkin - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : Man Who Had No Eyes - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : Learning to Leave the Flesh - Jeff VanderMeer
City Of Saints and Madmen : The Ambergris Glossary - Jeff VanderMeer

Dwarf kill dismemberment horror.

3.5 out of 5

Shock the funghi.

3.5 out of 5

Arist lop off exhibition.

3.5 out of 5

Merchandising madness.

3 out of 5

X bits.

3 out of 5

X-man analysis.

3 out of 5

Behind the door raving.

3 out of 5

No story.

3.5 out of 5

Tentacle research.

4 out of 5

Getting shorter.

3 out of 5

Good idea to keep little monsters locked up.

3 out of 5

Clearly history now.

3 out of 5

Decrypting unreality.

3.5 out of 5

Change the course of funghi rivers.

3 out of 5

Thorny departure.

3.5 out of 5

Comprehensive weird detail.

4 out of 5

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/11... ( )

City of Saints and Madmen is Jeff VanderMeer's collection of novellas, essays, faux-bibliographies, and other miscellanea pertaining to the fantastical and bizarre city of Ambergris. Like no other city, real or imagined, Ambergris is a strange place, where mysterious mushroom-people lurk in the dark corners, where King Squid hold positions of great importance and composers' deaths lead to civil unrest.

This is a somewhat top-heavy collection of writings, with three longer novellas at the front followed by a case study (of a troubled author who's come to think the fictional city he created might actually be real) and a lengthy appendix of detritus (in the best sense of the word): letters, pamphlets, short stories, glossaries, and other pieces. It's a difficult book to get a reading rhythm going in, as it moves along rather in fits and starts. VanderMeer's writings are, at times, utterly enthralling, although at other times I found the prose plodding and rather dull.

At the very least, every page of this book is imaginative and intriguing. VanderMeer has written into being a richly-textured place that makes for fascinating reading, even if it doesn't exactly lend itself well to thoughts of vacationing there.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2008/... ( )

Jeff VanderMeer was an author who was unknown to me, having randomly picked this book off the shelves at Pulp Fiction, and so I spent the first quarter of this very strange book growing accustomed to his world. "City of Saints and Madmen" is ostensibly a fantasy novel, set in the bizarre city of Amergris, but the stories wander so frequently across the city's fictional history that they range from involving barbarian invaders in swords and armour, to featuring trains, telephones and television. There is also some crossover with the real world, making things even more confusing.

It's a very richly detailed world, and one which VanderMeer doesn't explicitly explain to you. Which is fine by me - my hatred for spoonfeeding is a matter of public record. What I was able to gather by the end of it was that Amergris is a city under threat, founded atop a society of subterranean mushroom-like people known as "grey caps," and subsequently suffering from unexplained problems with fungal growth. It is widely suggested that the grey caps will one day retake the city, putting to an end the petty concerns of the priests, artists, writers, historians and scientists who are at the centre of these stories. I suppose City of Saints and Madmen is technically a book of short stories, the first half consisting of four slim novellas, the second half consisting of an "appendix," containing everything from the scribblings of an asylum inmate to a pseudo-scientific pamphlet on the gigantic freshwater squid. I quite liked this format, with bits and pieces giving an insight into a larger city; while the subject matter sometimes became tedious (such as the squid pamphlet), the format ensured that it wouldn't be too long before I was reading about something else entirely.

What VanderMeer excels at most is horror. While many of the stories heavily involve introspection, crises of art, self-doubt and the like, with characters that are neither particularly memorable nor likeable (with the exception of the historian Duncan Shriek, whom we know only through reading his history of early Ambergris, but who immediately endeared himself to me with his dry wit), there are frequent instances of horror. Saints may be in short supply, but this is indeed a city of madmen, and not the kind of place you'd want to raise your kids. But for the reader, the best moments of City of Saints and Madmen are by far those that verge onto fear and terror: the psychotic orgy of rape and murder that inexplicably occurs during a festival, a blind woman who claims to have heard something rustling inside an empty cage left behind after a grey cap raid, or the circumstances of the fishing fleet early in the city's history that returns one season to find the city completely deserted, its inhabitants having simply vanished. These parts of the book are like studs of chocolate in a cookie, rousing me out of the slumber induced by a story about an antique salesman or whatever and making me thoroughly enjoy the book for those few excellent pages.

When VanderMeer sticks to his strengths, and fills the reader with a sense of eerie dread, he's great. Most of the time, however, City of Saints and Madmen is a fairly unremarkable wander through a bohemian metropolis with occasional hints at greater literary skill. It does, as always, get points for being a fantasy genre text that relies on imagination rather than on Tolkien, but as with any large collection of short stories, the ultimate grade is average: the good stories dragged down by the bad ones, the bad stories lifted up by the good ones. Nonetheless, VanderMeer shows promise, and I may keep an eye out for his other works. ( )

In thinking about how to review this book, there were a number of things I wanted to avoid. The first is that I cannot say that I have "finished" it. To say that would be to imply that I am in some way done with it, and nothing could be further from the truth.

City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories and other miscellanea, all relating to Vandermmer's fictional city of Ambergris. The city is beautiful and horrific, decadent and decaying, elegant and disgusting; but most of all it is (in a way many fictional locales are not) real. In reading about the city, I could see the architecture, smell the streets and hear the cacophony of the inhabitants. Vandermeer has made the place so easy to imagine, and yet leaves enough to the imagination of the reader that no two people who have read the book would be likely to describe it using the same terms.

Vandermeer has written a book that is frightening and whimsical at the same time. One minute he's describing a riot with bloodthirsty abandon, and the next he has you laughing at the footnotes in a pamphlet written for tourists new to the city. In each piece, he hints at a larger story and gives clues to deeper mysteries. The book is also filled with little sketches and silly fictional bibliographies which add to the sense that Ambergris is a city that exists somewhere just out of reach.

I will never be finished with this book, no matter how many times I read it. ( )