"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. ( )

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer is a fascinating work of fantasy. It is a collection of various forms of writings. There are "ordinary" stories, (mock) scientific articles with plenty of footnotes and bibliographies included, letters and (in some editions) one encrypted short story (for which the book itself is the key).

The City is Ambrergris, a humid, tropical or near-tropical, chaotic and violent metropolis full of rot and fungus. Ambergis was founded on a site then occupied by mysterious gray caps and named after the "most secret and valuable part of the whale".

The stories and writings span a period of approximately 300 years of the town history. The story of city itself is told, as well as the stories a few more or less important individuals and families of the city. The main book is composed of four stories, one of which, titled 'The Strange Case of X' is about an anonymous inhabitant of an Ambergrisian mental asylum. X is, or he says he is, a best-selling author from Kansas - a place unkown to the interrogating psychiatrist - a writer whose most successful work has been City of Saints and Madmen, a book set in an imaginary city of Amgergris... The rest of the book, Appendix, is a collection of papers found in X's room after he disappears.

Lots of effort has been put to the look of the book. Different typesettings and page decorations have been used for different types of texts. This works, the book is beautiful (even though it is all black and white), it is nice just to browse around and turn the pages see what comes next. Others have described the book as a concept album, and, in my opinion, that is well put.

So far so good. But there are som buts. VanderMeers writing style is at times quite dense, concenctration is required to get into it, and the footnotes and other extras did broke mine. I got distracted more than once. I was not taken away. Some stories were like prolonged jokes, funny first but not all the way.

On the other hand, a few of the stories were excellent, my favourites being The Strange case..., Transformation of Martin Lake, where the narrative alternates between the story of how a mediocre painter becomes The One Ambergrisian artist and the attempts of art historians to interprete his work and his transofrmation, The Hoegbotton family history, and The Cage. In these the people of the city become close, real, living persons who share the worries and troubles of ordinary human beings, even though they live in a city not so ordinary.

I just happened on Jeff VanderMeer's work when I noticed he and his wife Anne are editing a collection of New Weird stories. This work sounded interesting, particularly as many reviews compared VanderMeer to Borges.

I'm not convinced VanderMeer shares much in common with Borges. That is not a rip on VanderMeer, but rather a compliment, as it reflects his unique and innovative literary voice.

This book is a collection of works that revolve around the fictional metropolis of Ambergris. The main features of the city are its native inhabitants, the fungus-cultivating "gray caps," and its tendency to explode into violence at somewhat regular intervals. The works that make up this book are very different in tone, narrator, form, and any other way you could imagine. First, there is a tale of a madman's obsession -- Dradin, in Love. Then there is the story, told through a doctor's log entries, of a mental patient who claims to have written Ambergris into existence. Then there is a long glossary of Ambergrisian terms written by a historian with grudges to settle and strange theories to transmit. And a long work on the King Squid by an apparently unhinged "squidologist" with attached bibliography.

If VanderMeer is like Borges, it is in his ability to unsettle a reader's intellectual bearings. Borges did this largely by presenting philosophical conundrums in story form. VanderMeer accomplishes a similar effect through the use of unreliable narrators and a richly detailed imaginary past. The result is an uneasy feeling of not knowing whom or what to believe that calls into question the notion of history itself.

VanderMeer dark whimsy makes all of this fun. By all means, when you finish this book, move immediately to Shriek: An Afterword to get even more unreliable information about the history of Ambergris. ( )

http://martlet-blog.blogspot.com/2007... ( )

I was disappointed, but I had very high expectations. The stories are good, the 'concept album' design is very nice indeed, but the world-building struck me as gimmicky and failed to take itself seriously enough.

This is not to say that you shouldn't read it. Taken invidividually, most of the stories are good and a few are excellent. Top pick goes to "The Transformation of Martin Lake", an eerie account of the psychological breakdown that created a great artist. VanderMeer alternates excerpts from a critic's discussion of Lake's work with the gradual unfolding of the events leading to the breakdown, which at the same time shows us the true inspiration behind the work and exposes how baseless the critic's theorising is. It's a nice combination of pretty nasty psychological study and pretty funny satire.

Another favourite piece is "In the Hours After Death", which in any other collection would be straight-up surrealism. It tells of the temporary reanimation of a recently dead trumpet player, by fungal infection. Read as pure surrealism it's lush, beautiful and strange. The problems start because in some sense we're supposed to take it seriously.

I described City above as a 'concept album'. The first half of the book consists of four stories set in the city of Ambergris (one of which is presented as a tourist guide to the history of the city). The second half is nominally the personal effects of a mental patient appearing in the last of the stories, "The Strange Case of X". As I said, the design is lovely, with each story presented in its own typography and page layout, really giving the impression of facsimile copies of a disparate collection of original documents.

The downside to this conceit is that it reinforces the realistic interpretation of the surreal elements of the stories: we are to take seriously that Ambergris is a real place, in which apparently surreal events are commonplace.

This isn't bad in itself, but the nature of the surrealism becomes problematic. It can be summed up in two words: fungus, and squid.

The fungal element runs through Ambergris like ... well, like mould through cheese. It's part of the atmosphere of the place and underpins lots of the more overt horrific elements (although not those of "Martin Lake"). And the squid are there for laughs.

At least, that's the impression I get. They're funny, sometimes, but Ambergris is not a comedic invention. Somehow the world-building is deeply inconsistant in its combination of comedically-inspired and horrifically-inspired elements.

Another sign of the kind of imagination at work is the view we get of the city itself. This is characterised by a few towering landmarks that are visible from all quarters; not just geographically but historically and socially as well. It's the Borges Bookstore, Hoegbottom & Sons, Voss Bender, in story after story after story. And in much the same fashion, fungus and squid. I get an impression a little as if VanderMeer wants to brand his creation as clearly and distinctly as possible: "fungus and squid... that must be Ambergris!" "Yes, you're right, there's the Borges Bookstore, it is Ambergris!"

I can't help comparing the style to China Miéville's Bas Lag novels, unfavourably. It's an unfair comparison, since Miéville is holding himself to standards of realism that VanderMeer seems to have rejected. The result, though, is in the Bas Lag case a factual description of a fictional world, while Ambergris is very clearly fictional at all levels. This might seem odd, given the attention to detail in the design and typography, but again the comparison to a concept album seems appropriate. There's a consciousness of the game being played, a self-consciousness which gives rise to in-jokes and which can't help subverting the apparent realism of the depicted world. Just as we know the Beatles aren't really Sgt Pepper's band yet we sing along about Billy Shears, we're encouraged not to take the city of Ambergris seriously as a world (the backdrop for the collection), even as we take the individual settings as seriously as the stories require us to.

So I'm in two minds about a recommendation. Many of the stories are stronger taken individually, but the 'concept album' design of the book as a whole is pretty neat. Check it out, but don't expect it to be a believable solidly-constructed world. ( )

I have never read as wonderful a collection of surreal fiction as this. Imagine Robert W. Chambers impregnating Charles deLint who gives birth to Lewis Carroll and you have the barest notion. ( )

Vandermeer is a fantastic writer. I have two versions of this book, the hardcover Cosmos edition includes many things not in the original Wildside edition. Still, either is worth your while.