City of Saints and Madmen

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There is no escape. You have to return to or remain in the world of Ambergris. It is our cage. And we can either sing or scream. Trapped in Another World: The "patient" featured in The Strange Case of X has been dumped in Ambergris from Chicago, after he felt another entity drag him through. It gets worse, though; the man from Chicago has pushed Janice Shriek into a fire. 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.” 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. Excellent, excellent,” Dradin said, and, after a tic of hesitation—for he was much closer to penniless than penniful—he added, “but I shall need two,” and as the clerk’s eyebrows rose like the startled silhouettes of twin sea gulls upon finding that a fish within their grasp is actually a shark, he stuttered, “A-a-and a map. A map of the city. For the festival.”

The clerk, a rake of a lad with dirty brown hair and a face as subtle as mutton pie, winked wryly, smiled, and said, “I understand, sir, and I have precisely the book for you. It arrived a fortnight ago from the Ministry of Whimsy imprint—an Occidental publisher, sir. Please follow me.” The government’s response to this economic crisis has benefited large corporations and wealthy Americans, while leaving behind many disadvantaged communities and struggling small businesses,” the report said. City of Saints and Madmen” is his first visit to the city of Ambergris; a city unlike anything I can think of in the modern world, that plays mix and match with references of geographical locations and eras that should have logically never met each other, and yet blend together artfully in this strange place. The book is constructed as a collection of stories of wildly different formats. From traditional novella to diary entry, historical pamphlets and detailed bibliography, we get to know Ambergris little by little, as a strange and experimental literary tapestry is woven in front of our eyes. The one problem I was confronted with was that the long urls of each story do not always work in the apps. (I know not why) Instead, you have to use a short url, consisting of only the unique identifier of each article, if you want to create a “table of contents” to directly link to stories. Here is how I do this: Unreliable Narrator: Janice holds that she is offering a balanced yet opinionated account of her brother's life. Duncan takes issue with the first claim. She straight out admits this herself towards the end; including that it was her who informed Duncan's superiors he was in a relationship with a student destroying his career.Most people may know the first two authors mentioned as horror writers, and it is true that Vandermeer's stories contain a flavor of horror, though many of them are too humorous to be classed as horror. The stories also contain a whiff of the strange and absurd, and quite a bit of tongue-in cheek dark humor. Essentially, it is imaginative post-modernist fiction. The stories include a strong sense of self-referentiality. (For instance, some of them pose as history books or diaries.) Ambiguously Human: After Ethan Bliss has been rescued after a crucifixion, Finch encounters him the next day and sees his hands are completely healed - this is something that'd be impossible even for fungal medicine. Bliss also can easily travel through portals and has access to artifacts that are made by neither human or Gray Caps. Near the end of the story, Bliss shifted into an inhuman thing when he became enraged at Finch before regaining control of himself.

Good Thing You Can Heal: Duncan is so riddled with alien fungi that he can regrow lost body parts with fungal equivalents (in his writing, he even thought of offering to grow a new leg for his sister Janice).

It's not that I don't see it--the book certainly has the right markers: the self-awareness, the meta-fictions, the ironies and self-contradictions, the allusions and in-jokes, the big, rearing ugliness of modern literature. And yet to say that it has those markers doesn't mean much--it's like saying that a math book has equations, it doesn't mean that they add up to anything. Book Genre: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, New Weird, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction, Steampunk, Urban Fantasy, Weird Fiction