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.” Make the most of the tapestry of tales and visions before you. It is a rare treasure, to be tasted with both relish and respect. It is the work of an original. It’s what you’ve been looking for. I'm there again. There's something in it reminiscent of the moment after a car accident, where you're sitting in disbelief, trying to make sense of it, half laughing, half shaking your head. 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.

Again, VanderMeer suggests that we should not rely on just one view to establish the truth of the matter. Also included---for reasons that absolutely confound and elude this reviewer---is the obnoxiously horrendous and viciously cruel “Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris”. Complete drivel and a disgusting cold sore on an otherwise unblemished complexion of literary beauty. In my opinion.) The best words to describe it would be “delightfully insane.” Because it is. Utterly batshit and utterly fascinating. We now have a situation where a person, an artist must effectively struggle with a lethal marine life form.He also seems to have committed a crime for which he has been charged and exonerated by a jury, which believed his “story”. Now he is being interviewed to establish his sanity. They all start off pretty bland and unexciting, and then suddenly, the atmosphere totally changes - especially the Dradin and the Lake stories so far. Suddenly they become surreal and in the case of the abovementioned story, it's a breathless, totally out there mixture of horror and weirdness. 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. This reviewer, in pursuit of truth and fact rather than gossip and rumor, thoroughly investigated the strange case of Vandermeer, who (it is true) simply arrived one night, “out of the blue”, as they say, in a most untoward section of the city and was brought to the Voss Bender Institute at the behest of the Ambergrisian police.

I would love to say this novel defies description, but it doesn't. :) In fact, thanks to the existence of a number of really quite fabulous works that came after it, some from VanderMeer's own hand, we can now properly place this work in its proper context. 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. With both Wolfe and Vandermeer, you often find yourself going; "Hmm, I thought this was odd, or that rang a bell, but I didn't quite see it at the time. I see now that the author had been teasing me all along."His elements are all more overtly connected to the theme of Ambergris, a city that doesn’t seem to be as developed as the modern world, but still doesn’t seem to resemble any city from the past, apart from aspects of the Byzantine Empire.

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. Whether or not “X” is an alter ego, he has written works with the same titles as components of COSAM. I tend to allow an author like David Mitchell to get away with loose or almost thread-bare connections.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. City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading—and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that he’s made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago . . . 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.

It explores just how much desire, lust and love occur within the head of the Subject, regardless of the existence, knowledge, awareness, consent or encouragement of the Object. 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. Ambergris began in 1992 with "Learning to Leave the Flesh", a short story conceived for the Clarion writers' workshop at Michigan State University. Although it does not reference the city directly, it mentions locations that would reappear in later work, such as Albumuth Boulevard and the River Moth. Considered a "proto-Ambergris story" by the author, "Learning to Leave the Flesh" wouldn't be included in the book until its 2004 edition. VanderMeer explores the implications for writing (and, by extension, reading) in the most metafictional story, "The Strange Case of X". It made Dradin swell with pride to think that the woman at the window was more beautiful than either Juliette or Justine, far more beautiful, and likely more stalwart besides. (And yet, Dradin admitted, in the delicacy of her features, the pale gloss of her lips, he espied an innately breakable quality as well.)City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of tales set in Ambergris, a fantastic world populated with more madmen than saints. The city was "settled," in a manner of speaking, when pilgrims arrived in a beautiful city inhabited by tall, nonviolent mushroom people. Long story short, the settlers made up something to take offense at, and killed off all the mushroom people, taking the city for their own. Since then, the citizens of Ambergris has been under the threat of the mushroom people who have seemingly come from nowhere and begun to inhabit the city again, cleaning up the city at night and occasionally robbing or killing people. But, mushroom people aren't the only threat to the city's cityzens . . . dangerous dwarfs, murderous masked men, ethereal evils, frightening festivals and other, uh, bad stuff is just waiting around the corner to create carnage. An insidious web of conspiracy and secret societies, reaching out and attaching itself to inhabitants of the real world and, inevitably, engulfing the reader. Reference to Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy, in describing this aspect, would be unavoidable. Weeks ago (this reviewer discovered), strange rumors abounded through the Ambergrisan literati that an unusual new figure arrived on the literary scene in a most unusual way. Vandermeer, a patient at the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute, has been entertaining a team of psychiatrists and staff of the institution. I suppose all fantasy worlds are collages of some sort. Your standard derivative Tolkien stuff, your D&D and high fantasy, is all a vaguely medieval Western Europe, with some drastically altered Eastern Europe folk tale stuff added (I'm thinking trolls and elves and whatnot), with an altered form of Greek deities added. But that format has become so widely used that it seems homogeneous and normal.