It ain’t easy being a book-nerd, let me tell you what. Because man, the amount of public masking you have to do when you’ve got a deep and abiding love of novels that, like, a few hundred to a few thousand people in the entirety of human history have read and love as much as you do gets exhausting. Although one could reasonably argue that said masking is what causes me to read so many damn books in the first place, because what you do when you get sick of people is you go home and you crack the spine of your choice and you slip off into sweet literary oblivion. So yes, ok, self-fulfilling prophecy.
But folks, you know what obscure-ass book I am done masking about? Jeff VanderMeer’s peerless Ambergris trilogy. Fine, smartass, three books. City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterward, and Finch. It just so happens that I scooped the sucker in the form of a big ol’ omnibus that dented tables everywhere a couple years back. So in my head, it manifests as a single book. Of course, if you’re at all familiar with VanderMeer, you know the trilogy is well in his wheelhouse. While my man’s been at it since his late ‘80s high school days, and while he’s been known in the incredi-niche “weird fiction” world since the oughts, his justifiably beloved Southern Reach books (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, y’all) put him on the radar of the broader book-nerd world.
Yet Ambergris introduces us to a younger, weirder VanderMeer. That’s right, even weirder than the guy who wrote the book about the hell-zone. For proof, look no further than the book’s very first sentence: “Dradin, in love, beneath the window of his love, staring up at her while crowds surge and seethe around him, bumping and bruising him all unawares in their rough-clothed, bright-rouged thousands.” The weird circumlocutions of the style: twice VanderMeer mentions this idea of “love,” and within the bounds of the sentence we circle around to Dradin, this love of his, and the crowds around him, as well as gesturing at a cosmos both cruel (“bumping and bruising,” mind) and indifferent (“unawares” of Dradin’s love, “unawares” perhaps of Dradin himself). Which should cue the attentive reader to a simple fact: nothing in this book will be as it seems, and anyone looking for the simple comforts of a concise, easily digestible story best look elsewhere.
That sentence we just close-read our way through hails, as you may imagine, from “Dradin, In Love.” It’s the first piece that makes up City of Saints & Madmen, and even discussing that book’s contents is a whole damn thing in itself. Originally published way the hell back in 2001, it consisted of four novellas, which offer readers a guided tour of VanderMeer’s beautifully bizarre city Ambergris. The next year offered an expanded City, with several short stories included that really flesh out the world. Highlights include “In the Hours After Death” (“The tendrils move in concert. The clash of sounds has more unity than raw cacophony, yet no coherence. It seems as if several people tuning their instruments have begun to play their own separate, unsynchronized melodies” epitomizes the kind of queasy beauty VanderMeer is uniquely capable of) and the shockingly funny “Release of Belacqua,” in which our pompous opera-going hero wears an outfit that “blar[es] at us like a bawdy horn.” My major gripe about the omnibus is that it omits these short stories, as well as a glossary of the extensive jargon VanderMeer generated for the universe; I guess 850 pages is mountainous enough already, and the sucker would’ve sprawled over a thousand without it.
A few more words on the novellas. “Dradin” kicks us off in fine style, a wicked gothic romance with a sadistic sense of humor. Then it’s straight into my personal favorite, the delightfully Nabokovian “An Early History of Ambergris.” Narrated by Duncan Finch, a man as cranky as he is talkative, it’s an incredible act of literary velontriloquism (because VanderMeer ain’t kidding, the story indeed presents itself as an excerpt from a history book) with a moving family story at its core. There’s also some phenomenally creepy shit involving sinister mushroom folk and underground tunnels, but like, I want you to read this thing. So it’s straight into “The Transformation of Martin Lake.” Among too many other things to concisely discuss, Ambergris features a teeming art scene, one so interlaced with the city’s elaborate politics that it crosses into terrorism. Bolano fans will find themselves right at home, as will classical music enthusiasts, as a powerful composer by the name of Voss Bender causes Mr. Lake considerable grief. Lastly, you got “The Strange Case of X,” which like any proper ending turns the entire package inside-out on you. It starts in prison and it just, like, goes.
And that’s just the novellas, man. They’re, like, fifty to a hundred pages a pop, and VanderMeer finds this much story to jam into each of them. I found myself forced to slow down as I read through them, taking each novella one day at a time and giving myself breaks between each one. It’s a lot to process, but to me, that’s the whole damn art of it. VanderMeer’s offering an alternative vision for fiction as we know it, letting his ecosystems teem as they will rather than jam everything into the conventional character arc. Straightforward storytelling has persisted through the millennia for a damn good reason; it’s powerful and engaging if done the right way. With that said, too much of it feels stifling, and I find myself seeking something that’ll turn me inside-out. City of Saints and Madmen did exactly that. In other words, the book is a structural marvel, as mutable and as full of surprises as the city it describes.
So it only makes sense that the two novels in the package follow slightly more conventional paths to get where they’re going, though of course all things are relative. So it’s not like VanderMeer went straight into the “let’s rewrite Star Wars” path, or the “let’s try our hand at cyberpunk” groove thing, or whatever else you may want. If anything, he pushes deeper at what he’s established. Shriek: An Afterward takes us deeper into the Shriek siblings’ rivalry, and along with it, deeper into the tunnels that run underneath Ambergris; turns out literalizing the metaphor can make a powerful literary device if you put it in the right hands, and VanderMeer’s are indeed the right ones. I’m sure you’ve heard the common winge about how “experimental” (for lack of a better term) artists only found their way on that path because they couldn’t hack it in the conventional mode. That might be true if you’re a huge fan of bad-faith bullshit advanced by close-minded sorts, but VanderMeer proves himself just as apt at writing moving character-driven stories as he does with the freaky weirdness. In fact, I’d argue that the trilogy’s full-throated embrace of freaky weirdness makes Shriek’s family story all the more authentic.
Finch closes things out, and in many ways it marks the full convergence of VanderMeer’s many goals. He’s working genre here, and while it’s easy to speak reductively and call Finch a detective story, you can never really tell with VanderMeer. There’s a little cloak-and-dagger in there as well, and a big ol’ dollop of weird fantasy and, of course, good old cosmic horror. So in a sense, he’s bringing the detective story back to its roots; it recalls Poe’s enormously influential “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which proposes the natural world itself as the ancient and incomprehensible proto-Eldritch evil. VanderMeer’s working in similar territory, but not even Poe’s fecund imagination could’ve produced, say, our detective’s work for his sinister mushroom masters (some terrific dialog here), or the sheer weirdness of Finch’s unforgettable costar Wyte, whose rotting-yet-alive condition provides quite a few horrifying answers to questions the book raises, while also opening up a few more questions of its own.
And yet, despite the crush of attention VanderMeer got for Southern Reach - y’all remember Alex Garland’s film of Annihilation - the continued acclaim subsequent projects like Borne and Hummingbird Salamander won him, his status as a climate-fiction prophet, and the fancy omnibus, this trilogy remains relatively obscure. I remember back when damn near everyone who liked books was reading Southern Reach, including plenty of people who wouldn’t touch genre otherwise. Yet this 900-page masterpiece from the past dropped with nary a dent. I don’t know, maybe the sheer weirdness of it, the fact that it’s inherently difficult to categorize easily, means it’s doomed for a smaller audience than his later work. But man y’all, as usual, I can only recommend that we lean into the arcana. Because VanderMeer crafted something special here, something bold and beautiful and bizarre and unlike anything I’ve ever read before. If you’ve got thirty-odd bucks begging you to spend them on something, buy a ticket to one of the stranger cities that has sprung from the collective literary imagination. You will not regret it.