Customer Reviews

Dradin in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere

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A quick update for anyone interested:

This baby will probably set you back $100+, but it's included in Jeff's 'City of Saints and Madmen' for a much more reasonable price.

What I loved most about this short novel was not the lifelike main character or the fascinating world in which he lives, but the writing itself. The author Jeff Vandermeer is obviously a lover of words and you can tell that he pined over every one in this book. I often found myself re-reading whole sentences and paragraphs just for the appreciation. Keep an eye out for this guy.

I'm quite a jaded fellow when it comes to reading fantasy. I read too much of it when I was a lad. So now something has to be really special to invoke the same sense of wonder I felt as a hearty youth. Milorad Pavic can still do it, always; Italo Calvino, mostly; Jack Vance, often; Fritz Leiber, sometimes; maybe a few other names -- James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, Clark Ashton Smith... and Jeff VanderMeer. He's one of the few bright lights currently burning in fantasy writing. And he's young, so whereas I'm enjoying the grave-lights or sunsets of the other figures on my list, VanderMeer is providing me with a dawn. Dradin, In Love is a superbly atmospheric work which succeeds in mapping a shadowy, almost Kafkaesque city landscape which has expelled cliche beyond the furthest suburbs. VanderMeer pulls off what I see many fantasy writers (especially here in the UK) failing to do. Yes, he's one to watch out for, and he deserves to be more widely read.

Dradin in love is a profoundly disturbing excavation into the destruction of one man's desires. Dradin finds more about himself than he wishes to know, with unforeseen results. The victorian ouvre of the story gives the beginning a kind of naivete, and the deconstruction of that naivete through startling revelations seems to be the driving force behind the plot. This is an excellent read, written in a style largely indistinguishable from Victorian/Edwardian novellas. The internal illustrations are excellent and add to the surreality of the story, rather than diverting attention away from the plot.