City of Saints and Madmen

Jeff Vandermeer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A master of postmodern game playing, VanderMeer (The Exchange) here gathers all the fiction published in his earlier trade paper collection (also titled, in a typically Borgesian maneuver, City of Saints and Madmen), plus an equal amount of new material. Set in the haunted city of Ambergris, with its Borges Bookstore, these stories feature bizarre recurring characters and intensely self-referential plots. Among the highlights are the World Fantasy Award¤winning Transformation of Martin Lake, the tale of a talented painter who's obsessed with a great composer; The Strange Case of X, which concerns an incarcerated lunatic found wandering the streets of Ambergris carrying the very book being discussed in this review; the wonderful new story The Cage, in which an antiques dealer becomes infected with a fungus that's slowly taking over much of the city; and, oddest of all perhaps, an untitled short story, which fills the entire dust jacket and concerns an unnamed traveler who has a close encounter with a giant squid in the river that runs through Ambergris. Other pieces take many forms, including a history of the city complete with footnotes, psychiatric records from a local hospital, an amazingly funny work of pseudo-biology entitled King Squid and entirely bogus bibliographies and glossaries. This beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn't for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"One of the best books of 2001" CHINA MIEVILLE "Other fantasy authors may stripmine their invented worlds for the last scrap of ore; VanderMeer keeps going deeper, and finding new forms of gold" LOCUS --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (February 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553383574
• ISBN-13: 978-0553383577
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,021 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Magical, April 10, 2002

By	Fosky Bob "human" (Vacaville, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (Paperback)

'The City of Saints and Madmen' is easily my favorite collection of 2001. Comprised of four stories, each more deliciously exotic and fascinating than the one before, this attractively priced trade paperback is sure to entrance all readers willing to immerse themselves in VanderMeer's brilliantly conceived world.

VanderMeer's Ambergris is easily the most lavish and enticing fantastic world that I've yet to encounter. Articulating the brilliance of this book would require writing skills on a par with VanderMeer himself. I can only point to the book and insist that it is excellent. Truly excellent.

Taken by themselves, the stories are small gems...but when looked at as a whole, as part of the wonderful Ambergrisian tapestry, they become more than the sum of their parts. I anguished with the title character in 'Dradin in Love' as he realizes that his passionate longing for a mysterious woman is unlikely to be consummated. The fascinating history of Ambergris as told in 'The Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris by Duncan Shriek' is surely one of the most complete histories of a fictional world ever conceived. The World Fantasy Award Winning 'The Transformation of Martin Lake' tells the amazing story of a humble artist who is transformed into a master through a harrowing and bizarre experience. Finally, 'The Strange Case of X' blurs the lines between fantasy and reality as an author whose life appears analogous to VanderMeer's undergoes rigorous questioning concerning the substance of reality.

Under VanderMeer's watchful eye, Ambergris is a thriving and exotic landscape. I devoured this collection in a matter of hours. Hungry for more I jumped onto the internet and searched out more VanderMeer. Ambergris is so fascinating and richly exotic that I could see VanderMeer writing about its Living Saints and Graycaps for decades without running out of stories to tell.

Immerse yourself in Ambergris. The land is hauntingly beautiful and terrifyingly real. I can see myself re-reading this brilliant collection several times a year. This masterful collection belongs on the bookshelf of every fan of speculative fiction. I'm eagerly looking forward to the Deluxe edition which supposedly contains 30,000 more words about this wonderful place and is supposed to be released Real Soon Now.

This volume, exciting and beautiful, is easily one of my all-time favorite books. Try it yourself. You won't be disappointed. Highly Recommended.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely beautiful book!, July 25, 2002

By	John Klima (Bettendorf, IA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: City of Saints and Madmen (Hardcover)

Do you love books? I mean, really love them? Then this is a book that should be on your shelf. The writing is top-notch. Modernist fantasy as powerful as anything from Tim Powers, Charles de Lint, or China Mieville. The best realized fictional world since Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.
In addition, the book is gorgeous! It is filled with wonderful illustrations, great design, and interesting typography.
What else do you get? How about a story on the dust jacket? How about a story written in code? Cool stuff.
In short, stunning.
Did I mention this is a print-on-demand title? This means the book is printed as it's ordered (well, maybe not every time, maybe every 50 or so) but it's a totally different printing process than standard books. No plates. That makes the layout of the book staggering!
Did I mention that the writing is amazing?
Buy this book. Buy several copies of this book and give it to friends.
Don't miss out.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fungus Among Us, December 1, 2004

By	Dark Mechanicus JSG "Black Ops Teep" (Fortified Bunker, USSA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: City of Saints and Madmen (Paperback)

Jeff Vandermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen" is sort of like finding a chest full of gold in a house fire: you've got to be quick to filch out the treasure in this awkward collection of often gripping, typically ghoulish little tales desperately searching for some order among the chaos---much like the boys and girls of Ambergris, the teeming city in which all this dastardly stuff takes place.

That's too bad, because half-hidden beneath this obtuse, strangely skeletal, self-satisfied wreck of a book are five juicy little stories, nuggets of unmitigated grue and wonder that Vandermeer has clearly invested his mind and imagination and soul. The stories suggest a writer with tremendous promise and some magic in his keyboard.

I first encountered the noxious "The Cage" in an obscure horror anthology. It is a shivery little morsel of pure dread concerning the fate of a stout descendant of the auspicious Hoegbotton clan. But it's what the story doesn't say---the dark things it hints at---fungus! dwarves! Truffidian priests!---that intrigued me, and led me, at long last, to Ambergris.

Try "The Cage": you'll like it. Upon my first reading, I found wicked, brimming with subversive, infectious evil. I wanted more.

Alas, Vandermeer never fashions a crown for his crown jewels. Expect an Ambergris any fuller or richer than that glimpsed in the five main short tales? Expect to be disappointed.

But those short gems do gleam in the darkness, and for them Vandermeer merits a chance. I have written already of "The Cage". "The Transformation of Martin Lake", about the strange life and stranger death of the prolific and powerful Ambergrisian composer Voss Bender, reminded me quite a bit of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut": it is all about secret assignations, and night-haunted fog-shrouded alleyways, and dead men telling no tales.

Then there is there is the apocalyptic "Dradin in Love", which is all about madness and obsession and disease and death, and the short and deadly "Learning to Leave the Flesh". The moral of both tales, if there is one, seems to be to avoid talking to strange dwarves with tattoos. The nasty "In the Hours After Death" brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase "dead on his feet". All of them are masterpieces of excellent storytelling: all of them leave the reader begging for more. All reek of ancient horror, of all too finite and feeble human lives, and of melancholy and madness, in equal doses.

Why couldn't Vandermeer have worked this kind of magic over the course of a book, in which these stories really do interweave and suggest something larger---rather than merely cleverly self-referencing?

The book also suffers from preciousness in presentation: like most collages, the book uses physical gimmicks as an alternative to cohesive storytelling. Alexandre Dumas used the power of his words alone to tell the tale. J.R.R. Tolkien aided his story merely with a map.

Vandermeer, by contrast, needs the aid, presumably, of a full-time graphics SWAT team: "City" uses dozens of fonts and typesets, encryption, baroque chapter heads, all manner of squidy illustrations. This is not storytelling, it's graphic design.

"The Early History of the City of Ambergris" is a prime example of padding which could have served its purpose of unifying the five tales---but instead makes a point of using a war-fleet of footnotes and teensy tinsey marginalia to assault the reader's eyeballs. Ugh. And please, don't get me started on "The Strange Case of X", in which the author unforgivably inserts himself into his own creation like some sci-fi version of Woody Allen.

Worse, Ambergris itself is largely a clone of Byzantium (modern day Istanbul): a chaotic pastiche transplanted out of space and time to the "River Moth", cobbled together of place-names and battle-sites and historical figures Vandermeer has intellectually grave-robbed from the tomb of Byzantine Imperial history. When Conan creator Robert E. Howard was creating his absorbing, living, breathing *world* of Hyperborea and cobbled together or corrupted the names of actual kings and kingdoms of antiquity, he was called a hack. In our less demanding age, Vandermeer does this and is called "brilliant".

Recommended, though, if only for these wondrous little short nuggets of terror and melancholy nearly buried in the offal of the overall book. The little glimpses we see of an Ambergris---the fungal growths, the constant patter of rain on Albumuth Boulevard, the grisly and carnal orgies that accompany the Greater Festival of the Freshwater Squid each year, the menacing Grey Caps---all of these things make me wish Vandermeer had been more ambitious, and truly wrestled with his creation to give us a living, breathing city.