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Better Together
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This collection of mostly older stories from the talented VanderMeer features a variety of tales that walk the border between literary surrealism and genre dark fantasy, many of them taking place in the author's two favorite locales, the haunted city of Ambergris, setting for the much-praised City of Saints and Madmen (2001), and the even darker metropolis featured in the novel Veniss Underground (2003). Perhaps the finest of the Ambergris stories is "Learning to Leave the Flesh," the tale of a writer who makes his living crafting individual perfect sentences whose life is transformed when he's assigned to write an epitaph for a dwarf who has committed suicide. Among the Veniss stories are "Balzac's War" and "Detectives and Cadavers," with their monstrous, sentient flesh dogs, and strangely mutated human beings. The title story may be the best of all, a surreal fable about the intrigues and battles among the employees who work in an office building, a struggle cut short when one woman's trumpet vine infiltrates the crawl spaces and ventilation shafts of the structure, pulling it down on the heads of everyone within. Not everything in the book is outstanding—a number of interesting but unexceptional apprentice pieces are included—but this is a solid collection overall and clearly points the way to the author's more recent, major work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
VanderMeer's stories are clearly influenced by the magical literature of Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Calvino, and like theirs, VanderMeer's muse is equally at home in places real (Peru, Cambodia, Florida) and fantastic. The collection opener, "Secret Life," is the history of a five-story building, surrounded by desolation, that houses thousands-- from the janitors in the basement to the mysterious "Shadow Cabinet" on the fifth floor--and is brought down by a vine; ingredients including murderous rage over a presumably stolen pen and VanderMeer's revealing endnote on inspiration make the piece delicious. In the closer, "Experiment #25 from the Book of Winter: The Croc and You," a story won't cooperate with its writer because it has been inspired by an image that is irresistible but impossible to fit into a plot. In between, "The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight" provide a vital legendary background for VanderMeer's imaginary city, Veniss (see Veniss Underground [BKL Mr 15 03]), and other lovely, fantastic places are so well conjured that their most surreal elements seem veristic. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
This collection of mostly older stories from the talented VanderMeer features a variety of tales that walk the border between literary surrealism and genre dark fantasy, many of them taking place in the author's two favorite locales, the haunted city of Ambergris, setting for the much-praised City of Saints and Madmen (2001), and the even darker metropolis featured in the novel Veniss Underground (2003). Perhaps the finest of the Ambergris stories is "Learning to Leave the Flesh," the tale of a writer who makes his living crafting individual perfect sentences whose life is transformed when he's assigned to write an epitaph for a dwarf who has committed suicide. Among the Veniss stories are "Balzac's War" and "Detectives and Cadavers," with their monstrous, sentient flesh dogs, and strangely mutated human beings. The title story may be the best of all, a surreal fable about the intrigues and battles among the employees who work in an office building, a struggle cut short when one woman's trumpet vine infiltrates the crawl spaces and ventilation shafts of the structure, pulling it down on the heads of everyone within. Not everything in the book is outstanding—a number of interesting but unexceptional apprentice pieces are included—but this is a solid collection overall and clearly points the way to the author's more recent, major work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
VanderMeer's stories are clearly influenced by the magical literature of Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Calvino, and like theirs, VanderMeer's muse is equally at home in places real (Peru, Cambodia, Florida) and fantastic. The collection opener, "Secret Life," is the history of a five-story building, surrounded by desolation, that houses thousands-- from the janitors in the basement to the mysterious "Shadow Cabinet" on the fifth floor--and is brought down by a vine; ingredients including murderous rage over a presumably stolen pen and VanderMeer's revealing endnote on inspiration make the piece delicious. In the closer, "Experiment #25 from the Book of Winter: The Croc and You," a story won't cooperate with its writer because it has been inspired by an image that is irresistible but impossible to fit into a plot. In between, "The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight" provide a vital legendary background for VanderMeer's imaginary city, Veniss (see Veniss Underground [BKL Mr 15 03]), and other lovely, fantastic places are so well conjured that their most surreal elements seem veristic. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
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