Saints and Shrieks: Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Fiction
I don’t know what makes a novel great. Maybe every great book is great in its own way. I suspect, though, that a novel’s greatness resides most often either in its structure (not just its plot, but its balancing of themes and elements, its division into units like chapters, and its decision of what to describe and when) or its prose (its ability to make every word count, not only in depicting character and setting, not only in moving forward story, but in advancing the theme of the book, what it’s about, the idea that prompted the telling of the tale in the first place).
I suspect also that truly great novels fuse the two things, so that stylistic choices are an outgrowth of structure, while structural elements are visible in the voices the story uses. And all these things are always surprising the reader, even while making perfect sense.
Which brings me to Jeff VanderMeer, and his three novels of the fictional city of Ambergris: City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.
This is not a typical trilogy. The three books are very different from each other in both style and structure, although they do have some themes and characters in common. Chiefly, they have Ambergris in common.
Ambergris is a strange place, a baroque metropolis defined by wars between sprawling merchant houses, the orgiastic annual celebration of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, and a mostly-subterranean nonhuman race called Grey Caps. The city changes over the course of the books — its technology shifts, its social structure is altered — but then the way we see the city changes as well.
Anyone who has been reading these entries with any regularity knows that the word “minimalist” will never be used in the same sentence with my name. I seem to be visually starved, needing to be perpetually surrounded by interesting if not strange things to look at. This can easily be proven by the fact I cohabitate with a voodoo doll collection and three German Shepherds.
Night of the Necromancer
The lead story for the
complete artwork comprising all the issues in 2010) is “Mannikin” by Paul Evanby. The story opens in July 1776, the date of American declared independence from British colonial rule (sidenote: the writer is Dutch and the magazine is published in the U.K.). But this isn’t about Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, and doesn’t even take place in the colonies, but rather signifies the irony of a revolution that resulted in freedom for white Protestant male landowners who relied on the exploitation of African-American slaves to maintain economic autonomy.
The Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly
All right movie fans, its here! We’ve been telling you about it for months and today is finally the day when 
Here at the Black Gate offices we’ve sent the entire gaggle of lazy summer interns to the local 
The Dead Matter
I’ve been telling you about this one for quite awhile and now it’s finally here!