City of Saints and Madmen

one of the best

This is one weird book. Kind of like that Alice in Wonderland feel you get when you play certain video games, like Little Big Planet. Pure escapism.

this "book" has the most awesomely, epically, insanely detailed fictional setting of any book ever. thumbs up.

Awesome...and crazy.... I'm still not sure I understand it all. Very creepy and wonderful.

my sense of humor plus fucked up shit involving fungus and cephalopods.

this was an absolute delight to read. i would say more, but i actually finished it sometime ago and simply forgot to update it here. definitely one i would recommend.

Weird, interesting, different. Fantasy unlike any other.

I heard Dante skipped this Circle of Hell because he mistook it for Paradise. 'Ware the Graycaps and the King Squid.

The four main stories are all referenced in Shriek: an Afterword. Like beginning at the end and moving towards the beginning.Dradin is obviously mad, Duncan is seen by the general populace as mad in Shriek, and Martin's brush with madness is what propels him from obscurity to success. And then there's the nameless author based on, no wait, IS Vandermeer himself, trapped in Ambergris who is...more

The four main stories are all referenced in Shriek: an Afterword. Like beginning at the end and moving towards the beginning.Dradin is obviously mad, Duncan is seen by the general populace as mad in Shriek, and Martin's brush with madness is what propels him from obscurity to success. And then there's the nameless author based on, no wait, IS Vandermeer himself, trapped in Ambergris who is convinced he was the one who created Ambergris.... I mean, what the hell?! The conceit to insert yourself into a story only seems distasteful to me. It does have Vandermeer's style of pondering fiction / reality line, the construction and writing of fiction, and lots of references to Vandermeer's related Ambergris work but it irritates me! This writer god-complex deal with author insertation is irrationally irritating to me. Though one of the non-traditional stories in the appendix, King Squid, the angry scientist's research and bibliography suddenly parting to reveal the disquieting biography of madness took me aback. Good god, even About the Author is a mix of fiction and reality. Vandermeer's audacity is amusing, charming, puzzling, and thematically suiting. But it's primarily art.   hide