City of Saints and Madmen

Rating:
Summary: Dark and Sweet -- like Puppet Theatre drenched in honey!
Review: VanderMeer is one of the few modern fantasy writers worth reading. His imagination is enormous and sombre, cool and elusive as a chilled shadow, and no less fluid. It is a pleasure to read VanderMeer, because his tales are visual and yet musical, neither the word nor the image dominating the other. This book condenses and serves much of what he has done in recent years, and it is a satisfying platter, with a taste strange but sweet, worthy of a lick at the corners of the lips and a dreamfilled slumber afterwards. Comparisons are odious, we all know that, and yet I am reminded of some of the great French fabulists when I read VanderMeer. I never exaggerate. This book is utterly marvellous!

Rating:
Summary: A flemish work of exquisite texture
Review: Vandermeer's words are beautiful hues in a Flemish painting. Ambergris is any town in all its colours,and one cannot admire enough the splendid tapestry of a strange alternate world.Vandermeer has truly a Byzantine mind. I recommend this book to all who wants something original,for a change, something voluptuously dark like Storm Constantine at her best,something that's not so biologically "yucky" as China Mieville's "Bas Lag" ("La-bas",really!) novels.Vandermeer's stories are a refined work of art.