Rating: 
Summary: It was OK
Review: I dont' want to be harsh on this book because it is quality fantasy. In other words, it's not of the epic fantasy genre. The biggest problem was that I never fully grasped Ambergris. Its like Ambergris was a giant painting and I only saw small slices of it. It feels more like a hastilly published companion piece to a successful novel that takes place in Ambergris. The stories themselves didn't stand out to me. Martin Lake was my favorite story but I found it predictable in some ways and thus a let down. Drabin, in Love was OK but not exceptional. And Mr X was poor. The early history was good but it needed something more to go with it than the 3 other stories.
Rating:
Summary: It was OK
Review: I dont' want to be harsh on this book because it is quality fantasy. In other words, it's not of the epic fantasy genre. The biggest problem was that I never fully grasped Ambergris. Its like Ambergris was a giant painting and I only saw small slices of it. It feels more like a hastilly published companion piece to a successful novel that takes place in Ambergris. The stories themselves didn't stand out to me. Martin Lake was my favorite story but I found it predictable in some ways and thus a let down. Drabin, in Love was OK but not exceptional. And Mr X was poor. The early history was good but it needed something more to go with it than the 3 other stories.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Your Usual Kettle of Squid
Review: I have no doubt that this uncategorizable collection will emerge as one of the finest (and most unusual) books of the year. This beautifully-produced hardcover edition contains a wealth of new material not included in the trade paperback, including the magnificent weird horror of "The Cage" and the delightfully strange mock-academic monograph "King Squid." You're not likely to read another book this year that ranges so effortlessly from horror to farce, all seasoned with a sly postmodernism that is playful rather than pedantic.This is fantastic fiction for people who like Nabokov as well as Tolkien, Borges as well as Lovecraft. Smart, funny, self-aware, wonderfully imagined, and beautifully written, this book is a marvelous example of what fantasy can aspire to and what it can achieve.
Rating: 
Summary: Mostly madmen
Review: I have read only the short novel DRADIN IN LOVE which forms part of this book set in the city of Ambergris. The hero Dradin is an irrationally optimistic ex-missionary who against all odds survives - though not unscathed - his love affair with a woman seen in a distant window. The basic plot was used by E. T. A. Hoffman, but the locale and characters and actions are much better done here than in the translations of Hoffman I have read - though the movie version done in England in the 40s is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Weird City Makes Good Reading
Review: I picked this book up because the author wrote an interesting article on Angela Carter another web site. I was not disappointed. There are four short stories here, that when added together in this book, create the wild tale of this unbelievable city. If you like the likes of Angela Carter, Alasdair Grey, or Philip Pullman you will like Jeff Vandermeer.
Rating:
Summary: Rare and wonderful
Review: If you like E.A.Poe, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, the Jack Vance of Dying Earth, the Michael Moorcock of Gloriana and Dancers at the End of Time, the M.John Harrison of In Viriconium, the J.G.Ballard of Vermilion Sands -- you'll be able to add this to your shelf of favorites for reading and re-reading. Atmospheric, dreamlike, intelligent. This is one of the very best of the literary fantasy writers. VanderMeer's rep. has been growing apace and this is a great introduction to his strange world of Ambergris. A fine, original work.
Rating:
Summary: Amazingly fantastic
Review: It has been a long time since I've been this excited about being introduced to an author. Indeed, VanderMeer reminds me of the last author to get me this excited, Gene Wolfe. VanderMeer displays the same fine mastery and appreciation for the language as Wolfe, delights in weaving atypical plots as Wolfe does, and for making unexceptional people the focus of a story -- again, as Wolfe does. Now, if you haven't read any Gene Wolfe (you should do that as soon as you get done with this book), let me explain what that means: pure and absolute delight. Every piece (and it is hard to determine how many there actually are) is stunning in its complexity and richness. Prose like this comes along about once a decade, and I'm glad to be participating in it. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Amazingly fantastic
Review: It has been a long time since I've been this excited about being introduced to an author. Indeed, VanderMeer reminds me of the last author to get me this excited, Gene Wolfe. VanderMeer displays the same fine mastery and appreciation for the language as Wolfe, delights in weaving atypical plots as Wolfe does, and for making unexceptional people the focus of a story -- again, as Wolfe does. Now, if you haven't read any Gene Wolfe (you should do that as soon as you get done with this book), let me explain what that means: pure and absolute delight. Every piece (and it is hard to determine how many there actually are) is stunning in its complexity and richness. Prose like this comes along about once a decade, and I'm glad to be participating in it. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Perfectly realized body of work
Review: Its difficult to know where to begin describing Jeff VanderMeer's remarkable "City of Saints and Madmen"; with it's interweaving plot lines cutting across stories, one is never sure where one section begins and another leaves off. Moreover, the world of Ambergris is so fully realized, and yet so willfully fanciful, one can never quite find one's footing. In the hands of a less skilled writer, all of this would add up to a bizarre mish-mash, but VanderMeer somehow weaves it together into one unified work. Moreover, this is a book for booklovers; the arrangement is a work of art in and of itself. The use of fonts, illustrations, footnotes, even the binding adds to the illusion. The cover itself is remarkable, as it contains both a short story and a hilarious fictional biography of the author. VanderMeer and his publisher have succeeded admirably in creating a volume that harkens to an era when books were not only repositories of writing, but valuable for what surrounded the writing. And what writing it is! VanderMeer flashes descriptive powers that border on the hallucinogenic; the pages absolutely drip with the essence of Ambergris. From the giant squid that inhabit the River Moth, to the serenely vicious Grey Caps, the author has produced a world that is both bizarrely foreign and completely believable at the same time. One of the keys to this success is VanderMeer's wise decision to left some things unsaid; for every piece of information about Ambergris that he doles out, he holds back ten, leaving the reader craving more, but also making his world believable because of its very complexity. In this regard (at least), he is the equal of China Mieville, who has likewise created a world that is both foreign and familiar. As for the stories themselves, I could spend the entire review on any one of them, but given the constraints of the medium, I'll just touch on some of the highlights. First off is the cover story, which I mentioned above. Although necessarily brief, it immediately introduces the reader to VanderMeer's talent with descriptive phrases like "muscular water". Moreover, it reveals two key things about VanderMeer's writing. The first is that while Ambergris may be fanciful, it is still every bit as brutal (and as beautiful) as our own. The second is VanderMeer's fascinating penchant for self-reference; he seems both fascinated and puzzled by his creation. The result is a desire to nurture it, but a fear of being defined, or even consumed, by it. Next is "Dradin in Love" which reveals Ambergris in all its glory and horror. Detailing the angst of the eponymous Dradin, it is by turns touching and horrifying. This is by no means a conventional love story; its conclusion questions whether benign illusion is preferable to brutal truth. As with most of these stories, there are illuminating facts dropped elsewhere in the book, particularly one about Dradin's time as a jungle missionary. Next is a fictional history that details the founding of Ambergris and which is perhaps my favorite story. It is incredibly detailed, richly textured and deftly written. VanderMeer uses this "historical" approach to write a story that is maddeningly incomplete, yet which provides the foundation for much of the rest of the book. After that is "The Transformation of Martin Lake" which is perhaps the strongest story in terms of message. In it, VanderMeer seems to be commenting on the futility of not just criticism, but history itself. Essentially, since all human action is informed by the mind, and since the mind of another is inherently unknowable, there is a sort of transitive effect whereby all human action, and hence history, is at best a confused muddle. At worst, it is either an ignorant or willful sham perpetrated by those with an agenda or those too stupid to interpret even the limited snapshot into other lives that we are granted. The second half of the book falls under the bailiwick of "The Strange Case of Mr. X" which is an account of VanderMeer's stay in an Ambergrisian mental hospital. It sounds horribly contrived, but VanderMeer pulls it off nicely. Each story in this latter half is ostensibly an item found in the author's cell after his puzzling disappearance. But far from being distinct, they rather from a whole that can only be appreciated once one has read all the way through them. They range from an hysterical monograph on the King Squid that inhabit the River Moth to an encoded story. What they all have in common is a bizarre symbiosis that offers insight into each story at the most surprising moments. For example, the aforementioned squid study rewards the reader of the footnotes with a rather poignant glimpse at the "author's" life. Likewise, the coded story isn't just a gimmick; the rather gruesome circumstances of its origin mandate a brutal decoding that mirror the words revealed on the page. In the end, there's not much more that I can except that "City of Saints and Madmen" is not only one of the most beautifully rendered books I have encountered, but one of the most supremely written. Not since reading Bradbury's collections of short stories have I encountered a collection that feeds off itself so effectively. It reads like a novel even as it sucks the reader into maddeningly brief glimpses of Ambergris. This is a must read, and ranks at the top of the list of books I've read in the last year. Jake Mohlman
Rating: 
Summary: Fungus Among Us
Review: 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.
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