There is a city where fungi threatens to take over, devouring books and balconies and, sometimes, people; where power slips from one hand to the next with the ease of a slit throat, and streets are torn apart by the warring of rival publishing houses; where the subjugated indigenous people—the unsettling gray caps, or "mushroom dwellers"—lurk in shadows and beneath the ground.
Ambergris is a city of thieves and madmen, religious zealots and squid worshippers, heretics and historians. A city marked by violence, irrevocably shaped by its early history of colonialism and genocide and seemingly unable to move forward as it refuses to look back.
As always with stories this weird, what's perhaps most remarkable is how completely non-weird they are at their core. Sure, the inhabitants of this great city of squalor do participate in a Purge-like event every year called the Festival of the Freshwater Squid (Ambergris predates "The Purge," y'all), but what is this but a twisted reimagining of our own back gardens, the skeletons in our closets?
Genre fiction gets a bad rap when it comes to prose, but VanderMeer's language is beautiful. It's that literary stuff —Prose with a capital P. His descriptions of Ambergris are both incredibly vivid and also unimaginable—especially as the trilogy progresses and the city becomes more and more monstrous. VanderMeer loves playing with the limits of human understanding, and some things are apparently indescribable.
But despite the occasional, elusive description—and there are far less in Ambergris than in his more widely-read Southern Reach trilogy—there's so much depth and diversity to this world. Not only is Ambergris teeming with different forms of life and centuries of history, VanderMeer also plays around with form in such a way that his books feel like lost artifacts of the city.
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