There is a point, in any piece of art, when to add a further stroke would worsen it, making it too busy, destroying the careful balance of fluidity and gesture. Every artist knows this point exists, but for most of us, we only recognize it once it has passed, once we have already ruined it, and it becomes abundantly clear that we should have stopped a moment sooner. I like reading books City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1) BY Jeff VanderMeer where I feel my brain have an IQ orgasm.

A Fête Worse than Death: The Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It's an orgy of violence, murder and death resemblant of The Purge movies. His elements are all more overtly connected to the theme of Ambergris, a city that doesn’t seem to be as developed as the modern world, but still doesn’t seem to resemble any city from the past, apart from aspects of the Byzantine Empire.Unexpected Genre Change: The first two books are Lovecraftian horror. Finch is a more of a noirish detective novel with cyberpunk overtones. Excellent, excellent,” Dradin said, and, after a tic of hesitation—for he was much closer to penniless than penniful—he added, “but I shall need two,” and as the clerk’s eyebrows rose like the startled silhouettes of twin sea gulls upon finding that a fish within their grasp is actually a shark, he stuttered, “A-a-and a map. A map of the city. For the festival.” Also like Wolfe (and Banks again), there are some very cliche problems with character and point-of-view. Just like in bad Steampunk (meaning most of it), where authors completely forget the 'punk' and make all of their characters upper class and educated, VanderMeer doesn't give us any views from oppressed or minority classes. It's all about the difficulty of being a smart, middle-class white male artist (or scientist). Mad Artist: Besides the example of Martin Lake in the prior City of Saints and Madmen, Ambergris has many unstable artists. Janice, though just an art gallery owner, is herself an oddball and she collects artisanal prostheses for her leg stump (her first pegleg was the re-enactment of the opera house slaughter by the Kalif). Janice even tried making herself an art piece pegleg. Cold-Blooded Torture: The Partial, Thomas is torturing Finch for information including cutting off a finger and toe.

Human Resources: Duncan believes that the Gray Cap's machine is powered by the emotional turmoil of Ambergris's population and so the Gray Caps actually treat the humans there as a kind of herd animal. Cool Tank: Mentioned in passing but towards the late stages of the war, tanks have been developed with an extra turret mounted on the underbelly. The under-cannon's purpose is to blast Gray Caps underground enclaves. By the time they're in service it's too little, too late. Friday’s tally set the highest daily Covid-19 record in the US for the fifth time in 10 days, surpassing the previous day’s highest daily spike of 91,248 new cases. Much of the self-awareness takes the form of a jokey, silly tone, and much like in Iain Banks, it seems to be an ill fit for otherwise dire and serious stories. More than that, VanderMeer is constantly harping on it without much payoff--there are some truly clever pieces of wit, here or there, but for every one that hits its mark, we have to wade through ten others that don't.PDF / EPUB File Name: City_of_Saints_and_Madmen_-_Jeff_VanderMeer.pdf, City_of_Saints_and_Madmen_-_Jeff_VanderMeer.epub Eye Scream: Mazinkert I and any others who are taken alive while going into underground Cinsorium, have their eyes surgically removed. The line “Do you want to publish a book on Medium?” at the top of this story, under the main image, is an example of what it looks like, although I didn’t place a link on it. Features that I would remove a star or a half-star for: Some of the stories, especially An Early History of Ambergris, which I found slightly boring in places, are a bit too rambling and the author becomes a bit too indulgent with his "historian" conceit. Book Genre: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, New Weird, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction, Steampunk, Urban Fantasy, Weird Fiction