3.75—Inexplicable. No idea how to talk about or react to this book at all. It's dense, as much of Vandermeer's writing is, and for this reason and others quite difficult to get into; the first story is a good introduction to themes, but a poor introduction to the intentions and world of this book. I wound up loving the second story (though while reading it I felt intense trepidation) and thereafter read compulsively, if slowly. It took a lot of concentration to understand what this book is doing. I thought the payoff of the effort was worth it until the final story, which I am still figuring out my feelings on.

It plays heavily with form, among other things. The second chapter/story is a textbook-style history of Ambergris, while the fourth draws regular excerpts from another in-world history text; the two texts are written by in-world siblings. The book also functions as a metatext. What unites the stories is that they are all about men going insane in Ambergris, and the five stories overlap in some fashion. The second story is the first chronologically—The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris, by Duncan Shriek. It makes clear that Ambergris functions as a post-colonization city-state, whose indigenous residents are humanoid mushrooms who were systematically killed and relocated by incoming human settlers. The "mushroom-dwellers" recur on and off throughout the text, which occupies several very distinct periods in Ambergris history. The book returns to the effects of this colonization, namely the lately-marginalized existence of mushroom-dwellers in the city; and how, under their very strange and systematic revenge and reappropriation efforts, they make their presence known in the city and to the madness-tending human protagonists.

God, it's a fucking weird book. Ambergris is a weird city. The worldbuilding, and the tome's metatextual tendencies, are the most interesting parts of it. It reminds me of gaslight fantasy in a sideways sort of way: motor vehicles are a new invention in Ambergris, tenements are the main housing, and yet the things that I dislike about gaslight fantasy—its tendency to the twee and the aesthetic—are made fairly horrific. It is a horror novel. It contains grisly and at times graphic depictions of violence. This, coupled with the themes of colonization, made it an incredibly entrancing world to get to know. I don't believe this combination of 19th-century European-inspired fantasy setting and colonization are a mistake; there are missionaries, soldiers, merchants and traders, politicians and artists—all of whom turn a blind eye to the horrors around them, worldly and otherworldly, because this is Ambergris. We know, from the second chapter, upon which it is founded. The horror is a fact of it. Goddamnit. I think I really liked this book.

The last chapter is a bit of a departure from what the first four were doing and reminded me considerably of King, particularly my simultaneous reread of The Talisman. There is a writer who is, he believes, held captive by the darkness within himself and an allusion to the idea that people exist both in our world and in Ambergris, to which a connection of some kind is strongly implied. Ah shit! I like this, too—our author believes he is American, which of course, it's heavily implied, is simply the other side of Ambergris' coin, as horrific as Ambergris. You love to write a review and have the book click for you midway through. 

This is one of those I know I will enjoy heavily on a reread. I will also say that, while dense, I had an intense appreciation for the prose throughout. Really looking forward to continuing in this series and learning more about Ambergris, though I'm of no illusions that I will find any of these books a particularly breezy read.