If their prophets are only fools and madmen

And now a word from our . . . all right, I don't have sponsors. But read this anyway.

There's a book called City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer, that sits here on a shelf of books so archaic (at least in this apartment) that they're still alphabetized. Its cover looks like an Eastern Orthodox ikon as essayed by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Breughel the Elder; it contains four stories, "Dradin, in Love," "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris by Duncan Shriek," "The Transformation of Martin Lake," "The Strange Case of X," and an introduction by Michael Moorcock. In 2001, I ordered this collection on the sole strength of its cover art and a piece of bizarre entitled "The Florida Freshwater Squid: An Overview of History, Habits, and Human Interaction (including such related phenomena as the annual Festival of the Freshwater Squid)" that I'd just read at Fantastic Metropolis. While waiting for the book to arrive, I looked up stories like "Flight Is For Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over," "A Heart for Lucretia," and "Quin's Shanghai Circus." I'd never heard of Cosmos, or Prime, or Wildside. I'd barely heard of Jeff VanderMeer. I wasn't quite sure what I was getting, but I was curious to find out.

What I got was, perhaps, the stories that might have been produced if Mervyn Peake and Vladimir Nabokov had stayed up till dawn on a hallucinogenic bender and then sat down to collaborate, with critical input from H.P. Lovecraft and Angela Carter. Except that the stories didn't read anything like that. They read entirely like themselves: like Jeff VanderMeer. And where two weeks ago I hadn't known a gray cap from a living saint or a freshwater squid from a fungal delirium, now I wanted to know what more on earth Jeff VanderMeer had written, so that I could read it. When City of Saints and Madmen was reissued / reprinted / reincarnated as a seven-story hardcover, I lamented for my book budget and the embedded story I would never get a chance to read.

This is now a problem of the past. After any number of trials, travails, and successes in the small press, City of Saints and Madmen is now available as a trade paperback from Bantam Books:



Which is pretty cool, if you think about it. The Bantam edition even comes with all sorts of neat stuff online, not to mention illustrations—which my older edition certainly didn't have. Talk to the author if you don't believe me. In the meantime, I'll be checking out the Yale Bookstore. I have strange and fantastical stories to catch up on. And this time, I can afford them!