EDITOR’S NOTE: Another contribution from Catherynne M. Valente’s blog Goblin Market, syndicated here for your pleasure. Waitasec… giant squid? Sentient fungi? Where do I sign up?

City of Saints Cover

A quick plug here and a promise to get to the meat of Goblin Market as soon as possible–deadlines have eaten my life and rock stars have kidnapped my son.

But I love this book so much that I just have to link to its final and triumphant wide release–in a new Bantam paperback. The story of how COSAM came to be is rather harrowing–not to be read by those just starting out in the literary world, as it will freeze your young blood right in your veins. Thus, all banners and trumpets to this final incarnation!

This is something like a review, but really, it’s a love letter to Vandermeer’s marvelous, frightening, beautiful creation: the great city of Ambergris. I pretend no objectivity. This book has a permanent place on my recommendation list.

Dear Ambergris:

Not only have you the greatest city-name since Truth-or-Consequences, New Mexico, but you are ruled by an abiding terror of squid and mushrooms, and that makes you dear.

Since I first ventured–hesitantly? Well, yes, there is, after all, the river-squid, and rarely in literature do giant squid bode well for nubile young maidens such as myself–into you, I have been confronted by marvels at every turn, not the least of which being the inversion, perversion, and glorification of history itself, and the deconstruction of deconstruction. Is there anything your streets and alleys cannot encompass? I think not. From Martin Lake’s paintings and his secret revealed, to the grey caps (yes, dear Reader, these are ravenous anthropomorphic mushrooms, and that should be enough right there to lure you past the tentacled river) and the horrifying Silence–whose secrets I am literally dying to know–to the truly delightful Hoegbotton Guide to your admittedly checkered past, which has few secrets besides the cause of its author’s indigestion, there is enough in Ambergris to exhaust a lifetime’s curiosity.

As long as you bring your cryptographer’s manual, a bathing suit, and make sure to be in tow for the Festival–I hear it’s a hoot.

I love you, Ambergris. But please don’t touch me like that–I might not survive it if you loved me back.

Love,
CMV