The latest in World Fantasy Award-winner Vandermeer's Ambergris cycle (Shriek: An Afterword, 2008, etc.) pits a dogged detective against . . . just about everyone. An upstart species known as the gray caps has emerged as the power in the once-renowned city of Ambergris, now a crumbling place of decay and despair. Blame the vengeful gray caps for that. As the Ambergrisian underclass, they eked out a subterranean existence, manifestly in thrall to human superiority. But six years ago, the Rising placed Ambergris totally in the gray caps' tyrannical hands. Now Finch, a detective, finds himself reporting to a being who speaks to underlings in often impenetrable clicks and whistles, though no one in their bare-bones police station would risk disobeying these commands. The bizarre double murder of a gray cap and a human shakes up the status quo. Finch's boss seems intensely interested in the crime. Does it have something to do with the mysterious Lady in Blue, elusive leader of a growing counterinsurgency? Soon other intensely interested parties appear with a multiplicity of arcane agendas, to all of which Finch somehow seems key and in all of which his best interests are clearly not paramount. Only for the faithful; anyone else will find the plot opaque and largely incomprehensible.
Editor’s note: The Nebula Awards are often described as the Academy Awards of SF/F literature. Like the Oscar, the Nebula is voted on by the members of an industry trade organization who are the professional peers of the award nominees. For the Nebula, that is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. There are six […]
Biology, especially on a smaller scale, is sometimes completely indistinguishable from horror. The real world has given us ravenous insects with absolutely terrifying eating and breeding habits and plants that trap prey for days while digesting it alive, amid numerous other unsettling marvels. But among the most unnerving natural phenomena are fungi. There are mushrooms […]