Two bodies are found in an apartment, a human man and a greycap whose body has been sliced in half – the legs are nowhere to be found. Except of course in the world of Ambergris and the head of Jeff Vandermeer there can never be anything as straight forward as hardboiled noir. So, Shriek, for example, despite moving the Ambergris history on a little bit and being every bit as weird, wild and horrific at times as City of Saints & Madmen was his romance (it could even have been his historical romance) – and Finch? Finch is his hardboiled noir. From the beginning, Vandermeer has been the sort of writer who sees his books in terms of both narrative and genre. A good long while ago now, I interviewed Jeff Vandermeer who at the time was in the midst of publicising his majestic City of Saints & Madmen, a sort of House of Leaves-esque cornucopia centred on the fictional city of Ambergris, a city at once thrilling, unknowable, mysterious and utterly real, in which a century long internecine war was going on between the residents and creatures known as greycaps (who looked a bit mushroomy and had the ability to wield mushrooms and reduce flesh and blood to spores that blew in the wind) – and Jeff talked me through where he saw his envisioned Ambergris cycle going, touching on both Shriek: An Afterword and Finch, each of which have now appeared.
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