This goes up as an all-time favourite. Explaining it to a friend would probably make me look like someone in front of a murder board, jumping around trying to explain my logic and conclusions.

For starters, each book is completely different at a structural level. From a straight up (more-or-less) typical (and disturbing) narrative that fills out the idea and character that is Ambergris the city, an ostensible missionary now steeped in the New York-esk underbelly of the city develops an infatuation with a woman in a store window, and proceeds to lose himself to his feelings completely. Not what you’d expect from a fantasy novel at all, feeling New Weird esk very much.

But then it becomes apparent that it’s just a part of the larger story, which happens many times throughout the trilogy. One section is a guide book to Ambergris with extensive footnotes inserted regarding history, and makes it a very long and literary… thing? There’s a narrative of the exploring of underbelly of the city, in the caverns where the fantasy creatures dwell. There’s a forward, again written in a post modern way with lots of footnotes, only not by the author of the forward and the forward being more of a memoir as it proceeds. A very short story that appears as an interview of a pseudo Vandermeer (self insert?) author, who appears to be suffering from hallucinations of Ambergris in New York. It’s wraps up with a heavily modern noir detective story, again managing to make all the other seemingly disparate threads feel highly relevant and even more interesting, increasing re-readability.

Somehow, the whole thing ties together perfectly and the prose work is absolutely my type: proficient, poetic, high specificity, and, while semi mercurial in its mode of shaping to the various narrators, manages to keep a dark-fantasy noir-esk tone. It ramps up and down but builds into an absolute force at the end. It really is just a stunning and completely captivating bit of work. I already know I’ll re read it some time, and lament having got to it so late. It sat in my shelf for literal years before I picked it up. Don’t be like me~