First Nicholas goes looking for Quin and finds him. Then Nicola, his twin, goes looking for Nicholas, and he finds her. Then Shadrach, Nicola's lover, goes looking for Nicola and then for Quin. It's all set in the city of Veniss, wrapped in a wall a mile thick to keep the desert out. Decaying, decadent, fragmenting, inward-looking, Veniss is one of the last, lingering enclaves of humanity, and it's sitting on top of a vast, hellish underground labyrinth where Quin rules supreme.

Quin is a genetecist and mad scientist who has created intelligent meerkats with human arms and blue, multi-limbed ganeshas. His kingdom is packed to the rafters with grotesqueries and abominations and left-over atrocities. It's Shadrach who, like Orpheus, must venture into this hideous underworld for love and revenge, with a meerkat's head tied to his arm, to find the man who made it all.

This is a short, dense, structurally clever book that might be unbearable if it wasn't so well written. Vandermeer makes poetry out of the horrors and the odd flash of beauty, and there's plenty of conceptual wit, staggering visions and flashes of beauty to keep the reader engaged. It's hard not to emerge from this book feeling a ghostly fraction of the transformations undergone by the characters, and look at the world and people and other books a little differently. It's a mad book about a mad world. Recommended.