City of Saints and Madmen

The Ambergris Series, Book 1

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. You hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you’ve ever visited - an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.

City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading - and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he has made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago.

By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness” reports invokes a universe within a puzzle box where you can lose - and find - yourself again.

©2002 Jeff VanderMeer (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Not my jam, but not the authors fault.

Bronson Pinchot's performance is consistent with his other work..spot on.
I did not care for the book, it seemed overly wordy for the sake of wordiness. (I just made up those terms) I neither hated or loved this title. I would also go further and say , it's on me for picking it,not on the author. I'd check out another Vandermeer book in the future.

Monotone reading

I know Bronson Pinchot is an award winning narrator. But jeez…I can’t even pay attention to the first story because it’s so monotone it sounds like a lecture in the most boring history class ever. Story is decent when I had to turn off audible and read the book.

Good book, okay narrator

I loved the book, though I wish this reading were more complete. My main problem is that the narrator occasionally takes on deeply unpleasant voices, both for certain characters and when reading footnote numbers, which is unfortunately quite distracting

good but odd

I was interested after going through the southern reach series and found this just as good but deffinetly an oddity. what made it all a fun jumble is this is based on the first edition of the book where as I followed along on kindle with the third edition which has more stories and a different format. the added confusion fit the style of the book that no one truly knows the whole story

one good short story in a vat of refuse

Don't bother with the big history book in the middle. it's a struggle to get through and none of the information there is reflected on in an interesting way.

Not good.

Hard to tell which was worse, the stories or the reader.

It felt like the reader was bored reading the book most of the time. And the stories came at you out of nowhere with no explanations for most thing like you just have to accept everything going on, which hard to do when you have no information or the semblance of background.

Don't read this. it's not worth it.

Unendurable...

I really hate to stop a book I've started, especially to criticise it. I feel you have to give it a chance to redeem itself. However, four hours was all I could take. Seemingly endless boring tedium punctuated with tasteless bouts of violent carnage, rape.and genocide. No characters I could possibly care about, no engaging story lines: just empty, vapid prose that erupts without warning into nauseating cruelty before dropping back into mind numbing tedium. By it's description, I had hoped to be starting a quirky, enjoyable new series. No such luck. Give this one a miss.