Veniss Underground

Starred review from February 3, 2003
HIn his masterful first novel, VanderMeer (City of Saints & Madmen) sets a dark, phantasmagoric tale in and beneath a decadent, far-future city where Living Artists craft monstrous works of biological art and genetically enhanced meerkats plot to make humanity obsolete. The story is told from three viewpoints, that of Nicholas, a Living Artist not quite talented enough to succeed; his more pragmatic, vat-grown twin sister, Nicola; and her former lover, the unsavory Shadrach, who has survived a childhood lived in the dangerous levels beneath the city and now operates above ground as an agent for Quin, the world's greatest Living Artist and the perverted master of much that is evil within the city of Veniss. When Nicholas's apartment is robbed and the tools of his trade are stolen, he goes to Shadrach and begs an introduction to Quin, hoping to find employment and resurrect his near moribund career. Alas, he fails to follow Shadrach's directions and soon disappears beneath the city, where he undergoes a wonder-filled journey that echoes Dante's Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch, while also paying homage to the work of such genre masters as Cordwainer Smith and Edward Whittemore. VanderMeer's eye for just the right gruesome detail brings his nightmarish landscapes and bizarre, partially human creatures alive in astonishing profusion. Not for the faint of heart, the story packs a strong emotional wallop. (Apr. 4)Forecast:
Locus recently chose VanderMeer as one of the 10 best short story writers working in the SF/Fantasy field today. The release of his first novel is bound to generate a lot of buzz—and sales that verge on mainstream numbers.

March 15, 2023
A new edition of VanderMeer's first novel, which set a template for much speculative strangeness to come. Today VanderMeer is celebrated for twisting and stretching the familiar tropes of science fiction in taffylike ways and at epic scale, most famously in his Southern Reach trilogy. His debut novel, first published in 2003, is more compressed but blurs themes and styles in familiar VanderMeer-ian ways, combining cyberpunk, horror, noir, and myth while remaining remarkably cohesive. At the story's center is Shadrach Begolem, who is on a mission to rescue his beloved, Nicola, who's been kidnapped by Quin, a malevolent and powerful figure. Deep in the underground layers beneath the city of Veniss, Quin maintains a compound of humanity held in a "live storage" organ bank. The mood is dystopic when it's not actively stomach-churning; aboveground, fish are "three-eyed and so scaly as to be coated in armor," and belowground, "children were plucking the eyeballs out [of discarded donors] as if searching for shells on the beach." Accompanying Shadrach on this crusade is a meerkat (or, rather the disembodied head of one), the creature of choice for cyborg assistance in this milieu. Yet for all the grotesque, uncanny strangeness that VanderMeer conjures up, he doesn't lose sight of the love story at its center, playing with the themes of Orpheus descending to Hades to rescue his beloved Euridyce. And though later novels are more user-friendly, his audacity here is appealing; as VanderMeer himself rightly puts it in an afterword, the book is "a mutt, a mongrel, but, to me, oddly beautiful nonetheless." Also included are a praise-filled introduction by science-fiction writer Charles Yu and a short story set in the same universe: "Balzac's War." A worthy start to an innovative writer's career.

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