Errata by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 5/5 cats
I am writing this sitting in the waterlogged lobby of a rotting, half-finished condominium complex. I am surrounded by cavorting freshwater seals and have two pearl-handled revolvers in my lap, a bottle of vodka in my right hand, a human body in the freezer in the kitchens behind me, and a rather large displaced rockhopper penguin staring me in the face.
i loved this story.
it is a story that is admittedly not for every reader—you have to appreciate the fun to be had in bewilderment and the jarring, unsettling feeling of being led somewhere and then abandoned, of going back and rereading to find extra clues, the metafictional name-dropping and framing device, and the deliberately mangled storytelling mode like a spookier Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
the style is what i like the most. at one point, vandermeer (vandermeer the author? vandermeer the character?) refers to blackpool, england as a town, “that seemed like a combination of hell and a carnival,” and that’s not a bad description for the way this story is written. it’s like a john frusciante song, where it absolutely should not work—the complicated, delicate lacework of the guitar and the vocals either goofy or tortured shriek, hell and a carnival, the crazytown stuff in this story and the way he’s able to corral it into just this side of sense-making—it’s kind of a thrill.
and as tempted as i am to spend the afternoon picking away at it and obsessing over it and seeing what i can see within it, those days are over and i have promised myself to limit my free tor short reviews to SHORT reviews, because if i get any further behind, i will likely end up at lake baikal myself, and—seals and penguin pals aside—i do not wish to live this story.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2009/01/15/errata/
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