Jeff Vandermeer writes true terror better than any other writer I know. His creepy first novel, Veniss Underground, is a surreal nightmare punctuated by episodes of shocking and grotesque violence. The book takes place in the far future, at a time when biological manipulation has been taken to its extremes. The mysterious Quin is the widely acknowledged master of "the living art," and in the book's opening act, a young, idealistic man named Nick goes searching for Quin.

Of course, what he finds is not exactly what he had expected. The same can be said for this book. After a hideously confusing (if gorgeously written) Part I, it quickly becomes apparent that, for all of the book's initial weirdness, it in fact possesses the structure of a fairly conventional mystery: Where did Nick go, and what happened to him?

The setting in which the mystery takes place, though, is anything but conventional. Vandermeer somehow evokes an entire world and an entire society with only a few choice details. In fact, you end up knowing very little about the bizarre city of Veniss, but strangely, you feel that you know it much more than you actually do.

Vandermeer is a superb writer. If you told another author to write three scenes about a woman and her sentient meerkat butler, you'd get trash. With Vandermeer, however, you get an absolutely peerless dozen pages that veer from menace to pathos to bewildered understanding--perhaps my favorite couple of pages in the entire novel. (The image of the meerkat with the fiddler crabs in his paws will stay with me forever.) Vandermeer has an ear for the telling detail and the precisely appropriate atmosphere. Within a few sentences he can write spot-on about heartbreak, violence, tenderness, and horror. His writing is always right; and, on occasion, it's brilliant.

Veniss Underground is very dark fantasy. It is also, despite its extreme brevity, a myth, with strong overtones of Orpheus, Dante, and other epic journeys into darkness. If there is any part of this novel that is disappointing, it is that in the end the self-consciously mythic story arc feels like a let down compared to the astonishing writing that surrounds it.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu