The Tombstone Guide to City of Saints & MadmenThe book lay on the weathered coffee table, pages spilling loosely from its tattered, well-worn binding, a suggestion of mould dotting the cardboard of the inside jacket, close to the spine. The following elements were (barely) contained within:• A beautifully written fantasy/horror novel, complete with intricate world-building, playful (indeed masterful), use of the English language, inexorable creeping dread and a strong sense of whimsy. Comparisons to Lovecraft, Mieville, Peake, Moorcock, Pratchett or Gaiman would not be unfounded.• A highly sophisticated work of post-modern metafiction which uses a range of fictional documents (psychiatric reports, magazine articles, family histories, letters, essays, bibliographies etc) to construct a multidimensional collage, full of hundreds of fully cross-referenced stories-within-stories. Use of the word, “literary”, would not be unfounded, however meaningless that term may be.• An insidious web of conspiracy and secret societies, reaching out and attaching itself to inhabitants of the real world and, inevitably, engulfing the reader. Reference to Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy, in describing this aspect, would be unavoidable.• A living creature which has the power to transform and to be transformed by the act of being read. VanderMeer is a character himself, but as he says, "It's not a one-to-one relationship”. He is all of the characters, therefore would not also the reader be an integral part of the story, changing the story, perhaps changed by the story…?• A small purple mushroom with a white stem.A Note About The Cover Design: This reader would have preferred to see a beautifully lavish cover designed by one of the several wonderful artists whose works graced the interior pages of City of Saints & Madmen. In my humble opinion, the paperback cover design is not suited to either the feel of the story or the style(s) of the other artwork. It is definitely not suited to having enthusiastic readers flick back and forth between various appendices without the book rapidly disintegrating in their hands.Dr. R