![]() ![]() Nestled next to the Vorrh is Essenwald, a colonial cut-out built to resemble a typical European city, down to the last stone. The forest is regarded with reverence and fear by both locals and colonials. It bends time it cannibalizes the memories of anyone who encroaches too long. (Now, does Catling, an English white man, perpetuate that? I don’t think so, but I’ll get to that…) Catling freights the Vorrh with its own mythos: It is eternal and endless. Catling took the name from Raymond Roussel’s tract, Impressions of Africa, which, from what I can tell, was mostly a madcap travelogue of sorts that helped foster the boilerplate Western notion of Africa as an alien place filled with exotic horrors and savagery. The easiest way to start talking about The Vorrh is to ask, ‘What is the Vorrh?’ The Vorrh is an ancient, dense forest set in the heart of the African continent, most likely the Congo, and rumored to enclose the Garden of Eden. ![]() Words like ‘genius’ and ‘sheer madness’ and ‘Jungian’ get jumbled like marbles in my mouth when I try to describe this book for friends. The blurb that accompanies it is woefully inadequate, though of no fault to the blurber, because how can a book like this be summed up in a few lines? (I’d love to hear about how Catling pitched this to his publishers…) I don’t think I’ve read a book like this in a while. A slippery, twisty book, it always seemed to be squirming out of reach. The Heart of Darkness meets Borges meets something that might have crawled out of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.īrian Catling’s The Vorrh-or as editor Tim O’Connell likes to put it, “VVVOOORRRRRHHH”���is an intoxicating novel that defies easy summary. It really was beautiful on many levels, to be sure, but it was more like a passing ship in the night followed by the screams of tortured men and the twang of a magical bow. That true love doesn't necessarily require slow vivisections. Sometimes, I was fully engaged, and other times, I was just catching myself wondering why I was sitting through these odd photography sex-bondage scenes or watching a truly horrific torture, and while I then reminded myself that this is considered a horror, I then wondered what all the other story bits were doing to improve or engage me in the horror sense.Īnd then I realized that it's all my fault with cultural expectations that equate love without amazing torture. So why not give it a higher rating just for all the interesting ideas and the near-juxtaposition and crossovers between the magical cyborg forest and a modern european town?īecause the story was only able to grab me fitfully. What I did get was quite a few truly beautiful and evocative scenes of robots in a time and memory bending endless forest, an adventure with a bow made of a violently killed woman, lots of exploration in the real world during the early days of photography, socialites, mind-doctors, and a truly enormous amount of graphic and violent sex, sex, sex, and strangely enough, it's mostly the women being violent. I wanted to expect lyrical language, and I did get a lot of lyrical language, and I wanted to expect some rather interesting ideas and concepts put together in a poetic way, all the while getting immersed in fantasy and science fiction and a truly heaping helping of the dark stuff, enough to consider the novel as a true horror. I think I was really prepping myself up for this one just a little too much. While fact and fiction blend, the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance under the will of the Vorrh. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel, heiress Sarah Winchester, and photographer Edward Muybridge. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast-perhaps endless-forest. Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called “a phosphorescent masterpiece” and “the current century's first landmark work of fantasy.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |