Jeff VanderMeer - Finch

VanderMeer's Finch is... well, it's Farewell, My Lovely if Philip Marlowe worked for the pod-people while snacking on Alice's Wonderland mushrooms. It's The Name of the Rose if Sean Connery's character was a conglomeration of self-aware spores instead of a medieval monk. It's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold if all the agents were also testing psychedelic drugs and hung out in a postapocalyptic Emerald City instead of Eastern Europe. More importantly, Finch is a really good book-exciting, dark, suspenseful, and wonderfully weird.

-Tad Williams, internationally best-selling author

I can't remember ever reading a book like Finch. Audacious in technique, and extravagant in imagination, it has the rare quality of making the macabre poignant. In the midst of a disturbed and disturbing narrative landscape, Jeff VanderMeer gives us deeply sympathetic characters-especially Finch himself-who inspire us to care about their flawed and tyrannized world. I'm impressed.

-Stephen R. Donaldson, New York Times best-selling author

Jeff VanderMeer's stunning Finch opens with a claustrophobic interrogation and with a reluctant detective forced to solve a double murder. Finch quickly expands beyond genres and beyond the edges of Ambergris-its complex history, its many apocalypses-while remaining a deeply affecting and personal story. Told in a pitch-perfect voice and steeped in the unrelenting menace authentic to the best works of noir, Finch is a wonderful, sad, brutal, and beautiful book. A tour de force.

-Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep

An uncompromising and boldly executed dark fantasy novel that is as atmospheric as the best noir. Full of raw intensity, Finch explores a brutal and believable phantasmagorical world.

-Tom Piccirilli, author of Shadow Season and The Cold Spot

Trapped in a city of decomposing histories and an even more moldering future, John Finch could be the hero of a Martin Cruz Smith thriller, if that writer had taken to eating magic mushrooms. Jeff VanderMeer's Finch presents the most frighteningly oppressive setting since 1984, in a feverishly imaginative blend of pulp fiction and high art. I could scarcely tear myself away from this, one of the best novels I've read in years.

-Jeffrey Thomas, author of Deadstock

With the razor-edged prose and bloody grit of noir, Finch works its way to the core mystery of the city and gives us, ultimately, nothing short of the apotheosis of Ambergris. I loved it!

-Hal Duncan, author of Vellum: The Book of All Hours and Escape from Hell!

When all is said and done Finch will be among the best books of the year. From the fantasy perspective Jeff VanderMeer has introduced a new language into the lexicon with a clipped, telegraphic, hardboiled, James Ellroy-esque writing style that he bends to his will. From the crime side of things he has created a new noir language that retains the atmospherics of the past and weds them with the throbbing claustrophobia of the city. Not only is Finch one of the best books that I've read in years but it is also the book I've been waiting to read for years without knowing it.

-Brian Lindenmuth, mystery columnist

Finch is a revolution disguised as a police procedural, an unholy wedding of hard-boiled Hammett noir and Ballardian catastrophic landscape, presided over by the ghost of Philip K. Dick. In Finch the gun VanderMeer hung over the mantelpiece in City of Saints and Madmen is finally fired-with apocalyptic, revelatory consequences for the city of Ambergris and its people, human and gray cap alike. As in the best noir detective stories, the double murder at the center of Finch is only one loop in a much greater knot tied in the world itself; and as in the best apocalypses, if unraveling that knot resolves many of the world's great mysteries, it does so only to open the way to a new world wider and weirder than anything the old world's inhabitants could have imagined.

-David Moles, finalist for the John W. Campbell Award

Jeff VanderMeer's hard-boiled detective novel plunges readers into [a] vividly realized world of invasion, betrayal, and intrigue. A noir tale with flashes of Chandler and The Thing, Finch is gripping from the first page to the last. Stark and moving-it's amazing.

-Meg Gardiner, Edgar-winning author of The Memory Collector

Finch is a police procedural unlike anything you've read. Like Ed McBain on acid, the story flows with wild images, sharp dialogue and energy that keep you turning the pages. John Finch is a troubled cop in a troubled time and a troubled place. If that doesn't make for a great story, nothing does. Jeff VanderMeer shines as he creates a world and crime in Finch, that will enthrall any reader.

-James 0. Born, author of Burn Zone and Field of Fire

Fungal noir. Steampunk delirium. Paranoid spy thriller, quite literally, on 'shrooms. There's enough nightmare and grit in Finch to stock any urban fantasy fan's darkest imaginings for years to come. But VanderMeer's visionary brand of imagining is closing on Burroughs at his best. Devastated postwar cityscapes, desperate temporary allegiances of the soul, and creatures dragged up out of the worst withdrawal hallucination you can possibly imagine-like something Len Deighton might have written at the top of his game, if he'd dropped a tab or six beforehand. A clear signal, if one were ever needed, that [VanderMeer] remains one of modern fantasy's most original and fearless pioneers.

-Richard K. Morgan