Short Story Collection: City of Saints and Madmen

Overview

City of Saints and Madmen is a short story collection by Jeff VanderMeer that introduces the bizarre, layered city of Ambergris. The book gathers interconnected tales, novellas, faux documents, and fragments that together form a mosaic of a single place, its streets, its politics, its myths, and its inhabitants. VanderMeer offers an invitation to a place unlike any ordinary setting, one where the boundaries between official history and rumor, human and fungal, reality and fabrication, constantly blur.
The collection's tone shifts from slyly comic to unnervingly strange, and its structure encourages readers to move back and forth through perspectives rather than follow a single linear plot. While certain pieces stand out as longer narratives, the real achievement is the cumulative worldbuilding: recurring names, places, and events echo across forms until Ambergris feels like a lived, dangerous city.

Structure and Style

Rather than a conventional anthology, the book assembles varied literary modes: first-person confessions, faux-academic essays, travel-guide entries, police reports, and mythic retellings. VanderMeer often uses unreliable narrators and meta-textual devices, footnotes, editorial intrusions, and fabricated citations, to give Ambergris the texture of a contested archive. This pastiche of forms not only entertains but also implicates the reader in parsing truth from fiction.
One of the longest pieces, a novella that combines grotesque romance with political intrigue, exemplifies how VanderMeer elongates a single story into a citywide event. Shorter vignettes and invented documents act as connective tissue, offering different angles on the same incidents and deepening the sense that histories and secrets lie layered beneath Ambergris's streets.

Setting and Characters

Ambergris feels like a character in itself: a port city with decaying grandeur, a mercantile past, and an underlayer of fungal life that catalyzes both wonder and horror. The city has been shaped by colonial violence, the rise and fall of artists, and the suppression of a mysterious indigenous presence, often represented by fungal or mushroomlike beings whose existence challenges human authority. These nonhuman inhabitants are a recurring focus, their culture and resistance refracted through human accounts.
Residents range from obsessive artists and censorious officials to petty criminals, scholars, and survivors of inexplicable events. VanderMeer populates Ambergris with eccentrics and witnesses whose partial, self-serving, or traumatized testimonies slowly reveal the city's moral ambiguities. Characters are less anchors for plot than lenses for mood and theme, each narration contributing a shard of the city's myth.

Themes and Tone

The collection explores colonization, artifice, ecological otherness, and the instability of narrative authority. Art and obsession recur: artists push toward transcendent or destructive creations, while institutions attempt to regulate or rewrite history. Ecological strangeness, particularly fungal life that resists assimilation, functions as both literal threat and metaphor for suppressed cultures and uncontrollable change.
The tone rides an uneasy line between dark humor and dread. VanderMeer uses irony and playful pastiche to unsettle readers before revealing more unsettling truths beneath the surface. That oscillation creates a persistent tension: wonder invites curiosity, but curiosity often leads to cost.

Significance and Reception

City of Saints and Madmen helped establish Jeff VanderMeer's reputation as a leading voice in contemporary weird fiction and as a formative figure in the New Weird movement. Critics and readers praised the audacious worldbuilding and genre-bending techniques; some found the fragmentation challenging, while others celebrated the book's density and imagination. The collection has since become a touchstone for writers interested in speculative urbanism, metafictional play, and ecological strangeness, and it seeded later works that return to Ambergris and deepen its mysteries.