Excerpt and News - Buy Finch While There's Still Money?
Victoria Blake at Underland Press emailed me the other day to let me know that Finch is about five days away from being printed and shipped--just about right, timing-wise, for the book to reach the distributor and then be sent out to the various chains, indies, and online stores that have ordered copies. It looks like chain bookstore distribution will be solid, but you can preorder it now through Amazon or Indiebound and make my little freelancer's heart beat a little less frenetically. (Amazon appears right now to be offering Shriek, Finch, and Booklife for a ridiculous $31.)Meanwhile, in all the hullabaloo about the limited editions, you might've missed the fact that the first sixty pages of the novel are available online in a nice PDF format.I'll also have a complete six-week book tour schedule to post early next week.Finally, one of my heroes, Jack O'Connell, has read Finch and offered up a blurb, Publishers Weekly has reviewed it, and readers in Amazon's Vine program have started to offer their opinions..."Finch is a head-trip of the highest order---rich, complex, thoughtful and deeply intriguing. The novel’s twisting alleys echo with the vibes of Kafka and Peake, Chandler and Borges, Orwell and Burroughs, but VanderMeer is an original. This haunting story is an unsettling mystery about, I’d argue, evolution, mutation, identity, control and rebellion, and dissolution. In Ambergris, Mr. V has created a hauntingly alien world that---for all its viral, fungal darkness---sometimes feels like a visit to the darkest corners of our contemporary reality. VanderMeer is a visionary and Finch is a riveting work of profound imagination." - Jack O'Connell"The fantasy elements, even the dark or grotesque ones, are beautiful. From page one, I was sucked in, a now fan of those books which are cut into 'day' chapters. He has a very good use of vocabulary especially describing color and locations, it reminds me of Romantic Poets, yet this isn't a poem by far. The mixture is fantastic. It's gritty and violent, yet highly lovely in spirit, the only thing I could say even comes close to it...is Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel. The two books are completely different in plot but share the same gorgeous intensity in their gothic imagery and dark joys." - N. Graabe (Amazon Vine)"VanderMeer's third book set in the fungus-laden city of Ambergris is an engrossing recasting of the hard-boiled detective novel. Traditional tropes---femmes fatales, double-crossing agents, underworld crime lords---mix seamlessly with a world in which humans struggle to undermine the authority of [the gray caps] a century after the events of 2006's Shriek: An Afterword. By the time titular detective Finch solves the double murder of a human and a [gray cap], he's been drawn into a conflict in which he's rarely sure who's manipulating him or why he's so important to their plans. VanderMeer's stark tone is brutally powerful at times, and his deft mix of genre-blurring style with a layered plot make this a joy to read. Though the book stands well on its own, fans of the earlier Ambergris novels will appreciate it even more." - Publishers Weekly