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molliechard's review against another edition
Writing was unique, evocative and interesting at first, but I was bored with the story. It dragged on and I couldn't finish it.
terrypaulpearce's review against another edition
5.0
This is something special. It's really not quite like anything else. If I was trying to compare, I might say it's the bastard love-child of a threesome between Angela Carter, HP Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges, but that doesn't capture it. The prose is sumptuous, but more: it's edgy, and elusive, like the forest it describes. I often dislike the results when form is used to match content too heavily (I hate Toni Morrison's 'Jazz', for instance), but here it works a charm. You feel throughout like you're making your way through a forgetfulness-inducing, charmed, dark, entropic forest, as the characters do just that. And the balance of the whole between little individual stories and myths and arcs, and the larger story, is so well-judged it hurts. This feels as much like a mythology as Tolkien or Lovecraft, but more merged with the familiar. This is our world, but not.
scheu's review against another edition
3.0
I knew I was in for it when the cyclops started having sex with the robot. My friend told me that it would pick up in part two (which it did) but despite some interesting parts (the sexbot was not one of these) the whole made pretty much no sense at all. I feel as though this book was overhyped a bit, or that some of the folks writing blurbs didn't finish it.
blairconrad's review against another edition
2.0
If you like books with interesting and varied new ideas, with a fresh approach to fantasy, this is the book for you.
If you like books with a coherent plot, interesting characters whose actions make sense, and comprehensible language, this is not the book for you.
I like both things, but ultimately the language and the fact that there was no story turned me off. There are a number of ideas in here that were novel and interesting, and I'd like to have followed them a little further, but we never did. And Catling aimed for high falutin', poetical language, but I think he missed. Instead, his words acted more as a barrier to the story than anything else.
If you like books with a coherent plot, interesting characters whose actions make sense, and comprehensible language, this is not the book for you.
I like both things, but ultimately the language and the fact that there was no story turned me off. There are a number of ideas in here that were novel and interesting, and I'd like to have followed them a little further, but we never did. And Catling aimed for high falutin', poetical language, but I think he missed. Instead, his words acted more as a barrier to the story than anything else.
stalebiscuit's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
clarelynnmac's review against another edition
3.0
Thrilling, perplexing, exciting... This book left me feeling empty when it was over, as if I too had lost a part of my soul in the Vorrh. Such an exciting journey!! Of course I still had many questions when I reached the end, but being a book full of ambiguity I didn't really mind that not every plotline was tied up with a neat little bow. If you're looking for a fun challenge that will really test your brain and imagination then I HIGHLY recommend this book.
patrickwreed's review against another edition
5.0
Quite possibly one of the strangest books I've ever read.
It's difficult to say if it lived up to the immense praise in the reviews from the likes of Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits, though I'm not sure anything ever really could have. In spite of that, it is clearly a unique book and a work of singular genius - sharing something of the hallucinogenic dream logic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years Of Solitude", some of the fantastical intrigue of Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End Of The World", and a blending of historical fact and fantasy akin to Alan Moore or Michael Moorcock at their most ambitiously playful, yet standing entirely apart from all those analogies.
It's difficult to say if it lived up to the immense praise in the reviews from the likes of Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits, though I'm not sure anything ever really could have. In spite of that, it is clearly a unique book and a work of singular genius - sharing something of the hallucinogenic dream logic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years Of Solitude", some of the fantastical intrigue of Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End Of The World", and a blending of historical fact and fantasy akin to Alan Moore or Michael Moorcock at their most ambitiously playful, yet standing entirely apart from all those analogies.
griffonvagabond's review against another edition
1.0
If I could give this book a lower rating I would. In essence it is eloquently written trash. By far the worst book I've ever read and I've read Twilight.
karp76's review against another edition
4.0
Here is a strange land. Here be angels. And monsters. Cyclops and robots. Fact and fiction woven and knotted into one another, one indecipherable from the next. We come into this strange land not knowing what to expect. We are lured by mystery and the unknown. We find mythology and history walking hand in hand, just enough to convince us to continue, that this is in the right hands. The flavors are familiar. The hints are closest, oddly enough, to those of Pynchon (sweeping and grandiose, a sense of world weariness, of its time and of its place). We read and we devour, clawing, demanding to see beneath the surface, only to reveal the only true taint of the work, that unlike Pynchon, true and meaningful poignancy is lacking or shallow at best. Most works would crumble at this, dissolve under the expectation not to be found. Not here. Catling has created something very special here. It is haunting and lyrical. A gem of weird literature. A tale born in this world but told in another. This is not for the faint of heart or the passive. Heroes will die and die awfully and questions will remain unanswered. It seems apt in here, in this place, the wilds of the Vorrh. There is more. This is the only beginning. I am eager for the rest.
bhirts's review against another edition
5.0
This is the most I’ve enjoyed reading a book and the first time I’ve had that “don’t want to it to be over” feeling in a long while. This may be a bit of a “Boss Baby”** take, but it reminded me a lot of Primeval by Olga Tokarczuk, and almost nothing else; albeit with more of a “blockbuster” feel, more violence, sex, monsters and magic (but much less of the latter than most proper “fantasy” novels).
I’ve casually noticed many of the reviews complained about the writing in this novel, calling it pretentious and overwrought etc., which surprised me greatly because the writing was one of the first things that I specifically so enjoyed. To me, prose *usually* only strikes me as “pretentious” when it comes from a clumsy and overeager attempt to “seize” beauty, mostly by extending descriptions in endless baroque arabesques (Lovecraft for example, as much as we all love him), while in The Vorrh Catling’s prose seems to simply describe things *differently*, rather than *over* describe them, in a way that, to me, felt like a genuine attempt to get at the fundamental experience of things. For instance, one sentence that particularly stuck with me was (paraphrased, as I can’t locate the exact passage) something about a stagecoach driver driving “as the street talked to hands through the reins”. Some may find that kind of thing unnatural, but to me it’s simply viscerally capturing the feeling of driving on a bumpy road.
This is more of a 4.5 for me truthfully, and I know that part of the reason I am skewing my rating so high is an optimism stemming from the fact that this is book one of a trilogy, and a hope that many, or at least some, of the as-yet-still-untied loose ends (essentially all of them) will find satisfactory resolutions in future books; a hope that both my heart and brain know is almost certainly misguided…
**by “Boss Baby take” I am referring to a classic tweet from @afraidofwasps which reads “Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...”; meaning a take that sprouts much more from the (limited) vocabulary of references of the viewer than anything else.
I’ve casually noticed many of the reviews complained about the writing in this novel, calling it pretentious and overwrought etc., which surprised me greatly because the writing was one of the first things that I specifically so enjoyed. To me, prose *usually* only strikes me as “pretentious” when it comes from a clumsy and overeager attempt to “seize” beauty, mostly by extending descriptions in endless baroque arabesques (Lovecraft for example, as much as we all love him), while in The Vorrh Catling’s prose seems to simply describe things *differently*, rather than *over* describe them, in a way that, to me, felt like a genuine attempt to get at the fundamental experience of things. For instance, one sentence that particularly stuck with me was (paraphrased, as I can’t locate the exact passage) something about a stagecoach driver driving “as the street talked to hands through the reins”. Some may find that kind of thing unnatural, but to me it’s simply viscerally capturing the feeling of driving on a bumpy road.
This is more of a 4.5 for me truthfully, and I know that part of the reason I am skewing my rating so high is an optimism stemming from the fact that this is book one of a trilogy, and a hope that many, or at least some, of the as-yet-still-untied loose ends (essentially all of them) will find satisfactory resolutions in future books; a hope that both my heart and brain know is almost certainly misguided…
**by “Boss Baby take” I am referring to a classic tweet from @afraidofwasps which reads “Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...”; meaning a take that sprouts much more from the (limited) vocabulary of references of the viewer than anything else.