A review by chamblyman
The Erstwhile: The Vorrh (2) by Brian Catling

5.0

The Vorrh trilogy is a literary fantasy like no other: Brian Catling combines myriad far-ranging influences (surrealist painters, Heart Of Darkness, Holdstock's Mythago Wood, early Terry Gilliam films, the Bible) and characters both reality-based (photography pioneer Edward Muybridge, poet-artist-mystic Willliam Blake, naturalist Eugene Marais) and completely fantastical (A cyclops! Possibly fallen angels! Insectoid robots!) into a dense, poetic, slow-burning-yet-explosive epic that rewrites 20th century history, interrogates capitolism, war, and Euro-African colonialism, and reinvents mythology, art, and the natural world. It's a stunning, genre-defying work that lies somewhere between the realms of John Crowley's Aegypt cycle, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Clive Barker's Imajica, and Vandermeer's Area X trilogy (Annihilation).