[What Came Before]

Anyone else read it?
I thought it was good fun - liked the way all the stories linked.

[What Came Before]

I remember two highlights from the stories, but not much else:  the creepy mushroom people (sooooo scary creepy)...  and the those wildly hilarious "living saints" -- furiously masturbating naked old men.  I almost fell off my chair reading that part.     Altogether so so, I'd say.

I really like his Veniss Underground.  It's a hypnotically gorgeous retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice.  He also wrote four short stories set in the Veniss universe.  Two of them, A Heart for Lucretia and Balzac's War are really heartbreakingly horrifying.  It's not quite Bakkerian Apocalypse, but rather a slow and painful twilight death of humanity at the hands of a far more ruthless race.

[What Came Before]

Describing any story as heartbreakingly horrifying is an easy way to get me interested. I'll have to check them out with a description like that.

I'm also going to have to use "Bakkerian". I've been searching for an appropriate term to use to describe Bakker's prose and style and it strikes me now that there could be nothing more appropriate than that. The simplicity of his name being the root word obscures just how intimate and complex his world can be at times. Just love it

[What Came Before]

Describing any story as heartbreakingly horrifying is an easy way to get me interested. I'll have to check them out with a description like that.

I'm also going to have to use "Bakkerian". I've been searching for an appropriate term to use to describe Bakker's prose and style and it strikes me now that there could be nothing more appropriate than that. The simplicity of his name being the root word obscures just how intimate and complex his world can be at times. Just love it

I'm glad you liked that "heartbreakingly horrifying" phrase    It sounds very awkward in my mind but that's all I can come up with.  "A Heart for Lucretia" is heartbreaking because you see innocence and naivete ruthlessly destroyed.  The heartbreak of "Balzac's War" is a story of impossible choice of love or death in a nightmare of biological warfare.

"Horrifying" is connected "Bakkerian."  I didn't use the latter to refer to a broader description of the whole RSB style, simply its Sranc-crawling ontological eradication of humanity.  The two Veniss stories also describe a extermination of Homo Sapiens, except here it's clinical, scientific, and there will be no Outside forces interfering, no hope.

[What Came Before]

I find that sometimes when I'm at a loss for a proper way to convey my meaning, making up terms or an unorthodox synthesis of words sometimes, somehow, achieves something near to what I meant. To me, "heartbreakingly horrifying" conjures something to mind greater than just its parts.

I definitely misinterpreted your meaning of "Bakkerian". I'm going to continue to use it the same way I use the term "Tolkienesque", assuming you don't mind of course.

[mrganondorf]

For my money, VanderMeer fucking rox.  I loved the City of Saints and Madmen and I loved his first short story collection, The Third Bear.  The title story is a really memorable horror/fantasy.  I love the way VanderMeer's stories turn from weird to terrifying almost instantly.  Have already bought more VanderMeer and mean to read him forever.

[Cüréthañ]

Read Finch.  Noir with evil mushrooms.

[mrganondorf]

My wife already got me a copy!  Just queuing up the long long list...