Jeff Vandermeer. Why Should I Cut Your Throat? Excursions Into the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror. Austin: Monkeybrain Books, 2004, 335 pp., $15.95 paper.

Jeff Vandermeer has been amongst the most visible writers of the fantastic in recent years. In part, this has been due

in part to the publication of a number of well-received works of fiction: City of Saints and Madmen (2002) foremost among them; Veniss Underground (2003) and Secret Life (2004) following close behind. Yet Vandermeer has also made a name for himself in other ways: as the founder and force behind The Ministry of Whimsy Press; as the center of the "Romantic Underground" (a loose group of writers including Stepan Chapman, Michael Cisco, and Jeffrey Thomas that favors the baroque and surreal); as the co-editor of anthologies including the first three volumes of the Leviathan series (1997-2002) and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2003); as a prolific blogger and web-presence; and as an equally-prolific critic and reviewer. In dealing with Vandermeer, one is reminded of Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, figures who helped create and drive Modernism through not only their own work, but their essays, their editing, their salons and friendships--figures whose significance to literary history rests in the totality of their accomplishments.

Vandermeer may well be remembered in a similar way, as much for his role as aesthetic force as for his fiction. With this in mind, we come to his latest book, Why Should I Cut Your Throat? (2004), which selects Vandermeer's non-fiction writing since 1990, the majority of the pieces included dating from the late-90's to early-00's. The collection presents an admirable cross-section of Vandermeer's non-fiction, from convention reports to autobiographical essays to interviews to book reviews to critical analyses. For an example of Vandermeer's individual prejudices and predilections, one could ask for no finer. Given the scope of Vandermeer's reading, the collection also offers views of the fantastic fiction of the last decade-plus, particularly of those writers who have been at the forefront of the new avant-garde movements in the field (i.e. The Romantic Underground, The New Weird, The New Space Opera, The Interstitial Arts Movement).

When reading a fiction writer's non-fiction, the temptation exists to read the non-fiction in light of the fiction, to see what insights the one can provide us about the other. Certainly, that can be done here: a number of the essays and articles included in this collection deal with Vandermeer's fiction directly; others can be related to it with comparatively little effort. That said, any such collection must be able to stand up on its own for it to be worth our time. This Vandermeer's non-fiction can do, and so we have a volume that will appeal generally to anyone interested in the state of fantastic fiction in the last decade or so, and specifically to those interested in Vandermeer's fiction.

The collection is arranged into three sections: "Career and Craft," "Reviews," and "Criticism," which are bracketed and separated by a quartet of convention reports/travelogues. The first of these reports, "Why Should I Cut Your Throat When I Can Just Ask You for the Money?," describes the 1990 Georgiacon, while the most recent, "Anarchy, Surrealism, Dead Authors, & Ambergris," covers (among other things) the 2002 World Fantasy Convention. In between, there is a discussion of the 1999 World fantasy Convention ("World Fantasy Convention 25: 1999), and the 2002 Readercon ("Vanishing Books, Fake Diseases, and Alien Babies: A Myopic View of Readercon 14" [2002]). Taken together, these four essays present a series of snapshots of Vandermeer's development as a writer. All the essays concern the trials and tribulations--and occasional rewards--of conference-going. On the trials and tribulations-side, one would have to include older, egocentric writers, panel discussions in which one has no interest, and individual presentations that may go horribly wrong. On the rewards side, one finds younger, friendly writers, panel discussions that help showcase one's new anthology, and individual presentations that, in the end, go quite well.

Perhaps the biggest difference one notices across the four reports is of tone. The early review of Georgiacon is written in a voice whose efforts at sarcasm and irony are labored; by the final report, the voice has mellowed, become more self-assured and relaxed. One never gets the sense that Vandermeer especially likes convention-going--by his own admission, he is not the most social of animals--but the first two reports' somewhat snide accumulation of unpleasant details gives way to a more genial sense of tolerance in the later two. Conventions may be tedious, but at least they allow the chance to meet and spend time with good people in good conversation.

For those familiar with Vandermeer's fiction, the convention reports/travelogues converge with it in a few places. Perhaps the most significant convergence between the two modes comes in the first two reports. These pay attention to the different levels of cities: in his report on Georgiacon, Vandermeer contrasts the top-floor, high-rise atmosphere of the convention with the street-level reality of Atlanta; in his discussion of the 1999 World Fantasy Convention, he makes the same comparison between that convention hotel and street-level Providence, Rhode Island. In the first case, the contrast emphasizes the economic distance between those attending Georgiacon and those panhandling at street-level; in the second case, the contrast calls our attention to the cultural gap between those attending World Fantasy, who appreciate Providence as the home of H.P. Lovecraft, and what seems the majority of the city's inhabitants, who do not share in this secret knowledge (another preoccupation). Such contrast, of course, is crucial to both City of Saints and Madmen and Veniss Underground, and the convention reports solidify the idea that such division is fundamental to Vandermeer's vision.

The collection's first section, "Career and Craft," consists of five articles and two interviews. The highlight of this section is undoubtedly "City of Saints and Madmen: The Untold Story," which details at considerable length and in great detail the agonies involved in bringing Vandermeer's first major book to publication. Although the essay touches on the writing of the collection's principle novellas, this is not its central concern; rather, its heart is Vandermeer's assembling of the book's metafictional armature and his efforts to bring the whole thing to print in a manner consistent with his vision of it, not to mention his attempts to publicize the book after its publication. The essay is one of the finest written on the process of putting together and seeing to print a work of fiction, and it is no exaggeration to say that budding creative writers would do well to read it carefully. For those other readers who may have wondered at the steps involved in going from manuscript to publication to popularity, the essay is a fascinating guide.

Of the remaining essays, two, "Rum Runners, Tiny Castles, and Allergies" and "Sudden Hummingbirds, Sudden Dislocations: The Interstitial Experience," flirt with autobiography. In "Rum Runners," this is in the interest of fulfilling the essay's subtitle, "A Profile of the Writer at Twenty-Eight;" in "Sudden Hummingbirds," it is to give an autobiographical context for Vandermeer's interest in the Interstitial Arts Movement. Together with the interview of Vandermeer by Peter Wild, "The Best Fireworks Display You've Ever Seen," that concludes this section, these pieces seem to promise a host of revelations about Vandermeer--if not concerning his life, then at least concerning the specific compositions of his individual stories and novels. Interestingly, this does not happen: although one comes away from these pieces with a reasonably clear sense of Vandermeer's personality, the specifics of his life and creative process remain elusive. Like one of his own characters, Vandermeer in these essays and interview provides us only glimpses of himself. Given the extent to which Vandermeer has put himself forward as a public figure, such reticence is fascinating. That said, the pieces do allow us an inkling of Vandermeer-the-person, as he offers iconic moments from his childhood to explain his interest in and approach to the fantastic. One of those iconic moments, a nighttime walk in Fijian coastal waters with his parents, seems to anticipate the concern with the coastal settings that recurs in Vandermeer's fiction.

The book's next section, "Reviews," consists of twenty reviews, some of individual works, some of several works together. Here Vandermeer the careful reader is very much on display as he responds to many of the most important books of the last decade: Banks's Look to Windward (2000), Mieville's The Scar (2002), Harrison's Light (2002), Link's Trampoline (2003). At their best, Vandermeer's reviews carefully discuss the merits and failings of whatever book is under consideration. The reviews are especially interesting when Vandermeer is treating a book that he considers a partial success, flawed in a significant way (as opposed to one that is an out-and-out failure, which he tends to dismiss rather quickly). His reviews of Banks and Mieville fall into this category: in both cases, while he admires much about both works, Vandermeer also sees significant problems in the two, and this leads to extended analyses of the nature of the books' flaws. Vandermeer is not afraid to get his hands dirty: he deliberately and methodically takes apart Look to Windward to show exactly how it went wrong and what would have been necessary for the book to have gone right; his discussion of The Scar's shortcomings is briefer, but marked by the same attention to detail. In effect, Vandermeer has produced some of the first critical essays on these works, which future discussions of them will do well to take into account. We are under no obligation to agree with Vandermeer, of course, but we owe him a debt for his careful critical practice, the kind of which there is never enough.

The book's final grouping of essays, "Criticism," is in many ways the core of Why Should I Cut Your Throat?. The section consists of seven pieces, three of which: "Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet," "The Infernal Desire Machines of Angela Carter," and "Angela Carter: A Personal Appreciation," treat two of the writers Vandermeer confesses have been most important to him: Edward Whittemore and Angela Carter. Both Vandermeer's discussion of Whittemore's massive Jerusalem Quartet and his extended--even exhaustive--discussion of Angela Carter serve as good introductions to these writers. The essay on Whittemore was written to celebrate Old Earth Books' decision to reissue his five novels: Quin's Shanghai Circus (1974) and the Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry (1977), Jerusalem Poker (1978), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic (1987). Vandermeer's focus is on the Quartet, which he presents as a forerunner to more recent interest in genre-splicing. In Whittemore's multi-volume, secret history of the twentieth century Middle East, Vandermeer sees the conjunction of the spy novel, magic realism, and historical fiction. Vandermeer's enthusiasm for the novels is clear and contagious: having finished the essay, it is difficult not to want to find a copy of the Quartet and plunge into it.

The essays on Carter, in contrast, are almost polar opposites. "Angela Carter: A Personal Appreciation" is a brief eulogy written on Carter's untimely death in 1992; its purpose is to mourn the passing of a writer whose work Vandermeer held as close as anyone's. "The Infernal Desire Machines of Angela Carter" is an effort at mapping Angela Carter's oeuvre from beginning to end that does not shy away from extended discussions of individual works. That is especially true of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), which Vandermeer argues compellingly are Carter's masterpieces. The essay is one of the finer things written on Carter: for anyone interested in and beginning to explore her fiction, it makes a good introduction; for those familiar with her work, it offers much to respond to.

For the student of Vandermeer's fiction, there is a gold mine of information in his approaches to Whittemore and Carter. His essay on Whittemore foregrounds the importance of secret history, the story behind/beneath the story; while his treatment of Carter helps us understand his idea of surrealism. Given Vandermeer's frequent references to surrealism, this is of no small value. Although Vandermeer quotes Breton's description of surrealism as the attempt to make a new mythology, his discussion of it centers on two points: that it combines a variety of literary modes, including Gothic and magic realism; and that it does so in a way that is disjunctive, fragmentary and deliberately challenging to the reader. It is thus a kind of meta-mode that allows its user access to whatever modes s/he wants in whatever combination s/he wants. Vandermeer's understanding of surrealism seems a particularly postmodern one, although it does not emphasize play in the way that one might expect; instead, his discussion of Carter emphasizes the way that she used this mode to grapple with those concerns most dear to her. Rather than a diversion from what is important, surrealism is a way to pierce directly through to it.

It is not hard to draw a line between Vandermeer's parallel interests in Whittemore and Carter. In their different ways, both writers are concerned with what lies beneath the surfaces of things, whether that surface be one of official history or consensus reality. This in turn appears related to his use of the upper-lower city division. It would seem no accident that Vandermeer is involved with "The Romantic Underground."

The unexpected treat of the third section is a longish essay called "Horror: Alive or Dead? A Discussion of the Current Horror Malaise." Written in 1992, when horror as a large-scale publishing enterprise was rapidly on its way to becoming a thing of the past, the essay ranges across the horror fiction of the early nineties in blistering fashion. Taking particular aim at the 1992 edition of the late Karl Edward Wagner's Year's Best Horror Stories, Vandermeer argues that horror has become moribund and formulaic, detached from the concerns of character and theme that animate all good fiction; the essay concludes with a set of recommendations for horror writers to resuscitate the genre. Given the continuing (if low-level) discussions of the causes of the so-called death of horror in the early 90's, Vandermeer's essay is useful as a report written, as it were, in the midst of the demise. Sadly, Vandermeer's afterword to the essay reveals that only part of it saw print--his review of The Year's Best Horror Stories--and that that review was misread as a personal attack on Wagner, rather than as a criticism of the larger horror field. Had the full essay seen print, it is difficult to say whether those writers who were offended by its excerpt would have been any happier, but one wonders if the horror genre would not have benefited from such frank advice.

According to the brief "Acknowledgements" at Why Should I Cut Your Throat?'s end, Vandermeer changed approximately one-third of the collection's contents at the suggestion of his wife. This means at least another hundred pages or so of Vandermeer's non-fiction writings remain uncollected--and given Vandermeer's prolific output, that amount is undoubtedly much higher. Given the many and varied successes of this collection, one hopes that we will see Jeff Vandermeer's second volume of non-fiction soon.

Reviewed by John Langan