Fantastic Metropolis

Favorite books released in 2002, in no certain order:

City of Saints and Madmen (hardcover edition), Jeff VanderMeer

A masterpiece that VanderMeer—or anyone—will have a hard time equaling. As exhilarating as reading gets.

A Year in The Linear City, Paul Di Filippo

Poignant, thoroughly charming novella set in a surreal but nostalgic ouroboros of a world.

The Scar, China Miéville

Mieville’s sheer inventiveness is breath-taking, his characters complex and frustrating and therefore very human.

Leviathan Three, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre

An outstanding anthology with stand-out stories by Jeffrey Ford, Brian Stableford, Stepan Chapman, Brian Evenson, Scott Thomas, Tamar Yellin, Michael Cisco, and Zoran Živković.

Guises, Charlee Jacob

Jacob’s poetic splatterpunk is as weirdly beautiful as it is ghastly, like Joel-Peter Witkin in prose.

Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk

Patented Palahniukisms, but with the supernatural thrown into the mix. A scathing and blackly humorous ecological horror novel, where the pollution is purely aural.

Favorite books read, but not published, in 2002:

• The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, Thomas Hardy
• Lord of The Flies, William Golding
• Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
• The Stranger and The Plague, Albert Camus
• i-o, Simon Logan
• The Other Side, Alfred Kubin
• Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Temple Grandin and Margaret M. Scariano
• Lolita and The Enchanter, Vladimir Nabokov
• Llana of Gathol, Synthetic Men of Mars, ??Swords of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs (my antidote to Nabokov’s Ada Or Ardor).