Why Should I Cut Your Throat?: Excursions Into the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror

by Jeff Vandermeer

An engaging, sometimes controversial look at the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror from a man with almost two decades of experience as a reviewer, fiction writer, and editor.

Genres: Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.

Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Reviews

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

This sadly inconsistent essay collection reflects little of the talent that makes VanderMeer's fiction so great. I picked it up in order to read the lengthy essay detailing the publication history of "City Of Saints And Madmen", and while I enjoyed that one a lot, it gave no real indication of quality from essay to essay throughout the rest of the book. Strangely, although the essays were pulled from around 15 years of VanderMeer's career, era in which each essay was written had no reflection on the quality of the essays either. The first one in the book, a convention report from 1990, was the oldest, and it was deeply flawed, but some of the later writings in the book were just as flawed, while one of the few essays in which VanderMeer did display the talent I've seen in his fiction (an essay on the state of horror fiction in the mid-90s) was also one of the earliest essays collected here. The section of the book that I felt was weakest was the section in which he reviewed books. Perhaps this just has to do with my own tastes as a reader and reviewer, but I felt that he was way too quick to nitpick and turn negative, to write a bad review of something that he seemed not to have that big a problem with. It was as if something had to be transcendently excellent to get a good review out of him. I'm the sort of person that prefers to read good reviews of books/music/movies/whatever, so that I'm pointed towards things worth looking for. VanderMeer seems to be the type of reviewer who finds it far more enjoyable to pan books for their shortcomings, no matter how hard those shortcomings have to be hunted for. And I mean, he may be right (though the one book I'd read that he negatively reviewed, Iain M. Banks's "Look To Windward", is in my humble opinion far better than he makes it seem), but still, I don't know that I'd collect my negative reviews for an essay collection.

On the whole, I'm not sorry that I read this book, I just wish it had been more consistent. Perhaps next time he publishes an essay collection, it will be, but considering that I didn't necessarily even like the most recent essays in this one, I have my doubts that that will be the case.

[.W. · Rating 1 out of 5]

deeply unflattering portrait of the artist as a young man. self-obsessed, judgmental and anxious in equal measure. name dropping abounds. even as a time capsule it's not a good look. stick to the fiction.