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The Vorrh

(The Vorrh Trilogy #1)

Brian Catling

3.49 · Rating details · 5,416 ratings · 981 reviews

Outside the colonial town of Essenwald lies the Vorrh, a vast -- perhaps endless -- forest. Sentient and magical, a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend holds that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now a renegade foreign soldier intends to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a ...more

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Hardcover, 512 pages

Published May 21st 2015 by Coronet Books (first published April 28th 2015)

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· 5,416 ratings · 981 reviews

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May 05, 2016 Bradley rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, sci-fi, 2016-shelf, steampunk

I think I was really prepping myself up for this one just a little too much. I wanted to expect lyrical language, and I did get a lot of lyrical language, and I wanted to expect some rather interesting ideas and concepts put together in a poetic way, all the while getting immersed in fantasy and science fiction and a truly heaping helping of the dark stuff, enough to consider the novel as a true horror.

What I did get was quite a few truly beautiful and evocative scenes of robots in a time and me ...more

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Jan 19, 2015 Genevieve rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: darkside, mind-blowing-bends-expectations, fantasy-fantastical-magical, favorites, stayed-with-me-for-days, epic-immersive, first-reads-arc, reviewed, literary-fiction

The Heart of Darkness meets Borges meets something that might have crawled out of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.

Brian Catling’s The Vorrh—or as editor Tim O’Connell likes to put it, “VVVOOORRRRRHHH”—is an intoxicating novel that defies easy summary. A slippery, twisty book, it always seemed to be squirming out of reach. The blurb that accompanies it is woefully inadequate, though of no fault to the blurber, because how can a book like this be summed up in a few lines? (I’d love to hear ...more

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May 31, 2015 Ariel rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: library

Reads like an old white dude's psychoanalytic sessions. ...more

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Mar 29, 2018 Violet wells rated it really liked it · review of another edition

In my teens a novel I loved was Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. I've never reread it for fear of spoiling my memory of the magic it weaved into my imagination. It was like the perfect transition from the otherworldly bewitchments of children's books to the more sober worlds of adult literature. The Vorrh is an imaginatively bizarre romp of a novel in the spirit of Gormenghast with a generous dose of the glorious controlled insanity of Thomas Pynchon thrown in.

The characters in the Vorrh include a o ...more

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Jul 12, 2015 Tim Hicks rated it did not like it · review of another edition

"B. Catling is a poet, sculptor, painter and performance artist." Hmm. Henceforth I may stick to books by authors.

Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits liked this book. Jeff Vandermeer says it "reads like a long-lost classic of Decadent or Symbolist literature." No doubt someone else says Catling's sensibilities are informed by a contempt for post-something, deconstructionalism and a desire to bring a new structure to fantasy unencumbered by such things as a coherent plot.

There are large chunks here that ...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Chris rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

I started a bare-bones blog to force myself to write better/longer reviews: http://scryingorb.wordpress.com/

Alan Moore loves this book. His praise is all over the front and back covers and it begins with a few page introduction where he raves about how fantastic the Vorrh is — how it is the best fantasy novel of this century thus far, how it enlivens a stale genre full of wizards and dragons, how superbly written it is, etc etc. These sort of introductions are always problematic, especially for ...more

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Jun 21, 2015 J.R. Handfield rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: read-fantasy-and-horror

Closer to a 2.5.

I finished reading this close to two weeks ago and I'm only writing a review now. This is emblematic of my frustration with The Vorrh, a book that came with a lot of buzz in some circles and, in the first 80 or so pages, really established something I thought I was falling in love with.

This is, at its heart, a sort of Weird fantasy tale. There's a small town bordering a forest that is believed to be magical or haunted or dangerous or some combination of all of those things. One m ...more

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Apr 29, 2015 Ryan Middlebrook rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, novels

There is a dark place in the world.

Essentially this place has been captured by Brian Catling in his novel The Vorrh, an alternative history of a soul sucking forest in the midst of Africa in the early 20th century. I finished this somewhat plotless book that reads more as a descent into madness than a traditional novel while questioning myself the whole time, “Why are you going on?” In the end, I probably shouldn’t have, and you probably shouldn’t either.

There seems to be a lot to explain as to There is a dark place in the world.

Essentially this place has been captured by Brian Catling in his novel The Vorrh, an alternative history of a soul sucking forest in the midst of Africa in the early 20th century. I finished this somewhat plotless book that reads more as a descent into madness than a traditional novel while questioning myself the whole time, “Why are you going on?” In the end, I probably shouldn’t have, and you probably shouldn’t either.

There seems to be a lot to explain as to why I would not recommend you reading a book that for most purposes was well written and, at least if you believe the reviews, well received. I’ll try my hand a some key points.

Have you ever had a friend that thinks that he is so clever when he turns a phrase? Maybe like a non-sequitur or a simple play on words that gives his sentence an unintended, but to him, serendipitous meaning. Now imagine having to read a book full of these crafted sentences. Sure maybe one in five come off with some power, but honestly, it becomes a slog rather than the occasional moments of delight like they can be. The author is trying too hard to get a little nod of the hat with each phrase. Some may see this as lyrical, but hundreds of pages worth makes you long for the spartan description of Hemingway.

Now let’s talk about description or world-building or character development or anything else besides, say, a plot. This is what Mr. Catling offers to you in this tome – which is supposedly the first of a trilogy. I couldn’t tell you what the next volume could be about because I’m not sure I could tell you what the story of this one is. There are a bunch of fleshed-out characters and the world of The Vorrh is elaborately assembled with such dark intention that makes the reader ready to escape. A story, such as it is, more or less develops just because the characters kind of bump into each other – not because there is any direction to the tale. Several long “side” stories have virtually no relation to the main characters or the Vorrh at all. It’s almost as if separate stories were just cobbled into this novel because they exhibited the same mood as the others and it would thicken the book. I love world-building and character development, but there seems to be a sad tendency – especially in the fantasy genre – to substitute worlds with stories. I’m sorry, but give me an O. Henry short story every day that has a plot than 500 pages of an immaculate world with no point. It is like many modern authors are trying to be Tolkein but missing the point.

Finally I need to mention the evil. The Vorrh is a dark place. It turns everyone that goes into it a hollow shell of a person. Make no mistake: this is the intention of this book to those who read it. Every single character is a dark, twisted caricature of a person. There are no heroes, no good guys, no noble purposes. The one character who should be a bright spot is a woman who receives back her sight after being born blind. In such a gloomy, oppressive world, surely this one would find joy in her sight. Almost purposefully as soon as the reader thinks this, the author spends the time to show the ugliness of the sight of flowers in this character’s mind. The gift of sight is actually a curse – for really to all the people that inhabit this world, life is a curse. I rarely psychoanalyze authors, but Mr. Catling has presented a worldview that sees corruption and evil in all things. I don’t know if I know anyone who I think would like this book, and if I did, I would be scared to give it to them because it might sink them beyond hope.

I usually don’t bring up the Bible in non-Christian works, but the author has taken perverse pleasure at bringing up many illustrations of it and making them horrible. In Phillipians, Paul says “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” I cannot think of a better antithesis to that statement than this book. It is a mire of thought. Avoid it.

2 stars out of 10

Red Eagle's Legacy ...more

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Dec 31, 2016 Coffee&Quasars rated it did not like it · review of another edition

A complete pile of flaming arse gravy.

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May 30, 2015 Bryan Alexander rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, historical-fiction, weirdness, new-weird, alternate-history

Reading The Vorrh ...

Reading The Vorrh reminds me of the first time I read Gene Wolfe. Catling offers a very similar combination of mystery, allusion, tricky plots, some beautiful sentences, unpredictability, touches of horror, and a powerful sense of meaning just beneath the surface. The Vorrh is like Shadow of the Torturer in that it's a standalone book which is also, apparently, the start of a series. This is also my way of offering very high praise.

If the Hugo awards matter ever again, this ...more

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Nov 14, 2017 Extraemailbasura rated it did not like it · review of another edition

My conclusion about this book: literary gaslighting. The blurb is enticing, and the book is endorsed by several big-name authors, but it never lives up to either.

I've read a lot of critiques in favor and against this book and in the end it comes down to:
-In favor: the prose can be nice.
-Against: the prose is too self-conscious and/or heavy-handed, at times what seems at first sight to be some wildly poetic passage turns out to show that Catling doesn't actually know what he's writing or what the My conclusion about this book: literary gaslighting. The blurb is enticing, and the book is endorsed by several big-name authors, but it never lives up to either.

I've read a lot of critiques in favor and against this book and in the end it comes down to:
-In favor: the prose can be nice.
-Against: the prose is too self-conscious and/or heavy-handed, at times what seems at first sight to be some wildly poetic passage turns out to show that Catling doesn't actually know what he's writing or what the words he's using means, or even makes any grammatical or logical sense.

-In favor: the book hints at some kind of intriguing steampunk/alternative history.
-Against: the book never really fleshes anything out. What the blurb entices us with (a strange and possibly malicious sentient jungle) almost never takes center stage, and instead we pass through seemingly unconnected lives of different characters. On top of that, the characters seem like ghosts in their own story, since there is no real character development, they are mostly unrelatable, and their actions rarely make sense.

-In favor: There are several scenes which are beautifully haunting.
-Against: A lot of the more grotesque scenes in the book seem to be there just because, not because they drive the plot. Which is fine in itself, but in combination of many other factors it just adds on to the negative aspects of the book.

Some other thoughts: using colonialism (for example) as a literary backdrop is fine in of itself. However, when a British author more or less fetishizes colonialism instead of using the novel to challenge the status quo, it gets tiring to read from a moral standpoint (didn't the British have hundreds of years to bask in their colonialism glory?). The same goes for some other themes in the novel: although Catling seems aware of the negative themes in his book, he never actually condemns them and actually fetishizes them.

A lot of the problems in the novel seem to come from the fact that Catling is an Old, White British Man. He doesn't seem to know or care how women's physiology actually works (periods are geysers of blood), nor what would actually motivate a woman or any human for that matter. At one point one of the female characters in the book has sex with a scrawny, ugly cyclops for no other reason other than he seems to have a big penis, and there is more physical description of the cyclops' penis than any of the characters in the novel. And just in case you were wondering, it is (I kid you not) a counter-clockwise corkscrew. If the "women will have sex with a big penis no matter what is attached to it" weren't such a tired and pervasive trope, and if Catling seemed to have any sort of grasp on real human psychology, then I might have been able to accept it as another part of the surrealism of the novel. There are violent rape scenes (again, no challenging of the status quo, more fetishes, more insinuating "women will let you rape them if you have a big penis because it will feel good" tropes), made more disturbing by the fact that Catling seems to identify most with the cyclops character. If you doubt that, if you do a google image search of "Brian Catling The Vorrh", you'll see that he has made a personalized rubber mask to make himself into a cyclops. Just saying.

PS- If you use the word "spunk" for semen in a novel, there's a special place in hell for you, and the only way to pay pennance is to donate all of your earnings from the novel to a charitable foundation. Your move, Catling. ...more

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Apr 28, 2015 Rick rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Man... I could probably write a 5-page essay on this one. Given how narratively dense the book is, though, I imagine I wouldn't be the only one. I fluttered back and forth between wanting to give this 4 stars or 5. Ultimately I chose 5. Here's why:

This is by far one of the most imaginatively wild novels I've read. Ever. There is so much going on in "The Vorrh" that it's kind of impossible to describe. It's set in post-WWI colonial Africa, but it's also set in mid-to-late 1800s England and Americ Man... I could probably write a 5-page essay on this one. Given how narratively dense the book is, though, I imagine I wouldn't be the only one. I fluttered back and forth between wanting to give this 4 stars or 5. Ultimately I chose 5. Here's why:

This is by far one of the most imaginatively wild novels I've read. Ever. There is so much going on in "The Vorrh" that it's kind of impossible to describe. It's set in post-WWI colonial Africa, but it's also set in mid-to-late 1800s England and America. It's an adventure novel, but it's also a strange, Victorian romance. It's a mystery. It's historical fiction, but it's definitely fantasy. It's allegorical... maybe? It's certainly unlike any fantasy I've ever read. There aren't any dragons, and there aren't wizards in any form you'd recognize, but the supernatural forces of the Vorrh are present throughout the book, even if you don't really grasp what they are or how they're propelling this wide cast of strange, fascinating characters. This book is jam-packed with imagination, and if you don't kind of let yourself go with the flow, it'll probably be a jarring read for some. Let yourself go with the flow. I don't know how it will make you feel, but the story will be worth it. This story fires the imagination, even as it leaves you bug-eyed with jealousy at some of the stuff Catling's created here.

It reminded me a lot of some of Gene Wolfe's stories, or maybe Samuel Delany's. I mean that as a compliment, because those are two great, great writers. But the book is dense. It is not a quick read.

The reason I almost gave this 4 stars was that because in spite of how marvelous the story is, the prose can sometimes be very, very convoluted. For the first 100 pages or so, every sentence seems loaded with so much metaphor and simile and personification and flowery adjectives that it really made me want to sit down with Mr. Catling and be like, Hey, this is great, but let's edit this just a WEE BIT, ok? The writing is not bad, by any far stretch. But as I read the book I could kind of tell that this was a first novel, mainly in how the story evolved over time, and how the pacing picks up. Like I said, the first 100 pages were a bit of a slog, even as he introduced these crazy, fascinating characters set in this familiar yet totally fantastical world. But after those 100 pages, the prose eased up a bit on the ostentation, and the story really took off. And it's a hell of a ride, even when you're not sure what's going on or why things are happening.

I can't imagine everyone will love this book. And I imagine I'll need to read it again, or sit down with others who've read it and discuss before I really have a full grasp of what happened. Heaven and Hell, angels and demons and Adam and Eve... I imagine I might have missed some of the stuff happening "behind the scenes". But Catling's imagination really is a marvel to behold. His writing is wonderful (once you get past the grandiloquence), and there are so many scenes and chapters that will leave you with goosebumps. There are scenes that will make you laugh, scenes that will terrify you. It's a bit of a trek, for sure, but the journey is well worth it. ...more

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Mar 08, 2017 Joseph rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, reviewed, disappointments, weird-fiction, novel, own, 2017-reads

Some authors' prose just clash with my ears: Ray Bradbury, Patrick Rothfuss and the fictional author, James S A Corey., to name a few. Add Brian Catling to the list. I'm not saying it's these author's fault. Who knows. I'm sure there's a large philosophical debate there about aesthetics, but I'm not interested in getting into that.

The Vorrh. I got excited about this because Alan Moore was excited about this, as well as, other such luminaries. From this moment forward I will only be reading books Some authors' prose just clash with my ears: Ray Bradbury, Patrick Rothfuss and the fictional author, James S A Corey., to name a few. Add Brian Catling to the list. I'm not saying it's these author's fault. Who knows. I'm sure there's a large philosophical debate there about aesthetics, but I'm not interested in getting into that.

The Vorrh. I got excited about this because Alan Moore was excited about this, as well as, other such luminaries. From this moment forward I will only be reading books recommended by GR friends, my wife, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.

This book has all the elements of good fiction: a mystery, mythology, several character viewpoints, androids, and a cyclops for crine out. But it never really materialized into anything of value.

Where VanderMeer, Mieville, and Ford are weird in a good way; this novel was weird in a bad way. Where Peake and McCarthy are wordy in a good way, this novel was wordy in a bad way. Gaiman and Wolfe are able to meander in there novels without convoluting; Catling just proved he cannot.

This novel is supposedly part of a trilogy. I'm ok with a story being somewhat incomplete, leading into the next installment, but the novel has to be able to stand alone in some way. Examples of successful attempts (IMHO): Annihilation (of the Southern Reach Trilogy), ASOIAF: A Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Hyperion. The Vorrh fails hard in this regard.

What is The Vorrh? Apart from being a mythical forest, beats me. And as it was barely addressed in the novel, I no longer care.

Moore's praise comes as an afterword in the edition I read. He tries to make sense of what you just read, and it's all just a bunch of bullshit. He makes false claims that Catling breathed new life into the fantasy genre. I agree that fantasy was stale for a time with the endless Tolkien pastiches, but all that definitely ended, if not before, with the arrival of the New-Weird authors. Read "Perdido Street Station" or "The Physiognomy" and tell me if they are stale. Moore even compares this writing to Peake (blasphemy). Yes, I learned that it's possible to write "Watchmen", "V for Vendetta" and "The Killing Joke", and still be a fallible human being. Don't listen to me or Moore; form your own opinion.

I wouldn't be continuing in the series, but like a fool, in the early stages of my courtship with this book, I signed up for an early reading of The Erstwhile, and Net Galley gave it to me. I will follow through with my commitments. Hopefully the series gets better. The second half of the book was an improvement on the first.

Author's favorite words repeated ad naseum:
1) Camera obscura
2) Erection
3) Fetish

(there were more but I kept bad notes) ...more

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Jan 12, 2013 Alex Sarll added it · review of another edition

A weird and astonishing fantasy of Africa. The strange and sprawling cast of protagonists includes a native policeman drawn back into the service of the colonial authorities against whom he once led a bloody revolt, a bowman whose bow's name we know before we know his, a cyclops raised by bakelite robots - and those are just the fictional figures. Mixing with them on equal terms are the historically verified, such as proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel (from whose Impressions of Africa the Vorrh's A weird and astonishing fantasy of Africa. The strange and sprawling cast of protagonists includes a native policeman drawn back into the service of the colonial authorities against whom he once led a bloody revolt, a bowman whose bow's name we know before we know his, a cyclops raised by bakelite robots - and those are just the fictional figures. Mixing with them on equal terms are the historically verified, such as proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel (from whose Impressions of Africa the Vorrh's name comes), and photographer and prick Eadweard Muybridge. The links between their stories are initially unclear, and sometimes remain so, but all revolve around the vast forest of the Vorrh, a presence which can bleach men's (or even angels') minds, and distort not only weather patterns, but time. And on the edge, for reasons briefly explained but which ultimately share the necessity of dream-logic, stands one middle-European city, with its burghers and carnivals.

Alan Moore's introduction sites The Vorrh combatively against the fantasy mainstream and yes, it's a long way from the generic pseudo-mediaeval post-Tolkien sagas. But it's not quite as anomalous as all that. The use of a lush metropolis as the focus for a fantasy addressing colonialism reminded me of KJ Bishop's Etched City, and the overwhelming power of the forest recalled Robert Holdstock's early Mythago books, before he fell into formula. And Moore must be aware of the latter at least, because he referenced them alongside this (at the time unpublished) in the conclusion of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. Conversely, I didn't think the comparison to David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus which Moore makes really holds water - both books are outlandish, brutal, oddly dreamlike, but Catling comes across throughout as a visionary artist, whereas at times Lindsay reads more like a nutter typing out his magnum opus in the library and reading it aloud as he does so.

Regardless of its peers and antecedents, though, I agree with Moore on this much: The Vorrh is a truly remarkable book, and one which shows that it is still possible after all this time to write a truly original novel. We need more like it, by which I of course mean, totally unlike it. ...more

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Apr 21, 2015 Rachel (Kalanadi) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

Ummm. That was a trip. Maybe not a good trip, but not a boring one.

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Jun 25, 2020 Katie Lumsden rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I am utterly bewildered. This is one of the weirdest and most confusing books I have ever read.

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Dec 10, 2012 Sam Leeves rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Every so often, a book comes along that defies genre. 'No Country for Old Men' is more than a thriller or a western. 'The Big Sleep' is more than a crime novel. And what exactly is 'The Catcher in the Rye'? Brian Catling's masterful 'The Vorrh' is another such book. This is not just another Fantasy. There are remnants of the Western in there, Adventure, Crime, Romance. And still, it transcends these genres as well. It is simply 'The Vorrh' and is a much better book because of that.

Of course, due ...more

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Jul 25, 2013 Antonomasia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sff, 2013, 2014, modern-british-fiction, decade-2010s

Feb 2014
The Vorrh is an unusual and remarkable historical fantasy though perhaps it’s coming to it after reading a lot of classics that makes it not quite as mindblowing as some reviews say. The vast cast of characters with interlocking stories, some of whom don't meet in person, tallies with current trends in literary fiction. The glorious surfeit of adjectives and adverbs recalls the too-richness of decadent literature but (and I speak as someone who’s too fond of those myself) the clause rhyt ...more

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Apr 12, 2015 Ryan rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I received this book through Goodreads First Reads.

I'm not totally sure how to review this book. Brian Catling is an extremely talented author; his words in this novel are completely poetic. And that's the main problem here, unfortunately. At 500 pages, this wholly original Fantasy book is very dense. The style of the prose combined with the subject matter just did not lend itself to grasping my full attention. It doesn't help that the ending could've been 40 pages shorter, and that the inclusio ...more

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Nov 10, 2017 James Chatham rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, genre-fantasy, i-loved-it

[4.5 stars]

I can say with all certainty that I've never read anything like this before. It's like a mosaic of strangeness - a group of narratives surrounding the Vorrh, a forest in an unknown location on Earth. The way most of these narratives slowly come together and intertwine is intelligent, and the sense of discovery throughout the novel is wonderful. The writing is simply outstanding: at times it reminds me of China Miéville in the way that Catling has this large vocabulary and isn't afraid ...more

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Feb 02, 2017 Anna rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, fantasy

I came across ‘The Vorrh’ while browsing in a bookshop and was intrigued by the prospect of a vast sentient forest, as well as impressed by praise from Alan Moore, Jeff Vandermeer, and Phillip Pullman on the back cover. (Then I reserved it at the library, of course. I never buy new books, they’re so expensive.) I was eager to read it and did so within 24 hours on two long train journeys. The puff quotes make comparisons to Decadent literature, Michael Moorcock, and Mervyn Peake, none of which I I came across ‘The Vorrh’ while browsing in a bookshop and was intrigued by the prospect of a vast sentient forest, as well as impressed by praise from Alan Moore, Jeff Vandermeer, and Phillip Pullman on the back cover. (Then I reserved it at the library, of course. I never buy new books, they’re so expensive.) I was eager to read it and did so within 24 hours on two long train journeys. The puff quotes make comparisons to Decadent literature, Michael Moorcock, and Mervyn Peake, none of which I can really agree with. Moorcock maybe, but I’ve read very little of his work so can’t really say. Peake, one of my all time favourite authors, is definitely not a suitable comparator. What I hoped for from ‘The Vorrh’ was a Gormenghastian story, in which a place was the main character and dominant force within the narrative. The title and length of ‘The Vorrh’ seemed to promise long descriptions, yet this forest felt flimsy and elusive. There were none of the dense, atmospheric descriptive passages that I wished for. I was instead reminded somewhat of Lanark by Alisdair Gray, which has similar non-linearity and confusing profusion of characters and points of view. Both novels twist it all together in the end although only limited sense can be wrung from events. I think Lanark is better written, though, as it contains much more memorable imagery. Perhaps because I was hoping for a lush, vivid, unsettling forest environment, I was disappointed by the limited visual presence of the Vorrh in its own book. Usually it’s just a dark smudge in the background, no more frightening and distinctive than distant stormclouds.

The horror of the place is instead depicted through its effect on people, which is certainly done effectively. There is a lot of impressively revolting body horror. The forest acts as a catalyst and setting for collisions between characters and significantly influences their lives. Once I had some sense of what was a flashback and what was happening in plot-time, I found it an engaging magical realist historical novel. There is some vague treatment of colonialism and a fair bit of mysticism, mingled with surreal and inexplicable details like bakelite robots. Also some very strange sex. I’m not really sure what it all adds up to, though. The narratives of the characters end abruptly and the book neither begins nor ends in the Vorrh itself. Did the sentient forest send those letters? Does it speak? Will we find out in the sequel?

After finishing, I went back to read Alan Moore’s introduction, which didn’t shed much light. He mentions ‘fugitive suggestions of a past that’s obsolete and vanished’ and ‘build[ing] a literature of unrestrained futurity out from the fond and sorry debris of a dissipating past’. That seems rather more ambitious than I could discern. Where was this unrestrained futurity? ‘The Vorrh’ struck me rather as a fantastical historical novel with a fixation on bodily mutilation. The tone seemed, if anything, fatalistic. Characters suffered, died, or survived and the Vorrh remained inexplicable and mysterious, sheltering monsters without allegorising anything specific. Technological advances were depicted as insufficient to conquer the forest, while risking madness in both those developing them and their unfortunate test subjects. Knowledge and wisdom seemed to be distributed arbitrarily across the cast. Perhaps the comparison with 19th century French Decadent literature is merited, as there is a certain fixation on the exotic, gruesome, and supernatural. Still not enough overwrought description for to truly merit the decadent label, though, which is a real pity. The general weirdness is appealing and quite possibly the abruptness is due to it being first in a trilogy. But when I read a novel about a dreadful sentient forest, I want to be able to visualise that forest. I want it to haunt my dreams! Instead, I was spooked by the beings in the forest and the effects the forest had on others. This could well have been intentional: maybe the real endless sentient forest was in our hearts and minds all along? Or maybe I just didn’t get it, for some reason. I really wanted to, though. ...more

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Oct 15, 2018 Henk rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned-e-books

Bewildering, bizarre, byzantine in language, like someone reciting a Norse legend with gods and monsters in it but then blended with some belle epoque colonialism.

“Complexity has cripled me before, and the healing from it took too many years.” - The Bowman

“His voice stopped mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.” - Tsungali

“He was the most ridicilous of travellers, brilliantly prepared for all events, so long as they never happened.” - The Frenchman

The Vorrh reminds me of The Dark Tower by St Bewildering, bizarre, byzantine in language, like someone reciting a Norse legend with gods and monsters in it but then blended with some belle epoque colonialism.

“Complexity has cripled me before, and the healing from it took too many years.” - The Bowman

“His voice stopped mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.” - Tsungali

“He was the most ridicilous of travellers, brilliantly prepared for all events, so long as they never happened.” - The Frenchman

The Vorrh reminds me of The Dark Tower by Stephen King, the epicness mixed with something you’d not expect (with King this is Western meets SciFi dystopia, here its a kind of The Lord of the Rings in colonial era). Also a fascination with guns in all sorts and gore is shared between the two fantasy saga’s. The graphic depictions and scenes, with a few pages narrating what dogs dreams of when fucking, were sometimes a bit much in my view, but effective in worldbuilding and setting the scene. Some other fantasy golden oldies also crossed my mind when reading: Ishmael traveling through the Vorrh made me think of the The Hobbit or There and Back Again and Mirkwood while Tsungali acted as a kind of Gollum to his master at two thirds of the book and Nebsuel was a kind of Elrond with his offering of a place to stay.

The Vorrh feels sometimes a bit bombastic with lots of adjectives and rather one dimensional characters, blessed with either occupational names like the Bowman and the Frenchman or names as Ghertrude when German and Charlotte when French. Some were better crafted than others, the Muybridge storyline for instance didn’t really hold my attention, I couldn’t retell his story well, even after just having read about him. Regardless, Catling his writing is rich, precise and packed with words I never read before, even when his characterisation is sometimes not so strong.

The atmosphere and world of the Vorrh are mesmerising, with women clawing out their uterus with their hands, a wood protecting itself by deleting memories of those who cross to far into it, a cyclops raised by bakelite robots, asylums with experiments, miracelous healings of the blind, aborted children turning to live, seances in creepy, sprawling mansions; its a Lovecraftian mix of short scenes which have only a very loose connection with each other at first glance, but the world sucked me in. Also the Erstwhile, a kind of angels, being out of sync with reality, their images appearing an hour later than their presence to the other senses, was fascinating as a concept, making me eager to read the next book in the trilogy. ...more

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Apr 29, 2015 Michael rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: slipstream

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Mar 09, 2020 Finn Danger rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Could not continue reading it after about 1/4 of the way in. The "lyrical" way in which the author wrote seemed less like descriptive beauty and closer to how a college student flagellates an essay with nonsense fill-in words to get their word count up when it is too low.

A bunch of sex, violence, flowery wording, and a bow made from a human body. Nah. Not for me. ...more

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May 22, 2015 Sarah rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Beautifully written but aimless and all over the place.

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Nov 23, 2012 Georgia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

The Vorrh is one of the best samples of fantasy fiction that has been written in the last decades. Moreover, it is a book that walks skillfully across genres, like only very good literature can do. It is as much fantasy as it is historical fiction and steampunk, playing all along with Jungian archetypes. The Bowman, one of the protagonists-narrators is such a one. The eye, and everything related to that (blindness, cyclopes, photography and much more), is another. More protagonists include Sir W ...more

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Dec 03, 2016 Jane rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: library, reviewed, fantasy, science-fiction, africa

Was intrigued by the original premise but it got too twisted and convoluted for me. It was several subplots--one involving a curious girl and a cyclops; another involving a soldier who has made a bow out of a person and the black man who chases him into the Vorrh [forest which will steal a person's memory]; another involving the real-life photographer, Edward Muybridge and another involving a surrealist writer, "The Frenchman". The forest ties them all together. To me it read like a lot of hallu ...more

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Jun 28, 2015 Eric rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015

Hard to reconcile Catling's technical proficiency and Lovecraftian ability to mount dread with the aimless narrative and regressive politics of the finished work. If the new idiom of genre fiction is just going to concern itself with crafting parallel histories of other times when white men were terrible to everyone, count me out.

Paradoxically, having learned this is intended to be a trilogy, I won't rule out giving the next one a try (it's impossible not to be at least a little impressed with t ...more

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Jan 08, 2016 sologdin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: burns-like-cold-iron

Really, really cool.

The setting here is “the great brooding forest […] older than humankind” (9), an expanse somewhere in Africa, near the site of where the “Possession Wars began when the True People […] rebelled against the British occupiers” (14). Setting mythology is that “nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh,” “the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species” (34). Some indication that the Tetragrammaton “gave Adam a corner of his clearing, so that ...more

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Dec 22, 2020 Lou Last rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: otherworld, novel

Needing to be somewhere else, I was led by this conversation: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bo... & https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bo...

Trusting Michael that this grows large ...more

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About Brian Catling

Brian Catling

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Also publishes as B. Catling.

Brian Catling was born in London in 1948. He is a poet, sculptor and performance artist, who makes installations and paints egg tempera portraits of imagined Cyclops. He has been commissioned to make solo installations and performances in many countries including Spain, Japan, Iceland, Israel, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Germany, Greenland and Australia. He is currently ...more

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The Vorrh Trilogy (3 books)

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Quotes from The Vorrh

“All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.” — 11 likes

“white men always told you where they were. They sent out a bow wave, so that the earth and its animals would murmur, well in advance of their arrival. Their wake was immense. Crushed and contaminated, the land was forced to repair itself, even after the gentlest of their journeys.” — 7 likes

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