Wow, this book was everything I'd hoped for, and morrh.

There's an obsession with vision and eyes, narratives of colonialism and the outsider, vivid historical characters and just as roundly-conceived fictional ones. There are ghosts, monsters, zombies, and mixtures of all three with humans, demons, angels, a dour Scotsman with a drink problem, quite a lot of sex and violence, sentient weapons, some steampunky bits... it's got everything and it coheres just enough and not too much. Some of the narratives end up entwining and one or two stay separate, but the thematic links justify their inclusion.

The prose is uninhibited and always adventurous, maintaining a wild capering rhythm full of flourishes without ever tripping over its toes. Catling gets away with blunt (but apt) intensifiers like "unbelievable", "amazing" and "indescribable" because unlike Lovecraft, his images are so original and arresting; his use of verbs (or verbing of nouns) in particular is outstanding.

Strangely, one thing I didn't take from this excellent fantasy novel was a great sense of place. In theory this should be very much a genius loci book, but the Mitteleuropean town in which most of the action is set, and the titular forest itself, while very well described, don't quite manifest as agents in their own right as I had expected they would.

The Vorrh calls to mind many great writers — Ballard and Pynchon in its hallucinogenic sense of time and place (and the latter in its brilliant incorporation of historical characters), Lucius Shepard in its jungle scenes and magical elements, William Steig's fantastic children's books in its rich, inventive and exuberant but never hard to parse prose style. Conrad and Mungo Park in the narrow sense of the colonial intruder. It picks up on the best of any number of "new weird" writers and is the first really great story I've read in that genre.

Crazy good shit.