The Vorrh Audiobook By Brian Catling cover art

The Vorrh

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The Vorrh

By: Brian Catling
Narrated by: Allan Corduner
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Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called "a phosphorescent masterpiece" and "the current century's first landmark work of fantasy".

Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast - perhaps endless - forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone's fate hangs in the balance under the will of the Vorrh.

©2015 Brian Catling (P)2015 Random House Audio Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Paranormal Paranormal & Urban Heartfelt Mind-Bending Scary Solider

Critic reviews

"Catling's novel reads like a long-lost classic of Decadent or Symbolist literature, with that same sense of timelessness. It's peculiar, wildly imaginative, unafraid to transgress and get lost, and is unlike anything I've ever read." (Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy)
"A phosphorescent masterpiece.... Easily the current century's first landmark work of fantasy.... A brilliant and sustained piece of invention which establishes a benchmark not just for imaginative writing but for the human imagination in itself.... Read this book, and marvel." (Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta)
"Brian Catling is simply a genius. His writing is so extraordinary it hurts, it makes me realize how little imagination I have." (Terry Gilliam)
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Surprised I’d never heard of this before. As someone who grew up heavily indoctrinated as an Independent Baptist with background in versions religions, this was an absolutely phenomenal read and very interesting glance into the “different bibles”. I’m very excited to read The Erstwhile to see where these familiar tales take me!

Fantastic fiction with heavy religious inspiration

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What a wild ride! Excellent narrator, and a wonderful writer. A possible good find for fans of Gene Wolfe.

What the heck!

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I finished this story but it was not what I was expecting. It was interesting in it own right, but I found it sometimes hard to follow. Maybe that's just me however. It did catch me enough that I will listen to the rest, but it is very different from what I was thinking.

Unusual

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No one else writes like Calling. I think his writing is beautiful, weird, and completely original. I got goosebumps from the way he described a tear moving down an old man's face. This trilogy feels like a fever dream and I loved it.

The narrator is tied with Simon Vance and Steven Pacey for my favorite narrator of all time. I think a big part of why the story works is because of his expert delivery.

Skillfully written and superbly narrated

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This book, both its performance and its story, take some time to warm up to, but in the end an absolutely worthwhile read. Though fantasy, it is without a doubt a literary feat. The language borders on the poetic and the plot meanders and pulls together an almost impossible web of characters, locations, and events. Initially I tried to listen to the book and had to put it down. It required too much concentration to follow the story, and the narrator’s tone was more grandiloquent than I prefer. However, much later (after continually hearing about the book’s merit) I gave it another shot. Again it took a LONG time to warm up to the book, but ultimately I grew to enjoy the author’s style and storytelling, and the narrator’s skill shone through as more characters developed. I’m only giving it a 4 because of the difficulty of the read, some of which I felt was distracting to the plot itself. For lovers of fantasy or literature, this is a must read.

Incredibly complex but imaginative

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I was lucky enough to have come into this without any mental model of what to expect, and wow.

Mind blowing.

I feel like this work has given birth to a new genre impossible to name.

Hallucinatory and utterly unique

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Fifteen pages into this one, I was ready to declare it a masterpiece. The opening scene describes a man constructing a bow from the bones and sinews of the woman he has loved, a woman who, supposed to have various dryad like powers, has just died. It’s haunting and memorable, a cross between a love story and a fever-dream fantasy. And then it goes even further when the man ventures into a mysterious forest – “the Vorrh” of the title – finding his way by shooting arrows from his bow/lover and then following the path they trace for him.

A hundred pages into this, I had almost resolved to give it up altogether. I wanted more of our original protagonist, but the book had spun into at least half a dozen seemingly unrelated tangents. There’s a story about a cyclops being raised in the basement of a well-preserved old mansion (where disembodied creatures keep a vague but terrifying order) by creatures made of bakelite plastic. There’s a native hunter, resentful of the British who have trained and armed him, who determines to kill our bow-explorer. There’s a “Frenchman” who, as various footnotes and commentaries explain, is Raymond Rousell, the French surrealist poet, who determines to venture into the Vorrh in dilettante fashion. There’s the pioneering photographer Edward Muybridge who’s venturing around the world taking pictures and dipping a toe into the Victorian occult. There’s a vicious Scottsman, MacLeish, who oversees work crews of slaves who are the only ones able to harvest the timber of the Vorrh – and then only because they are near-zombies.

And those separate plots – I may have missed a couple – all have further branches that divide into ever smaller tributaries of narrative, only some of which later come together. It’s so busy, so crowded with strange characters and radically shifting metaphysics, that it seemed – after those first 100 pages – an impenetrable mess.

But I did keep reading. For a time it was out of perversity, with a sense that I wanted to be able to counter some of the great hype I’d heard about the book. Then I felt a growing curiosity as I saw some of the different elements beginning to cohere. And at last I discovered an unexpected and deep joy: this was a book that seemed never to exhaust its inventiveness. It implies familiar fantastic tropes, mythological possibilities, and historical touchstones, all of which come together in a balance I could never have predicted but that I can still somehow appreciate.

Nothing here turns out as you would expect. [MAJOR SPOILERS:] Williams, our bowman, loses everything – his bow, his memory, and finally his life. Ishmael, our cyclops, gets a second eye and becomes a dull figure inclined to settle down with the woman whose sight he has restored while remaining friends with the woman who “raised” him and now bears his child. The economy of the great city by the Vorrh begins to falter as the slave work crews have fled and no one can bring in the wood. What begins as a quest concludes as a murder but, maybe, we see our hunter Tsungali assume the mantle and proceed in what will be the second part of the trilogy.

[END SPOILER:] The surprising and, to some readers I imagine, disappointing outcomes are only part of what makes this a concussive, memorable work. This is – as Alan Moore says in his spectacular afterword – an effort to wrest the fantasy novel from the narrow tropes and signifiers of the post-Tolkien experience. This is fantasy written by someone who may never have read a word of George R.R. Martin, and that’s all to the good even as Martin does many things very well.

Moore’s point, one I’ve tried to make without Moore’s articulateness, is that the imagination ought to be freer to follow its own course. All of this book is vaguely familiar, yet none of it proceeds as we expect it might. This is a glimpse of how we might free fantasy from the tyranny of the Tor paperback, those punishingly long “high fantasies” of kingdoms governed by rules from what Blake would have called “Newton’s night” rather than from a truly unfettered imagination.

I see some reviewers comparing this to the Gormenghast trilogy, and I do buy it. Gormenghast is haunted by what-might-have-beens, though – a fine ambition, but one that makes it feel as if we are coming too late to the real magic of its vision – while this feels more like ever-unfolding possibility.

By way of comparison, I’d add Drew Magary’s The Hike and Josiah Bancroft’s Sendlin Ascends, recent books that explore a similar refusal to play by “the conventions” of the quest narrative and, instead, plunge into the surreal and imaginative. Solid as each of those is, though, neither is at this level.

Instead, the only comparison that really holds for me is Alan Moore’s own Jerusalem, a vast and ambitious novel that begins not with the surreal but with the lower-case-D divine of Blake himself.

I’d rank Jerusalem even above this – it’s more coherent while achieving a similar sense of deep wonder – but I have two more books of Catling’s trilogy to go so maybe it will get there by the end.

You’ll know if this sounds too busy and too strange for you, and, if it is, stay away. If you’re intrigued, though, if you think there’s a chance that the deep weird might attract you, then give this a shot. With Moore’s Jerusalem and a handful of other books, it’s at the heart of a set of novels showing the potential for the true fantastic to produce a literature as vast and colorful as dream.

A Glimpse of All that Fantasy Might Make Possible

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Poetic, unique, disjointed, boring. Titles say it all. This is a love it or hate it audiobook... there is no middle ground.

Poetic, unique, disjointed, boring.

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Very few books like this one have every been written, or will ever be written again. Original in every way. Utterly fantastic

One of the most original works of fantasy published this century

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The story starts out strong but then fragments into a scattering of seemingly aimless, albeit intricately rendered, vignettes of sex, violence, depravity, and all manner of grotesque and macabre characters and creatures. It's a dark and desultory tale that works best when it's focus is on the labyrinthine interiors of the titular forest and flounders somewhat when it strays into the lives of it's many ancillary characters (like the historical personage of Eadweard Muybridge, for example). This is a unique, strange, and beautifully written bit of twisted fantasy saturated with imagery that rises to great heights at certain points but is unfortunately peppered with enough narrative missteps that keep me from giving it an unqualified recommendation.

Here there be monsters

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