
The Vorrh
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Narrated by:
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Allan Corduner
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By:
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Brian Catling
About this listen
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Jeff Noon
- Narrated by: Toby Longworth
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Below the neon skies of Dayzone, where the lights never go out and night has been banished, lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna. As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city's fate. In the end there's only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.
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The amazing ideas and worldbuilding.
- By Anonymous User on 12-24-23
By: Jeff Noon
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Moon of the Crusted Snow
- A Novel
- By: Waubgeshig Rice
- Narrated by: Billy Merasty
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again.
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Really great book!!!
- By Malia on 04-23-19
By: Waubgeshig Rice
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Unbury Carol
- A Novel
- By: Josh Malerman
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Carol Evers is a woman with a dark secret. She has died many times...but her many deaths are not final: They are comas, a waking slumber indistinguishable from death, each lasting days. Only two people know of Carol's eerie condition. One is her husband, Dwight, who married Carol for her fortune and - when she lapses into another coma - plots to seize it by proclaiming her dead and quickly burying her...alive. The other is her lost love, the infamous outlaw James Moxie. When word of Carol's dreadful fate reaches him, Moxie rides the Trail again to save his beloved.
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Interesting Concept, Poor Execution
- By Susanna on 04-25-18
By: Josh Malerman
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Lapvona
- A Novel
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.
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uncomfortable
- By Stetson on 07-04-22
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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Navola
- A Novel
- By: Paolo Bacigalupi
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In Navola, a city-state dominated by a handful of influential families, business is power, and power is everything. For generations, the di Regulai family—merchant bankers with a vast empire—has nurtured tendrils that stretch to the farthest reaches of the known world. And though they claim not to be political, their wealth has bought cities and toppled kingdoms. Soon, Davico di Regulai will be expected to take the reins of power from his father and demonstrate his mastery of the games of Navolese diplomacy. But in Navola, strange and ancient undercurrents lurk behind the gilt and grandeur.
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I tried
- By SKDEB on 07-15-24
By: Paolo Bacigalupi
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Bubblegum
- A Novel
- By: Adam Levin
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins, Michael Crouch, Julia Whelan
- Length: 39 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the internet does not exist and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology - a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio - has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to but must find a way to live in.
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Beware! This Audiobook Doesn't Want you to Buy it
- By Joel K. on 05-01-20
By: Adam Levin
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Tacky
- Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer
- By: Rax King
- Narrated by: Rax King
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Tacky is about the power of pop culture - like any art - to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These 14 essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love - snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu - into kinder and sharper perspective.
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Good, no perfect - in the best possible way
- By Tom on 01-26-24
By: Rax King
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The Brothers K
- By: David James Duncan
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 28 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Once in a great while a writer comes along who can truly capture the drama and passion of the life of a family. David James Duncan, author of the novel The River Why and the collection River Teeth, is just such a writer. And in The Brothers K he tells a story both striking and in its originality and poignant in its universality.
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Just couldn't go on
- By Susie B on 03-14-24
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Any Human Power
- By: Manda Scott
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 19 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. A decade later her teenage granddaughter is caught up in an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole, failed generation. For one shining fragment of time, the world is with her. But then the backlash begins, and soon she and her family are besieged by the press, facing the all-powerful wrath of the old establishment whose only understanding is power-over, not power-with.
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Smart, powerful, intense
- By Nature girl on 08-30-24
By: Manda Scott
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The Wall
- By: John Hersey
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 29 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Riveting and compelling, The Wall tells the inspiring story of 40 men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with torture, starvation, humiliation, and cruelty - a gripping and visceral story, impossible to pause.
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Fascinating
- By Phil on 06-14-21
By: John Hersey
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Solomon's Crown
- A Novel
- By: Natasha Siegel
- Narrated by: Ben Allen, Steve West
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelfth-century Europe. Newly crowned King Philip of France is determined to restore his nation to its former empire and bring glory to his name. But when his greatest enemy, King Henry of England, threatens to end his reign before it can even begin, Philip is forced to make a precarious alliance with Henry’s volatile son—risking both his throne, and his heart.
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Lovely
- By Kay on 03-15-23
By: Natasha Siegel
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Slade House
- A Novel
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Thomas Judd, Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the house's residents - an odd brother and sister - extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late....
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Grief is an amputation
- By Darwin8u on 10-29-15
By: David Mitchell
What listeners say about The Vorrh
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MCSama
- 05-23-21
Fantastic fiction with heavy religious inspiration
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!
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- Brian
- 06-17-20
What the heck!
What a wild ride! Excellent narrator, and a wonderful writer. A possible good find for fans of Gene Wolfe.
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1 person found this helpful
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- April Pritchard
- 10-20-21
Unusual
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- lisa kadison
- 07-02-19
Skillfully written and superbly narrated
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.
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- Jb
- 02-23-18
Incredibly complex but imaginative
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.
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- Seantron
- 06-23-22
Hallucinatory and utterly unique
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.
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- Joe Kraus
- 08-30-19
A Glimpse of All that Fantasy Might Make Possible
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.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Max
- 08-10-18
Poetic, unique, disjointed, boring.
Poetic, unique, disjointed, boring. Titles say it all. This is a love it or hate it audiobook... there is no middle ground.
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- Smokey Joe
- 01-06-23
One of the most original works of fantasy published this century
Very few books like this one have every been written, or will ever be written again. Original in every way. Utterly fantastic
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- Huoguo Fengzi
- 09-17-17
Intriguing but ultimately aimless story, spectacular reading performance
Incredible reading performance - the best audio book performance I've heard with splendid accents, voices and pronunciations. Beautiful and ambitious descriptive language. But the story....huh? More like 15 stories none of which ever really develop, connect or resolve. Do we need to read the entire series to get anything coherent? Mood is set beautifully and the magical-surrealist setting in colonial Africa is brilliantly evoked...but what the hell is going on? We never get any real delivery of plot, explanation of the (many) ideas and stories hinted at, or even what the story dances around the whole time - a deeper understanding of the Vorrh itself. It's all confusing and nothing seems to fit together as far as the plot lines...so enticing...and therefore, ultimately, very frustrating.
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