Extraemailbasura's Reviews > The Vorrh

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.