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This short story originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #232, August 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018, edited by Paula Guran.

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From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the one-volume hardcover reissue of his cult classic Ambergris Trilogy.

Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris Trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, andFinch.

Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It appeared as a chapbook in 1996 and was later in the collection City of Saints and Madmen (2001).

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A mesmerizing novella -- one moment hilarious, the next utterly chilling -- that is not only a tour guide through the dream city of Ambergris, but through the very architecture of the imagination. This brilliant work, presented as an actual "artifact" from Ambergris, and stunningly intricate in its construction, builds upon the world introduced in Dradin, In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere (Buzzcity Press, 1996).

The Early History of Ambergris was listed as one of the Books of the Year by acclaimed British author Brian Stableford in Vector, the Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association.

Reprinted (with other tales from Ambergris) in City of Saints and Madmen, published by Cosmos Books (2001), Prime Books (2002), Wildside Press (2003), Tor UK (2004), and Spectra (2006).

Once upon a time, on the banks of the River Moth, a city sprang up like no other in or out of history. Founded on the blood of the original inhabitants, the stealthy gray caps, and steeped for centuries in the aftermath of that struggle, Ambergris has become a cruelly beautiful metropolis--a haven for artists and thieves, for composers and murderers. City includes the World Fantasy Award-winning novella The Transformation of Martin Lake.

Narrated with flamboyant intensity by one-time society figure Janice Shriek, and presenting a vivid gallery of strange characters and even stranger events, this is an account of the adventures of her brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a dark secret that may kill or transform him. It involves, too, a war between rival publishing houses which threatens to change Ambergris forever, and rivalry with a marginalised race known as the "grey caps" who, armed with advanced fungal technologies, wait underground for their chance to recover the city that was once theirs. This story of the family Shriek is an exotic and colourful novel of love, life and death which brings to fruition the author's genius for capturing the truly weird.

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers.

Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.