Ambergris

Ambergris is the fictional, fungus-ridden city Jeff VanderMeer uses as the throughline for a loosely connected cycle of increasingly strange fiction, beginning with the linked stories of City of Saints and Madmen. Shriek: An Afterword recasts the city's history through a historian's biography of her artist brother's disappearance into its underground; Finch turns to a hardboiled detective investigating a murder after the city's balance of power has shifted. Each book changes form and narrator, using the setting itself as the connective tissue rather than a continuing plot.