Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

By Jeff VanderMeer

An engaging, sometimes controversial look at the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror from a man with almost two decades of experience as a reviewer, fiction writer, and editor. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932265112
• ISBN13: 9781932265118
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: UNKNO
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.9" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

great book, amazing author

I have been a major fan fo jeff since i picked up a copy of City of Saints and Madmen from an employee picks section of a borders. This book is a collection of stories about his time spent in atlanta for a convention, and many reviews and anecdotes he has written over the years. Jeff uses his emmense imagination to make even an atlanta convention a great, wonderful, insightful, and surreal place. If he wrote the phone book, id read it cover to cover. The end.

An insider's view of the world of SF, fantasy, & horror

Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, the first essay collection by one of America's finest young authors, Jeff VanderMeer (City of Saints and Madmen, Secret Life), is part humorous insider's view of the SF, fantasy, and horror scene (i.e. VanderMeer's experience at the 1999 World Fantasy Convention), part compilation of VanderMeer's previously published reviews, and part an infectious appreciation of VanderMeer's favorite authors (one comes away from these essays wanting to hunt down the works of Angela Carter and Edward Whittemore). Regardless of its parts, it is always brave and brutally honest (one wonders, after reading some of VanderMeer's scathing reviews, how much hate mail he has received), always compassionate and encouraging (particularly to aspiring writers in his notes on how to teach creative writing). But above all, it is a passionate, compulsively readable love letter to the imagination. Anyone who believes fantasy is simply orcs and hobbits, or doubts the literary merits of contemporary fantasy, needs to buy this book.