Extraordinary, delirious, overlong, meandering, overstuffed, frustrating. At once bursting with ideas and incident and somehow undercooked (characterization is slight, esp. the women). The strand detailing the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge was the most engaging for me, but it also felt like it belonged in a different novel (I realise there are thematic links to the rest of the novel). VanderMeer had it right when he described The Vorrh as resembling a lost Symbolist novel... strong on hallucinatory imagery, weak on plot.