 This is an interesting and unusual new author with a mixed bag collection here of stories I call it a mixed bag because some of them are excellent and some are not in fact of the 14 stories in this book Some aren't even good I would say there was one lengthy story in the middle of the book that I skipped all together because I could see right Away that I was not interested but the excellent ones are indeed excellent in my opinion The best story in the book is the title story the third bear It is a medieval fantasy horror story with its own mythology and its own magical lore That was very engaging and very visual and I will certainly remember it I was also impressed with the final story which was very different It reads like the work of Jorge Luis Borges Which is a high compliment because nobody writes like Borges in this collection? Vandermeer writes in a variety of styles some of these stories are so abstract that they're almost Incoherent I say abstract because I can't think of any way else to describe it It's almost as if he's experimenting with replacing The various nouns in the story with other nouns that he's just pulling out of the dictionary at random I'm not sure if I'm getting across my meaning anyway I have to put Vandermeer in an exclusive category with Rudy Rucker and J.R. Hamantashin These being authors whose minds don't work the same way the rest of ours do So while this book is a 50-50 for me, I certainly look forward to reading more Vandermeer Please remember to press that like button it helps my videos get seen And then subscribe so you can come back next time I do science fiction book TV and movie reviews all the time And please consider becoming a patron there's a link in the description below