A great reading, but Tevis's style kind of goes in the same rhythm over and over. I think he would be better suited to a shorter story where I didn't notice it quite as much.
I really, really, REALLY wanted to like "City of Saints and Madmen" -- China Mieville endorsed it, and I love his writing, and anyway the concept of Ambergris really appealed to me. But I didn't like it. It just didn't click with me. I hoped that VanderMeer's shorter fiction would work instead.
I think his REALLY short fiction would work better for me. This felt like a series of flash pieces, and the only one I really liked was "Vine". The janitorial religion segment was also pretty good. But the rest of them, while I didn't mind listening to them, I don't think I actually liked them very much. They didn't stand out. Even someone like me who enjoys reading about sex didn't get even the slightest charge from the guy with the pen extracting it from between his wife's breasts. The image didn't do it for me.
In order to understand WHY the story (stories?) didn't work for me, I think it's necessary to reference WHEN the story was published -- 2002, which means it was likely written no later than late 2001/early 2002, given how long it takes for a publisher to get a traditional book out on the shelves. Back then, when someone wrote a story like this, it was newer and fresher. Now that more and more of us work in cubicle farms and boring office buildings, there are more people who have had these fantasies. (I for one sometimes feel like the Mimic, because I have to do everyone's job but do not fit in any of their departments.) Most readers can identify with at least one person in this story -- we even have a person in an office whose job it is to stamp "approved" on things, so to speak -- but as a gestalt the story seems more scattershot than anything, as if the author wanted to hit on a lot of ideas and didn't think he had a strong enough story about any one of them so he pulled them all together.
I think a lot of people will like this story; VanderMeer has a distinct style and I can see its appeal. It just wasn't there for me, for the most part.