CANR
WORK TITLE: Absolution
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/
CITY: Tallahassee
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC June 2023
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 7, 1968, in Bellefonte, PA; married Ann KennedyBordman (an editor, anthologist, and publisher), 2003.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Florida.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, educator, and publisher. Ministry of Whimsy Press, Tallahassee, FL, founder and publisher, beginning 1984; Cheeky Frawg, pubisher; Infinity Software Development, Tallahassee, FL, technical writer/ project administrator, ending 2007; Shared Worlds, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC, cofounder and codirector of Shared Worlds (summer program), eleven years; Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, Trias Writer-in-Residence, 2016-17. Has lectured or taught at the Brisbane Arts Center, Wofford College, the Clarion Workshop, Trinity Prep School, and University of California at San Diego; judge: Eisner Awards, World Fantasy Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
AVOCATIONS:Soccer, weightlifting, collecting first editions.
AWARDS:Florida Artist Enhancement Grant; Rhysling Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association, 1994; World Fantasy Award for best novella, 2000, for “The Transformation of Martin Lake”; Florida individual artist fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts; Fear magazine best-short-story award; Philip K. Dick award finalist (with Forrest Aguirre) and World Fantasy Award for best anthology, both 2003, both for Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad scientiam, alios ad insaniam Deduxere; Tähtifantasia Award, 2007; Le Cafard Cosmique award, 2009; World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award for best anthology, both 2012, both for The Weird; Locus Award and BSFA Award, both 2013, both for Wonderbook; Nebula Award, 2014, and Shirley Jackson Award for best novel, 2015, both for Annihilation; Locus Award for best anthology, 2017, for The Big Book of Science Fiction; World Fantasy Award for best anthology, 2021, for The Big Book of Modern Fantasy; Shirley Jackson Award finalist, 2022, for Hummingbird Salamander; Kurd Lasswitz Preis—Best SF Translation into German, 2023, for German translation of Veniss Underground; included on the “100 Must-Read Books of 2024” list, Time, 2024, for Absolution.
WRITINGS
Also author of The Exchange (a limited-edition “Ambergris” artifact), illustrated by Eric Schaller, 2001, and of e-books, including Errata, Tor, 2013, and The World Is Full of Monsters, Tor, 2017. Editor of periodicals, including Jabberwocky and Best American Fantasy 2. Contributor to books, including Novel and Short Story Writers Markets, Breaking Windows, Magill’s Guide to SF and Fantasy Literature, Best New Horror 7, The Year’s Best Fantastical Fiction, Dark Voices 5, Dark Terrors, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy 2001, and Nebula Awards 30. Author of foreword to Songs of a Dead Dreamer; and, Grimscribe, by Thomas Ligotti, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2015, and introduction to Moderan, by David R. Bunch, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2018. Columnist for the Amazon.com book blog. Contributor to periodicals, including Time, The Nation, Esquire, SF Eye, Tangent, Nova Express, New York Review of Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Washington Post, Third Alternative, Weird Tales, Silver Web, Interzone, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Author’s books have been published in numerous languages.
Shriek: An Afterword has been adapted for film. The short story “A New Face in Hell” has been adapted as a PlayStation videogame. Annihilation was adapted to film by director Alex Garland, Paramount, 2018. Secret Life was adapted as a graphic novel by Theo Ellsworth in 2021. The “Borne” series has been optioned for TV by AMC. “The Third Bear” has been optioned for film.
SIDELIGHTS
Jeff VanderMeer is “one of the most remarkable practitioners of the literary fantastic in America today,” according to Nick Gevers on the SF Site. VanderMeer has published numerous short stories, in collections like City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris, has edited the “Leviathan” anthology series, and has published the novel Veniss Underground, the “Southern Reach” and “Borne” series, and others. Keith Brooke, writing in Infinity Plus, explained: “VanderMeer is a writer I admire immensely, even if he’s not always a writer I wholeheartedly enjoy. In a publishing age where it can be so easy for a writer of talent to make the safe commercial bets … those individuals who doggedly plough their own furrows should be cherished. And VanderMeer’s furrow is quite unlike anyone else’s.” Audubon contributor Jessica Bruder suggested, “While much of VanderMeer’s literary output defies genre—elements of sci-fi and fantasy interlace with noir, horror, thriller, and the supernatural—it taps a common source: the infinite wonder and strangeness of nature.”
VanderMeer began publishing short stories in the small press scene during the 1980s. These early works, Brian Stableford wrote in The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, “range from quirky comedies to striking contes cruels and vividly surreal horror stories.” Among these early stories is “Greensleeves,” about a magician who liberates the dreary inhabitants of a city library from their boring lives. “Although it is not a horror story,” Stableford noted, “this colourful work retains a dark element, which imports a Decadent sensibility into its breezy bizarrerie.”
This decadent sensibility reappears in much of VanderMeer’s fiction. City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of stories set in the mythical city of Ambergris, a place of cruelty and beauty populated by thieves and artists. A critic in Publishers Weekly found that “this beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn’t for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding.” Among the stories contained in this collection is “Dradin, in Love,” about an unemployed missionary who sees a woman in a window while walking through Ambergris and becomes obsessed with her. Brooke described the story as a “yearning, lyrical character study edged with darkness. ‘Dradin, in Love’ is full of bizarre imagery, and baroque description of a warped, Dickensian city, the prose is poetic and powerful, underscored with heartfelt passion and incisive wit.” Also included is the novella “The Transformation of Martin Lake,” a winner of the World Fantasy Award, which tells of an artist who undergoes a disturbing turning point in his career following a masquerade titled “Invitation to a Beheading.”
Allen B. Ruch, reviewing the collection in the Modern Word, noted that “although the Ambergris stories fall under the rubric of fantasy—or ‘Dark Fantasy,’ as some prefer—they are substantial works of postmodern fiction, and sit comfortably on the shelf between Angela Carter and Gene Wolfe. Like many of his influences, VanderMeer’s work has roots in pulp fiction as well as literature, and he brings an irresistible sense of fun to his writing, playing every card in the postmodern deck with a cheerful sense of abandon.” Brian Evenson in the Review of Contemporary Fiction noted that “the work here is often marvelously dark and grotesque, and VanderMeer’s creation of his world is complex and convincing. To read this book is not merely to read a story, but to enter into a complex and vivid world.”
VanderMeer’s anthology series “Leviathan” presents “postmodern playfulness and solid storytelling,” according to a critic in Publishers Weekly. Gathering stories by contemporary writers like Michael Moorcock and Jeffrey Ford, as well as reprints of classic tales from the nineteenth century, the “Leviathan” anthologies have managed to transcend genre and appeal to a wide range of readers. “In seeing how many ways the bounds of the ‘real’ can be stretched, the anthology also reaffirms how uncategorizable literature can be when practiced as a freewheeling art-form,” Steve Tomasula wrote of Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad scientiam, alios ad insaniam deduxere in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Ray Olson in Booklist remarked that “the third entry in this small-press anthology series is good and clever enough to send readers and librarians scurrying to find its predecessors.”
VanderMeer edited the 2005 collection The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, 83rd Edition with Mark Roberts. The “unusual small-press item promises to attract a fair share of mainstream readers, not least curious doctors,” a Publishers Weekly critic observed. The guide includes stories written by such notable authors as Neil Gaiman, Kage Baker, Cory Doctrow, Brian Stableford, Michael Moorcock, China Mieville, and Michael Bishop. Each author is presented as a doctor writing a medical opinion on the work of (fictional) scientist Thackery T. Lambshead. Some of the Lambshead’s discoveries include such diseases as Razornail Bone Rot, Ballistic Organ Syndrome, and Delusions of Universal Grandeur. The short stories for each disease include a history of its discovery, common cures, and a description of symptoms. Rob H. Bedford, writing on SFFWorld.com, found that “VanderMeer and Roberts have succeeded in putting together a truly unique book, that at its heart, is much of what Fantastic Fiction is about, having fun making things up and putting them to page as real and authentic.” Olson, again writing in Booklist, called The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, 83rd Edition “perfect recreational reading,” and Review of Contemporary Fiction contributor Tomasula felt that “at its best the disease guide is a reflection of our attempts to understand ourselves or our society, especially when something goes wrong, especially something that has no name.”
VanderMeer also regularly edits anthologies with his wife, Ann VanderMeer. They collaborated on The New Weird, a collection that attempts to define the emerging literary genre of the New Weird, a hybridization of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Many of the selections in the volume can also be described as urban noir, and they are written by such authors as Jay Lake, Alistair Rennie, Kathe Koje, Clive Barker, and Michael Moorcock. The last part of the book includes seven different takes, by seven different authors, on the same plot. Jackie Cassada, writing in Library Journal, declared that the volume is “highly recommended for all libraries interested in the latest in sf and fantasy as well as modern horror.” Proffering additional praise in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, James Sallis found that the “anthology documents ‘the moment or movement known as New Weird,’ that particular moment when strains of science fiction, epic fantasy, and transgressive horror got thrown together in the basket and hauled up to the builders.” He added: “There seems an ongoing effort here to take back the soul of fantastic fiction, to steal it away from glib commercial forms and restore to it its heritage as a dark, troubling form, one rooted deeply in our psyches: to reestablish it as a literature of substance.” Indeed, The New Weird is “set on pushing the envelope on what society defines as weird,” wrote a Small Press Bookwatch critic. The editors “ably demonstrate the sheer breadth of the ‘New Weird’ fantasy subgenre in this powerful anthology,” claimed a Publishers Weekly contributor.
In 2003 VanderMeer published the novel Veniss Underground, a story set in a subterranean city much like that of his earlier Ambergris. Veniss is “a decadent, far-future city where Living Artists craft monstrous works of biological art,” a reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted. Nicholas, who hopes to become a master Living Artist, disappears after following the directions of Shadrach, who tells him how to navigate through the many levels of Veniss to the home of the greatest Living Artist, the notorious Quin. Nicholas’s adventures in the city’s underworld echoes those found in Dante’s Divine Comedy. “VanderMeer’s eye for just the right gruesome detail brings his nightmarish landscapes and bizarre, partially human creatures alive in astonishing profusion,” the Publishers Weekly reviewer maintained. According to Booklist contributor Olson, the novel’s “milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow.” Speaking to Gevers in the SciFi Site, VanderMeer explained that “ Veniss Underground is a far future baroque fantasy, one part Portrait of the Artist as a Raw Nerve End of Envy, one part hall of mirrors, and one part balls-to-the-wall action-adventure story. Like most of my fiction, it’s at base about love and death.”
The plot of the 2006 novel Shriek: An Afterword takes place in the Ambergris universe in which several of VanderMeer’s novels and short story collections are set. The book is “a compulsively readable collection of odd anecdotes, character studies, and inventive, pseudohistorical detours,” Carl Hays wrote in Booklist. The novel is told by Janice Shriek, a journalist and former gallery owner who is Duncan Shriek’s sister. Duncan is the narrator of VanderMeer’s The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris —a novella included in City of Saints and Madmen —and each book is ostensibly written by its narrator. In Shriek, Janice sets out to supply an afterword to her brother’s opus. A Publishers Weekly writer noted that “fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Angela Carter and Borges will be well rewarded,” while a Bookseller critic remarked: “This title should appeal to a wider audience than just the fantasy crowd, as well as fans of the weird.” VanderMeer provides the reader with “a strong sense of the world beyond the page, the story beyond the book,” Keith Brooke commented in the online Infinity Plus. “When it comes down to it, Shriek is an intense, intimate study of sometimes estranged, sometimes close siblings, each plummeting the depths, scaling the heights, and above all transforming.” Brooke highly praised “the language: masterful use of tense and voice; never a word out of place; choice of phrase working overtime, to pile subtle effect on subtle effect.” On SFFWorld.com, a critic called the book an “intriguing thematic work” that offers a “reading experience” that goes “beyond surface appearances, narrative perspectives, and the categorization and classification of perceptions that help one to order experience while at the same time preventing one from grasping that unfathomable truth underlying experience.”
VanderMeer begins the “Southern Reach” trilogy with Annihilation and Authority, and the first installment introduces an unnamed female narrator who leads readers on her expedition into the mysterious Area X. The area exists beyond the reaches of civilization, and the narrator, a biologist, is sent to explore it with a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a psychologist, all of whom are women. The party is meant to report back to the Southern Reach government on their findings, but they know they may not survive. This is the twelfth expedition to attempt to enter the area, and everyone before them has either disappeared or returned without their sanity.
While most critics praised Annihilation, New York Times Book Review correspondent Tom LeClair wrote: “No spoiler alert is needed because we know the narrator escapes to tell the tale, which is ponderously plotted, often abstract in style and not very scary.” Yet, according to Washington Post Book World contributor Sara Sklaroff, “ Annihilation is successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out.” Lydia Millet, writing in the Los Angeles Times, was also impressed, asserting: “Despite the obligatory unanswered questions, Book One stands on its own. The apparent tragedy and freakish ecology of Area X’s blight are quite fascinating, and the solitary voice of its post-humanist narrator is both deeply flawed and deeply trustworthy—a difficult and excellent balance in a novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark.” Proffering further applause, a Publishers Weekly correspondent declared: “VanderMeer weaves together an otherworldly tale of the supernatural and the half-human.”
Authority introduces a character called Control, a leader of the Southern Reach group and this volume’s narrator. In Acceptance, the final installment in the “Southern Reach” trilogy, an expedition returns to Area X to attempt to recover a missing member of the team. Meanwhile, another storyline explains how the Crawler came to be. The creature was once a lighthouse keeper named Saul Evans. Many of the characters from the previous books in the trilogy return in this novel.
Reviews of Acceptance were favorable. Adam Roberts, contributor to the London Guardian website, commented: “Finding a way satisfactorily to pay off so much mysteriously tense apprehension is no small challenge for a writer—and VanderMeer manages to avoid banality and opacity both, and generates some real emotional charge while he’s about it.” Roberts concluded: “This is genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived.” Writing on the National Public Radio website, Jason Sheehan asserted: “ Acceptance … is at different times the best haunted lighthouse story ever written, a deeply unsettling tale of first contact, a book about death, a book about obsession and loss, a book about the horrifying experience of confronting an intelligence far greater and far stranger than our own, and a book about sea monsters.” “The imaginative daring and reach with which VanderMeer has invented and executed a concept such as Area X is breathtaking, especially in an explosive twist halfway through Acceptance that effortlessly moves the story from the local and earthbound to the cosmic,” remarked Neel Mukherjee in the New Statesman. Booklist critic, David Pitt, described the book as “a satisfying conclusion to this captivating trilogy.”
VanderMeer starts a new biotech-toned sequence with Borne, set in a half-ruined city where the results of experiments by “the Company” wander free and a massive flying bear named Mord regularly ravages the populace. A rival, the Magician, has enlisted mutated children to control her territory. Rachel is mostly just trying to survive, scavenging alongside significant other Wick, but her outlook shifts when she discovers in the depths of the sleeping Mord’s fur a sentient amorphous blob that she decides to adopt and, carrying it here and there, name Borne. Gradually Borne gains in worldly understanding as well as abilities, shifting in ways that start to threaten Rachel’s relation with Wick—who harbors a dubious past—and moreover reveal that Borne’s underlying origins and purpose are setting the stage for an otherworldly confrontation.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer found “remarkable” how the narrative in Borne reads “like a dispatch from a world lodged somewhere between science fiction, myth, and a video game,” its textures shifting “as freely as those of the titular whatsit.” Heralding VanderMeer’s masterful melding of bildungsroman, domestic drama, romance, and thriller, Booklist reviewer Krista Hutley affirmed that his “talent for immersive world-building and stunning imagery is on display in this weird, challenging, but always heartfelt novel.” A Kirkus Reviews writer lauded Borne as “superb: a protagonist and a tale sure to please fans of smart, literate fantasy and science fiction.”
The next “Borne” title is The Strange Bird, a prequel novella that finds the Strange Bird, created by the Company, managing to escape her underground cage and find freedom. But the humans she encounters are more inclined to harness than help her, and when she encounters a magician, the Strange Bird gets slated for surgical alterations that threaten to dictate her fate. A Kirkus Reviews writer affirmed that VanderMeer “writes circles around most fantasists at work today, and the story … is of an elegantly bleak piece with its predecessor.” Appreciating that VanderMeer allows a sliver of hope to sustain Strange Bird through her dark journey, Booklist‘s Hutley hailed the “hallucinatory imagery and expressive prose” and called The Strange Bird “beautiful and bleak, painful and rewarding.”
Multiplied realities come into play in Dead Astronauts, set in the “Borne” world’s same hellscape city, with a time-space-skipping blue fox, a broken-winged duck, a hungry leviathan, an oracular journal, and a trio of dead/alive astronauts taking center stage through a series of vignettes. Chen, Grayson, and Moss, able to access alternate versions of their selves, harbor revolutionary ideas as they explore the city, which is threatened by the utter darkness of Nocturnalia. A Publishers Weekly reviewer feared that this volume is “overstuffed,”in such a way that a coherent narrative “never coalesces; the characters and concepts are too loosely sketched and the prose is both grandiose and oddly humorless.” In Booklist, Nell Keep suggested that “the struggle of different forms of life trying to survive unites the vignettes”; she recommended Dead Astronauts for readers with “ecological concerns” and interest in narrative originality. A Kirkus Reviews writer enthused, “VanderMeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet.”
With A Peculiar Peril, his first novel written for young adults, VanderMeer opens his “Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead” duology. Sixteen-year-old Jonathan is called to the mansion of his departed grandfather, Thackery “Thwack” Lambshead, to sort through all the junk he hoarded over the years. Finding curious instructions from the deceased—something about bird-children and a quest—and even stranger evidence, Jonathan realizes his grandfather was murdered. Unable to preclude the arrival of go-getting friend Danielle and her brother Rack, a Korean adoptee with a prosthetic leg, Jonathan and his new friends all get mixed up in the drama surrounding the dimensions to which the mansion’s doors happen to lead. Most pressingly, a sci-fi/steampunk war in parallel world Aurora (where animals and vegetables can talk), with a Franco-German empire (led by warlock Aleister Crowley, his bat-monster familiar, and the head of Napoleon) assaulting England, threatens to spill over into Earth. The teens team up with the Order of the Third Door, as Jonathan’s heritage suggests, in order to avert disaster.
In the New York Times, Laird Hunt advised: “Picture a 200-foot-long death machine built to crush everything in its path—powered by pulped earthworms, defended by demi-mages and captained by the gently stoned 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne—and you will have glimpsed just the tiniest portion of the madcap magical mash-up that is Jeff VanderMeer’s first full-throated sally into epic young adult fiction.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer deemed A Peculiar Peril a “riotous, slyly sophisticated take on the hero’s journey,” distinguished by “boldly drawn characters, sublimely ridiculous worldbuilding,” and a “witty, prismatic narrative.” A Kirkus Reviews hailed the novel as an “enthusiastic hodgepodge of antique fantasy elements, … cosmic horror, clever wordplay, genre deconstruction, and butt humor” held together by a “just-go-with-it fever-dream logic.”
Hummingbird Salamander, a noir eco-thriller with a dystopian edge, opens with the narrator—a security expert who identifies herself only as “Jane Smith,” and who suggests the reader will learn “how the world ends” with a strange clue. As her interpretation of the clue propels her onward, Jane gets embroiled in a perilous standoff between a South American pillager of forestland in the Pacific Northwest and his ecoterrorist, bomb-wielding daughter, with a steady stream of environmental and societal disasters unspooling in the global background.
London Guardian contributor Sam Leith characterized Hummingbird Salamander as “a paranoia-laced near-future conspiracy thriller; but one in which the hard edges and would-be gritty realism of the traditional thriller melt into something more bewildering, more evocative and more surreal; an inquiry into identity, a gothic family drama, a fable about ecological catastrophe and the ethics of terrorism.” In Booklist, David Pitt praised VanderMeer as a “marvelous craftsman. Every word here feels carefully chosen; every sentence has a purpose; every plot point causes ripples felt through … the story.” Noting the novel’s apocalyptic direction, a Kirkus Reviews writer remarked on the plot’s arrival at a “future that no one will survive.” Along these lines, Helen Phillips in the New York Times Book Review appreciated how VanderMeer “makes the case—viscerally, unflinchingly—that we would do well to envision ourselves at this existential inflection point alongside Jane, exploring possible destinies for life on our planet. … This is climate fiction at its most urgent and gripping.”
[OPEN NEW]
In an interview with Kirkus Reviews, Vandermeer talked about how he had no plans to write another book in the “Southern Reach” series, but as he put it, “There were these questions that had their hooks in my subconscious.” Those questions led him to write Absolution, the fourth book in the series. The book is structured in three parts, with each part depicting a new expedition. The opening section involves an investigator named Old Jim looking into the first expedition on the Forgotten Coast, while another plotline involves a much later expedition. “It’s a very sneaky book,” Vandermeer said, describing it as a prequel in some ways and a sequel in other ways.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as falling in line with the three previous books in the series, although they lauded the last section as containing “some of the most vivid writing in the entire series, sinuous and delightfully weird.” They did note, however, that the level of swearing is unusually high. In the New York Times Book Review, Alec Nevala-Lee focused on the earlier section, praising it as “some of Vandermeer’s best writing.” Nevala-Lee compared Vandermeer to such luminaries as Borges, Poe, and Chesterton.
Michael Moorcock, in the Spectator, called the book a “reflection” on the series as a whole. Moorcock praised Vandermeer as a “craftsman with a wealth of inspiration” and called the novel “gloriously wild yet beautifully controlled.” In Booklist, Krista Hutley wrote that the book is “told in beautiful prose infused with bizarre and disturbing images.”
[CLOSE NEW]
VanderMeer once told CA: “My parents used to read to us when my sister and I were very young, books like a child’s version of William Blake that included ‘Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.’ Also Beatrix Potter. We grew up in the Fiji Islands because my parents were in the Peace Corps and the first ‘books’ I remember reading myself included the Tintin comics, the Asterix comics, and a series of Indian comics based on classics like the Ramayana. Around this time I began writing my own poetry and short fables, probably at seven or so. Around age nine, my parents bought me the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and although I couldn’t understand everything in the books, I read them all the way through. Perhaps the books being mysterious and not entirely comprehensible was a good thing. It made me want to fill in the gaps, and that made me want to write even more. By age fourteen I had had my work published in magazines, and by eighteen I had my first professional sale. From there, it was just a case of following up on my passion and seeing where it might lead.
“I am fascinated by people who have to operate under constraints imposed by society or by other people, and how the quality of one’s imagination can either triumph in quite difficult situations or can lead to disaster. I’m also interested in the transformative moment, the interplay of relationships, the effects of colonialism, and the alien nature of the mundane, when you really look at it closely. I’m intensely influenced by the natural world—the plants and animals around us. In terms of specific influence, I’d say that the works of Angela Carter, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edward Whittemore are crucial to this day, along with writers like Steve Erickson and too many others to name.
“I write longhand first, usually in the early morning. I then take that draft and type it up on the computer. I print out the draft and severely mark it up. Then I rewrite it in longhand, using the printout as a guide. Then I type that up on the computer again, then longhand again. I repeat this process until I’m satisfied that the draft is in good shape, and then I mark up the printout and make edits into the electronic file until I’m done. In terms of outlining, I let the project dictate what makes the most sense. Some fictions require more initial structure than others.
“I like novels that take you somewhere different and that you as the reader have to adapt to, and which, at the end of the day, blow the back of your head off with some unexpected, transformative moment. My hope is that my novels have this effect and that, further, they do what all good novels do: change with each reading, and reveal more of themselves.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.
PERIODICALS
Analog, December, 1996, Tom Easton, review of Dradin, in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere, p. 149.
Booklist, July, 2002, Ray Olson, review of Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad scientiam, alios ad insaniam deduxere, p. 1833; August, 2002, Ray Olson, review of Leviathan 3, p. 1939; March 15, 2003, Ray Olson, review of Veniss Underground, p. 1286; December 1, 2013, Heather Paulson, review of Annihilation, p. 34; August 1, 2014, David Pitt, review of Acceptance, p. 46; July 1, 2015, Vanessa Bush, review of Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, p. 47; July 1, 2016, Alan Keep, review of The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection, p. 46; April 1, 2017, Krista Hutley, review of Borne, p. 31; February 1, 2018, Krista Hutley, review of The Strange Bird, p. 39; November 1, 2019, review of Dead Astronauts, p. 31; June 1, 2020, Julia Smith, review of A Peculiar Peril, p. 82; July 1, 2020, Nell Keep, review of The Big Book of Modern Fantasy: The Ultimate Collection, p. 30; March 15, 2021, David Pitt, review of Hummingbird Salamander, p. 33; September 15, 2021, Terry Hong, review of Secret Life, p. 39; August, 2024, Krista Hutley, review of Absolution, p. 39.
Bookseller, December 9, 2005, review of Shriek: An Afterword, p. 31.
California Bookwatch, July, 2008, review of The New Weird; October, 2008, review of Steampunk.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2009, review of Finch; December 1, 2013, review of Annihilation; March 15, 2014, review of Authority; September 1, 2014, review of Acceptance; February 15, 2017, review of Borne; December 15, 2017, review of The Strange Bird; October 1, 2019, review of Dead Astronauts; May 15, 2020, review of A Peculiar Peril; June 1, 2020, review of The Big Book of Modern Fantasy: The Ultimate Collection; January 15, 2021, review of Hummingbird Salamander; March 15, 2023, review of Veniss Underground; August 15, 2024, review of Absolution.
Library Journal, February 15, 2008, Jackie Cassada, review of The New Weird, p. 98; December 1, 2008, Jackie Cassada, review of Fast Ships, Black Sails, p. 116; August, 2010, Jackie Cassada, review of The Third Bear, p. 73; November 15, 2010, Jackie Cassada, review of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, p. 63; February 15, 2014, review of Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, p. 76.
Locus, May, 1989, review of The Book of Frog, p. 51; October 15, 2003, Ray Olson, review of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, 83rd Edition, p. 381; June 1, 2004, Regina Schroeder, review of Secret Life, p. 1714; August 1, 2006, Carl Hays, review of Shriek, p. 58; March 1, 2008, Carl Hays, review of The New Weird, p. 57; May 15, 2008, Ben Segedin, review of Steampunk, p. 34; December 15, 2008, Frieda Murray, review of Fast Ships, Black Sails, p. 29; October 15, 2009, Jessica Moyer, review of Finch, p. 31.
Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2014, Lydia Millet, review of Annihilation.
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 2008, James Sallis, review of The New Weird, p. 30.
New Statesman, August, 29, 2014, Neel Mukherjee, “Heart of Darkness,” review of the “Southern Reach” trilogy, p. 46.
New Yorker, April 24, 2017, Laura Miller, review of Borne, p. 96.
New York Times Book Review, February 14, 2014, Tom LeClair, review of Annihilation; May 7, 2017, Wai Chee Dimock, review of Borne, p. 18; July 12, 2020, Laird Hunt, review of A Peculiar Peril, p. 13; May 9, 2021, Helen Phillips, review of Hummingbird Salamander, p. 15; November 17, 2024, Alec Nevala-Lee, “Uncanny X-Men,” review of Absolution, p. 14; November 17, 2024, Alexandra Alter, author interview, p. 15.
Publishers Weekly, May 6, 2002, review of City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris, p. 40; July 8, 2002, review of Leviathan 3, p. 36; February 3, 2003, review of Veniss Underground, p. 59, and Michael Levy, “Underground Author Rises to the Surface,” p. 60; December 23, 2013, review of Annihilation, p. 28; February 24, 2014, review of Authority, p. 151; July 28, 2014, review of Acceptance, p. 59; June 6, 2016, review of The Big Book of Science Fiction, p. 66; February 6, 2017, review of Borne, p. 40; May 27, 2019, review of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy: The Ultimate Collection, p. 70; October 28, 2019, review of Dead Astronauts, p. 77; May 18, 2020, review of The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, p. 43; June 1, 2020, review of A Peculiar Peril, p. 62; August 23, 2021, review of Secret Life, p. 53.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1996, Lance Olsen, review of Dradin, in Love, p. 192; fall, 2002, Brian Evenson, review of City of Saints and Madmen, p. 148; spring, 2003, Steve Tomasula, review of Leviathan 3, p. 149; August 18, 2003, Steve Tomasula, review of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, 83rd Edition, p. 62; spring, 2004, Steve Tomasula, review of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, 83rd Edition; June 26, 2006, review of Shriek, p. 36; May 28, 2007, review of Best American Fantasy, p. 42; December 24, 2007, review of The New Weird, p. 33; April 21, 2008, review of Steampunk, p. 40; October 20, 2008, review of Best American Fantasy 2, p. 40; October 27, 2008, review of Fast Ships, Black Sails, p. 37; August 24, 2009, review of Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer, p. 55; September 14, 2009, review of Finch, p. 31; November 9, 2009, “Let Loose: It’s Important to Have Fun with New Media,” p. 50; June 21, 2010, review of The Third Bear, p. 37; September 27, 2010, review of Steampunk II, p. 42.
Science Fiction Chronicle, October, 1996, Don D’Ammassa, review of Leviathan: Into the Gray, p. 80; June, 1997, Don D’Ammassa, review of The Book of Lost Places, p. 45; August, 1999, Don D’Ammassa, review of Leviathan 2, p. 46; June, 2000, Don D’Ammassa, review of The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, p. 59; January, 2002, Don D’Ammassa, review of City of Saints and Madmen, p. 23.
Small Press Review, April, 1997, Wayne Edwards, review of The Book of Lost Places, p. 7; May, 2008, review of The New Weird.
Spectator, November 2, 2024, Michael Moorcock, “In the Danger Zone,” review of Absolution, p. 44.
Washington Post Book World, April 7, 2002, Paul Di Filippo, review of Leviathan, p. 13; February 26, 2014, Sara Sklaroff, review of Annihilation.
Writer, January, 2010, “Strategic Tips for Today’s Storytellers,” p. 44.
ONLINE
Audubon Online, https://www.audubon.org/magazine/ (September 21, 2022), Jessica Bruder, “Best-Selling Author Jeff VanderMeer Finds That Nature Is Stranger Than Fiction.”
Grimdark, https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/ (May 14, 2023), Elizabeth Tabler, author interview.
Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (August 27, 2014), Adam Roberts, review of Acceptance; (June 9, 2015), Alison Flood, author interview; (April 16, 2021), Sam Leith, “Jeff VanderMeer: ‘Success Changes Who I Can Reach with an Environmental Message.’”
Infinity Plus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/ (March 16, 2002), Keith Brooke, review of City of Saints and Madmen; (October 12, 2003) Jeffrey Ford, interview with VanderMeer; (January 17, 2011), Keith Brooke, review of Shriek.
Interview, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/ (November 8, 2024), Victor LaValle, author interview.
Jeff VanderMeer website, https://www.jeffvandermeer.com (May 12, 2025).
Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (May 29, 2024), Mark Athitakis, “Jeff VanderMeer Grants SFF Fans ‘Absolution,'” author interview.
Locus Online, http://www.locusmag.com/ (October 12, 2003) Rich Horton, review of Leviathan 3.
Medium, https://woahitsjuanito.medium.com/ (November 13, 2020), Juan Barquin, “The Peculiarities of Jeff VanderMeer: An Interview.”
Modern Word, http://www.themodernword.com/ (August 13, 2003), Allen B. Ruch, review of City of Saints and Madmen.
National Public Radio website, http://www.npr.org/ (September 2, 2014), Jason Sheehan, review of Acceptance.
Powell’s Books website, https://www.powells.com/ (September 9, 2022), “Powell’s Q&A: Jeff VanderMeer, Author of ‘Annihilation.’”
SFFWorld.com, http://www.sffworld.com/ (January 16, 2011), Rob H. Bedford, review of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, 83rd Edition; (January 16, 2011), review of Shriek.
SF Site, http://www.sfsite.com/ (May 1, 2002), Nick Geners, “Our Man in Ambergris: An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer”; (October 12, 2003) William Thompson, review of City of Saints and Madmen, and Leviathan 3.
Tangent Online, http://www.tangentonline.com/ (November 9, 2002), Jay Lake, review of Leviathan 3.
Short Bio
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. Environmental nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire, among others. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023. Forthcoming work includes Absolution, a fourth Southern Reach novel.
Long Bio
Jeff VanderMeer's NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy has been translated into over 37 languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was made into a movie by Paramount in 2018. Recent works include Hummingbird Salamander, Bliss, and A Peculiar Peril, in addition to Theo Ellsworth's graphic novel adaptation of his short story Secret Life. Dead Astronauts, Borne (a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Strange Bird, set in the Borne universe, are being developed for TV by AMC and continue to explore themes related to the environment, animals, and our future.
Over a 35-year career, VanderMeer has been a four-time World Fantasy Award winner and 20-time nominee. For eleven years, VanderMeer served as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp he helped found, located at Wofford College in South Carolina.
Called “the weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker, VanderMeer has lived in Florida since he was in middle school, attending the University of Florida in Gainesville before moving to Tallahassee in 1992. He frequently speaks about issues related to Florida, climate change, and storytelling, including at Vanderbilt, DePaul, MIT, the Key West Literary Seminar, Yale, and the Guggenheim. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, among many others, and was the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. Nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Esquire, TIME, Current Affairs, Vulture, and the Los Angeles Times. He was a 2019 National Book Award judge for fiction and previously served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, among others.
Previous novels include Veniss Underground and the Ambergris Cycle (City of Saints & Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch), reissued from MCD/FSG, with nonfiction titles including Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated writing guide, and Booklife, the first career guide to fully integrate the internet into tactics and strategy. His short story collections include The Third Bear, the title story from which is under option for development into film.
VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction, which he started writing at age eight, publishing his first short story at age 14. Early on, he wrote and published poetry and short fiction extensively, in addition to running a publishing house, the Ministry of Whimsy, and holding literary events featuring National Book Award winners like Richard Wilbur and other major poets at the Thomasville Center in Gainesville, Florida. The Ministry became the first small press to have a book win the Philip K. Dick Award. (Stepan Chapman’s The Troika) and he edited the award-winning Leviathan series, which published writers such as Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, and Michael Moorcock.
VanderMeer also co-edited (with wife Ann VanderMeer) ground-breaking anthologies such as Best American Fantasy 1 and 2, Steampunk 1 and 2, New Weird, The Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy.
For several years, the VanderMeers also ran Cheeky Frawg, a small press that published Amos Tutuola and many works in translation, including Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck’s first collection in English and Finnish icon Leena Krohn’s complete stories in one mammoth volume. The VanderMeers rewilded yard in Tallahassee has been featured in national and international media, including in an Arte TV documentary in Europe and an Audubon Magazine profile.
While you're here, have some links to my short fiction.
What's the best way for readers to reach you?
By using the feedback form, or by snail mail at POB 38190, Tallahassee, FL 32315. I personally read all incoming email generated by the feedback form. I can't promise a response to every email, however, but always appreciate hearing from people.
Who is your agent?
My literary and film/TV agent is Joe Veltre of the Gersh Agency. For all queries for blurbs, reprint rights, foreign rights, or movie/TV rights, please use the contact form and I will respond or route the query to my agent or other appropriate individual.
Who do I contact to book you for an appearance?
Please contact Rachel Zeidman at the Gersh Speakers Bureau via email or phone. rzeidman@gersh.com | t: (212) 634-8115
Are you currently booking personal appearances and what kinds of gigs do you usually accept?
I am booking personal appearances, both in-person and remote. I have a wide range of experience that includes: readings; keynote speeches; creative writing talks or lectures; rewilding talks; humorous yet informative career "an evening with Jeff VanderMeer" events; book-to-movie presentations; and much more.
I have spoken at the Library of Congress, MIT, Columbia, Yale, the Key West Literary Seminar, and many more. Events at universities have included invites from English, Creative Writing, Environmental Science, and Biology departments. Writer-in-residence experiences have ranged from two-week stints to full semesters. I typically do not teach writer workshops as these are intensive and, for me, include considerable time on the front end and follow up after the workshop.
How do I get signed, personalized copies of your books?
You can order them through my local bookstore, Midtown Reader. I visit periodically to sign and personalize all orders. Usually, you'll also get little extras, like exclusive VanderWild postcards. If your country isn't on their dropdown list, query the bookstore.
How can I help support your rewilding efforts?
There are two main ways besides buying my books.
--You can subscribe to the VanderWild YouTube Channel, which posts exclusive video content of the wildlife in our backyard.
--You can buy VanderWild merch at our Threadless store.
The profits from both enterprises go back into environmental projects or support St. Francis, our regional wildlife rescue organization.
Do you have any advice for people who want to re-wild their own yard?
You can find some information at the yard section of this website. This Audubon profile by Jessica Bruder may also provide some sense of what a rewilding journey can look like--and if you live in an apartment, this Esquire piece I wrote on rewilding your balcony may also be of use.
It's important to realize that all herbicides, pesticides, and chemical, store-bought fertilizer kill organisms in your yard that you don't intend to kill. For example, fireflies live in the ground the first two years of their lives. Also, raking up dead leaves kills countless moths and butterflies plus the creatures that live in the thin layer of leaves. Use of native plants and understanding the balance in your yard should mean you don't have to use these harmful products or engage in harmful activities.
My best advice is to consult a native nursery in your area or an online expert in native plants familiar with your area. Most garden centers and regular nurseries do not provide proper advice. A native nursery will know what's best for your area. Without native plants, birds and animals have no food. You can find more general information and my tips for re-wilding in this Guardian article.
Can you tell us more about the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, inspiration for the Area X trilogy?
It's an amazing place and the refuge's online store sells an Area X t-shirt (ships internationally) to help fund things like their endangered salamander project. But maybe it's better to see the place for yourself, via this brief video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5stee_pAAU&feature=emb_logo
Can aspiring writers send you their manuscript?
Although I do sometimes blurb forthcoming books, I unfortunately cannot read book manuscripts at this time.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
If you really love writing, never stop. Endurance, resolve, and a commitment to put in the hard work of practice, practice, practice can carry you very far. Also, a commitment to exercise will carry you through rough patches, or some kind of physical activity that energizes you and gets you out of your head. Otherwise, most of my advice can be found in my books Wonderbook and Booklife. The Wonderbook website is free to use as well.
Jeff VanderMeer Grants SFF Fans ‘Absolution’
BY Mark Athitakis • May 29, 2024
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Jeff VanderMeer Grants SFF Fans ‘Absolution’
Jeff VanderMeer. Photo by Ditte Valente
In early April, Jeff VanderMeer dropped a surprise on fans, announcing the release of Absolution (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 22), the fourth book in his bestselling and critically acclaimed Southern Reach trilogy. No question, there’s still plenty to explore: The first three books chronicled the shadowy Area X, a mysterious uninhabited coastal region, and organizations like the Southern Reach and Séance & Science Brigade that have conducted ill-fated expeditions into it. While revealing the prehistory of Area X and extending its story into its future, the new book will resolve many of the series’ plot threads, VanderMeer says—while retaining the discomfiting ambiguity that’s been the hallmark of his horror/science-fiction mashup.
Absolution will be preceded this summer by reissues of the three previous books to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first of them, Annihilation. Speaking from his home in Tallahassee, Florida, VanderMeer discussed the genesis of Absolution, revisiting his past work, and whether we’ve truly reached the end of the Southern Reach story. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Were you surprised that you wanted to pursue a fourth book in the series?
I really didn’t plan to write another [Southern Reach] book, but there were these questions that had their hooks in my subconscious. I really wanted to know more about what the Séance & Science Brigade had been up to before Area X came down the border. I also had this weird vision of a scientific expedition to the Forgotten Coast, 20 years before Area X occurred, which had somehow created a condition for, or had an influence over, what happened later. And that was very powerful. All of this kind of lived beneath the surface of my mind.
What was the writing process itself like?
Last year, the floodgates broke open. For six months, I really wrote in a fever dream, which is very much like how I wrote Annihilation. Morning, noon, and night, basically. Writers don’t like to talk about this phase because it sounds…maybe too surreal. But you’re literally in an ecstatic trance—you’re basically having visions. So by year’s end, the novel was complete. It was the single greatest writing jag of my entire life, and so instinctual that I don’t remember large portions of it. I’m still figuring out how it happened.
Do actual dreams play a role in helping you create that dream state?
I will often have a dream that I write down that becomes the foundation for something. I have a lot of dreams I write down that don’t become anything. But often I’m also kind of primed by something, and I reward my subconscious a lot. So if a dream comes up with something that seems powerful, I will think about it consciously for a while, and then let it drift back into the subconscious until it’s ready.
People often talk about the Southern Reach series as relevant to our present concerns about the environment and politics. Was there something specific you were concerned about that fueled Absolution?
I think that to some degree it was the idea of the world compromising us—feeling this burden of guilt or anxiety over not being sure how much agency we have, not being sure if we’re doing the right thing. That manifests [in Absolution] somewhat in the character of Old Jim, an operative for Central who had been very intensely manipulated by Central, trying to do the right thing in these difficult circumstances on the Forgotten Coast. There’s always something in the text that reflects the modern day. There was a lot in Authority about bureaucracy that is really also about how we receive information in the modern era, like through the internet, and how dangerous and difficult and anxiety ridden that can be. I think that there are things like that in Absolution. Maybe it’s in a totally different context, but it is commenting on some part of the modern condition.
Whom did you first tell that you were working on a fourth book?
I told my wife, Ann, and then vaguely told my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sean McDonald. I told him that I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen with it. And then about a month in, it was so intense that I knew I was going to have a book. Then I just decided to just keep writing. I didn’t really tell anybody, though at certain points, when I felt I’d reached a certain level of completion, I’d share some excerpts online, which helps motivate me.
How do you handle fan response to those excerpts? I imagine a lot of writers would just find the comments on a work-in-progress overbearing.
My readers have been extremely kind to me, so [there’s been] a very generous sense of play. They’re really cheerleading more than critiquing when I do that. That’s the kind of energy that I’ve tried to use to engage with my readers online, like over fan art, especially with the Southern Reach series. The feedback doesn’t live in my headspace except in a really good way.
One hallmark of the Southern Reach series is that it’s written in a variety of registers. Was it a challenge to find a tone that was unique to Absolution?
It was such a pleasure writing this book, because it’s in three distinct parts, which interlock and form the full story. The first part of the story involves this long-ago expedition and its impact on things in the first three books. It’s uncanny fiction, and it allowed me to get to that sweet spot of what I think readers love about the books. It’s told in a more clinical style, because the things that are happening are so startling. The middle section involving Old Jim and the Séance & Science Brigade is more in the style of parts of Acceptance and Annihilation. The third part is the story of what really happened on the first expedition, and it’s just out of control—a total head trip and in a totally different style.
Did you have a hand in selecting the writers who wrote introductions for the reissues of the first three books (Karen Joy Fowler, N.K. Jemisin, and Helen Macdonald)?
They were writers I recommended who I really love, and writers who I really respect in terms of how they express themselves. It was a dream to have these three write about the series.
So you know that in her introduction to Annihilation, Karen Joy Fowler writes that the Southern Reach series is at four books “and counting.” Are you done with Area X?
That’s a good question. Absolution could be considered a prequel, even though it also covers part of the time period covered by the first three novels. And then also, without giving too much away, it could in some ways be considered a sequel. It’s a very sneaky book. And in that context, there are some ideas I’m kind of developing as another self-contained story. There are some ideas floating around. But I don’t know.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeff VanderMeer
Born July 7, 1968 (age 56)
Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation
Writerauthoreditorpublisher
Genre Speculative fiction
Fantasy
Metafiction
Horror
Science fiction
Weird fiction
Literary movement New Weird
Notable awards Nebula Award for Best Novel, Shirley Jackson Award, World Fantasy Award
Spouse Ann VanderMeer
Website
www.jeffvandermeer.com Edit this at Wikidata
Jeff VanderMeer (born July 7, 1968[1]) is an American author, editor, and literary critic. Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Series. The series' first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula[2] and Shirley Jackson Awards,[3] and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland.[4] Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne. He has also edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as The New Weird, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction.[5]
VanderMeer has been called "one of the most remarkable practitioners of the literary fantastic in America today,"[6] with The New Yorker naming him the "King of Weird Fiction".[7] VanderMeer's fiction is noted for eluding genre classifications[8] even as his works bring in themes and elements from genres such as postmodernism,[9] ecofiction,[10] the New Weird and post-apocalyptic fiction.[11]
VanderMeer's writing has been described as "evocative" and containing "intellectual observations both profound and disturbing,"[12] and has been compared with the works of Jorge Luis Borges,[12][13] Franz Kafka, and Henry David Thoreau.[7]
Early life and education
VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania in 1968, and spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps.[14] After returning to the United States, he spent time in Ithaca, New York, and Gainesville, Florida. He attended the University of Florida for three years and, in 1992, took part in the Clarion Writers Workshop.[14]
When VanderMeer was 20, he read Angela Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which he has said "blew the back of my head off, rewired my brain: I had never encountered prose like that before, never such passion and boldness on the page."[15] Carter's fiction inspired VanderMeer to both improve and be fearless with his own writing.[15]
Career
Writing
VanderMeer began writing in the late 1980s while still in high school and quickly became a prolific contributor to small-press magazines.[16] During this time VanderMeer wrote a number of horror and fantasy short stories, some of which were collected in his 1989 self-published book The Book of Frog and in the 1996 collection The Book of Lost Places.[16] He also wrote poetry—his poem "Flight Is for Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over" was a co-winner of the 1994 Rhysling Award—and edited two issues of the self-published zine Jabberwocky.[16][14]
One of VanderMeer's early successes was his 2001 short-story collection City of Saints and Madmen, set in the imaginary city of Ambergris. Several of VanderMeer's novels were subsequently set in the same place, including Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009), the latter of which was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.[17] In 2000, his novella The Transformation of Martin Lake won the World Fantasy Award.
VanderMeer has also worked in other media, including on a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church. The band Murder By Death likewise recorded a soundtrack for Finch, which was released alongside a limited edition of the book. VanderMeer also wrote a Predator tie-in novel for Dark Horse Comics called Predator: South China Seas and worked with animator Joel Veitch on a Play Station Europe animation of his story "A New Face in Hell".
The Southern Reach Series
Main article: Southern Reach Series
In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published VanderMeer's Southern Reach Series, consisting of the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. The story focuses on a secret agency that manages expeditions into a location known as Area X. The area is an uninhabited and abandoned part of the United States that nature has begun to reclaim after a mysterious world-changing event.[18]
VanderMeer has said that the main inspiration for Area X and the series was his hike through St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge.[19] The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos is among the books VanderMeer has cited as also having had an influence.[18]
The original trilogy was released in quick succession over an 8-month period, in what has been called an innovative "Netflix-inspired strategy."[20] The strategy helped the second and third books reach the New York Times Bestseller list, and established VanderMeer as "one of the most forward-thinking authors of the decade."[20][21][22]
The series ended up being highly honored, with Annihilation winning the Nebula[2] and Shirley Jackson Awards for Best Novel.[3] The entire original trilogy was also named a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy Award[23] and the 2016 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis.[24] Annihilation was also adapted into a film of the same name by writer-director Alex Garland.[4] The film stars Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez,[25] Tessa Thompson,[26] Jennifer Jason Leigh,[27] and Oscar Isaac.[28]
Later writing
In 2017 VanderMeer released Borne, a "biotech apocalypse" novel[29] about a scavenger named Rachel trying to survive both a city "plunged into a primordial realm of myth, fable, and fairy tale"[11] and a five-story-tall flying bear named Mord. As with the Southern Reach trilogy, the novel was highly praised, with The Guardian saying, "VanderMeer’s recent work has been Ovidian in its underpinnings, exploring the radical transformation of life forms and the seams between them."[29] Publishers Weekly said the novel reads "like a dispatch from a world lodged somewhere between science fiction, myth, and a video game" and that with Borne Vandermeer has essentially invented a new literary genre, "weird literature."[8]
Paramount Pictures has optioned the film rights to Borne.[30]
In August 2017 VanderMeer released the novella The Strange Bird: A Borne Story.[31] The stand-alone story is set in the same world as Borne but featuring different characters.
Dead Astronauts, a stand-alone short novel set in the Borne universe, was released on December 3, 2019.[32] A stand-alone novel, Hummingbird Salamander, was published on April 6, 2021.
Literary criticism and editing
VanderMeer is a frequent writer of critical literary reviews and essays, which have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic,[33] The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and other places. For a number of years he was a regular columnist for the Amazon book-culture blog and has served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, among others. He has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference.
In 2019, VanderMeer was a judge for the National Book Award for Fiction.[34]
VanderMeer has also edited a number of anthologies. He won a 2003 World Fantasy Award for Leviathan, Volume Three, a collection of genre-bending stories he edited with Forrest Aguirre. He and Mark Roberts were also finalists for the same award the next year for the anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
Most of his recent anthologies have been collaborations with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, the Hugo-award-winning former editor of Weird Tales. These anthologies include The New Weird, a collection of stories from New Weird authors; Last Drink Bird Head, a charity anthology benefiting literacy; The Weird, a World Fantasy Award winning collection of weird fiction; Time Traveler's Almanac, an anthology of time-travel fiction; Fast Ships, Black Sails, a pirate fiction anthology; and the Locus Award winning The Big Book of Science Fiction.[5]
VanderMeer is the founding editor and publisher of the Ministry of Whimsy Press, which he set up in the late 1980s while still in high school.[14][35] The press is currently an imprint of Wyrm Publishing.[36] One of the Ministry's publications, The Troika by Stepan Chapman, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1997.
Teaching
VanderMeer has been involved in teaching creative writing. One of the projects he is involved with is Shared Worlds, an annual two-week program that aims to teach creative writing to teenagers.[37] VanderMeer has also taught at the Clarion Workshop[38] and at Trinity Prep School. In addition to his teaching, VanderMeer has also written guides to creative writing such as Wonderbook, which won a BSFA Award,[39] a Locus Award, and was nominated for a Hugo and World Fantasy Award.[40]
Critical reputation
VanderMeer has been called "one of the most remarkable practitioners of the literary fantastic in America today,"[6] with The New Yorker naming him the "King of Weird Fiction."[7] VanderMeer's fiction is noted for eluding genre classifications[8] even as his works bring in themes and elements from genres such as postmodernism,[9] ecofiction,[10] the New Weird and post-apocalyptic fiction.[11]
VanderMeer's fiction has been described as "evocative (with) intellectual observations both profound and disturbing"[12] and "lyrical and harrowing,"[41] with his mixing of genres producing "something unique and unsettling."[42]
VanderMeer's writing has been compared with the works of Jorge Luis Borges,[12][13] Kafka, and Thoreau.[7]
Personal life
In 2003, VanderMeer married Ann Kennedy, then editor for the small Buzzcity Press and Silver Web magazine. The couple lives in Tallahassee, Florida. They have two cats.[43] One is named Neo.[44][43]
Awards
VanderMeer has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award 14 times.[45] He has also won an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers' Fellowship, and, the Le Cafard Cosmique award in France and the Tähtifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year's best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others.
Work Year & Award Category Result Ref.
Flight is for Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over 1994 Rhysling Award Short Poem Won
The Bone-Carver's Tale 1996 Asimov's Readers' Poll Short Story 10th Place [46]
Dradin, In Love 1997 Theodore Sturgeon Award Short Science Fiction Finalist [47]
The Ministry of Whimsy Press 1998 World Fantasy Special Award—Non-professional Nominated
Leviathan 2
(with Rose Secrest)
1999 British Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
The Legacy of Boccaccio 1999 British Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
The Transformation of Martin Lake 2000 World Fantasy Award Novella Won
Leviathan 3
(with Forrest Aguirre)
2002 Philip K. Dick Award Nominated
2003 Locus Award Anthology Nominated [48]
2003 World Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
City of Saints and Madmen 2002 Locus Award Collection Nominated
2003 World Fantasy Award Collection Nominated
2007 Tähtifantasia Award Won
The Exchange by Nicholas Sporlender, illustrated by Louis Verden 2002 Locus Award Short Story Nominated
Veniss Underground 2003 International Horror Guild Award First Novel Nominated [49]
2003 Bram Stoker Award First Novel Nominated
2004 Locus Award First Novel Nominated
2004 World Fantasy Award Novel Nominated
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
(with Mark Roberts)
2004 Hugo Award Related Work Nominated
2003 International Horror Guild Award Anthology Nominated
2004 World Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
2004 British Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
Album Zutique 2004 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
Secret Life 2005 Locus Award Collection Nominated
Three Days in a Border Town 2005 Locus Award Novelette Nominated
The Farmer's Cat 2006 Locus Award Short Story Nominated
Shriek: An Afterword 2007 Locus Award Fantasy Novel Nominated
The Secret Paths of Rajan Khanna 2007 Locus Award Short Story Nominated
The Third Bear 2008 WSFA Small Press Award Shortlisted
2008 Locus Award Short Story Nominated
2008 Shirley Jackson Award Short Fiction Nominated [50]
The Third Bear (Collection) 2011 Shirley Jackson Award Collection Nominated [51]
2011 Locus Award Collection Nominated
2011 World Fantasy Award Collection Nominated
The Surgeon's Tale 2008 Locus Award Novelette Nominated
The Situation 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Novelette Nominated [52]
Fast Ships, Black Sails
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2009 Shirley Jackson Award Anthology Nominated [53]
2009 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
2010 FantLab's Book of the Year Award Anthology Nominated
Fixing Hanover 2009 Locus Award Short Story Nominated
Steampunk
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2009 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
2009 World Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
The New Weird
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2009 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
Best American Fantasy
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2010 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
Finch 2010 Locus Award Fantasy Novel Nominated
2010 World Fantasy Award Novel Nominated
2010 Nebula Award Novel Nominated
2011 RUSA CODES Reading List Fantasy Shortlisted [54]
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2012 Shirley Jackson Award Anthology Nominated [55]
2012 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
2012 World Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
The Steampunk Bible
(with Selena Chambers)
2012 Hugo Award Related Work Nominated
2012 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional Nominated
The Weird
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2012 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
2012 World Fantasy Award Anthology Won
2012 British Fantasy Award Anthology Won
Weird Fiction Review
(with Ann VanderMeer & Adam Mills)
2013 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional award Nominated
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction 2013 BSFA Award Non-Fiction Won
2014 Locus Award Non-Fiction Won
2014 Hugo Award Related Work Nominated
2014 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional award Nominated
Annihilation 2014 Shirley Jackson Award Novel Won
2014 Goodreads Choice Awards Science Fiction Nominated [56]
2015 Locus Award SF Novel Nominated
2015 Premio Ignotus Foreign Novel Nominated
2015 Nebula Award Novel Won
2015 Kurd Laßwitz Award Foreign Work Nominated [57]
2016 Tähtivaeltaja Award Nominated
Authority 2015 Locus Award SF Novel Nominated
Acceptance 2015 Locus Award SF Novel Nominated
The Time Traveler's Almanac
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2015 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy 2015 World Fantasy Award Novel Nominated
2015 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Finalist
2016 Kurd Laßwitz Award Foreign Work Nominated [58]
From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer's Surreal Journey 2015 BSFA Award Non-Fiction Nominated
Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2016 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
The Big Book of Science Fiction
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2017 Locus Award Anthology Won
Borne 2017 Goodreads Choice Awards Science Fiction Nominated [59]
2018 Locus Award SF Novel Nominated
2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award Finalist
2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Finalist
2018 Kurd Laßwitz Award Foreign Work Nominated [60]
2021 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire Foreign Novel Nominated [61]
Dead Astronauts 2020 Locus Award Fantasy Novel Nominated
2020 Dragon Awards Fantasy Nominated
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2020 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
2020 World Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
2020 British Fantasy Award Anthology Nominated
Hummingbird Salamander 2022 Shirley Jackson Award Novel Nominated [62]
2022 Locus SF Novel Nominated
A Peculiar Peril 2021 Locus Award Young Adult Book Nominated
2021 Dragon Awards Young Adult/Middle Grade Nominated
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy
(with Ann VanderMeer)
2021 Locus Award Anthology Nominated
2021 World Fantasy Award Anthology Won
Absolution 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards Science Fiction Nominated [63]
Bibliography
Novels
Dradin, In Love (1996, collected in all editions of City of Saints and Madmen)
The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, by Duncan Shriek (1999, collected in all editions of City of Saints and Madmen)
Veniss Underground (2003)
Shriek: An Afterword (2006)
Predator: South China Sea (2008)
Finch (2009)
Southern Reach Series:
Annihilation (2014)
Authority (2014)
Acceptance (2014)
Absolution (2024)
Borne (2017)
Dead Astronauts (2019)
The Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead:
A Peculiar Peril (2020)
A Terrible Trouble (forthcoming)[64]
Hummingbird Salamander (2021)
The Stone Shed (forthcoming)[65]
Nonfiction
Why Should I Cut Your Throat? (2004)
Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer (2009)
The Steampunk Bible (2010) (with Selena Chambers)
Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy through Essays, Articles & Reviews (2011)
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013)
The Steampunk User's Manual: An Illustrated Practical and Whimsical Guide to Creating Retro-futurist Dreams (2014)
Collections
The Book of Frog (1989)
Lyric of the Highway Mariner: A Collection of Poems (1991)
The Book of Lost Places (1996)
City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (2001)
City of Saints and Madmen (2002, substantially expanded from the 2001 edition)
City of Saints and Madmen (2004, expanded from the 2002 edition)
The Day Dali Died (2003)
Secret Life (2004)
Why Should I Cut Your Throat? (non-fiction, 2004)
VanderMeer 2005 (promotional sampler, 2005)
Secret Lives (2006)
The Surgeon's Tale and Other Stories (with Cat Rambo, 2007)
The Third Bear (2010, Tachyon Publications)
The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (2011)
Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance (2014)
Short fiction
(Uncollected)
The Mare Tenebrosum (1988)
Varlags Are Strange (1989)
One-Armed Bandit (1989)
So the Dead Walk Slowly (1989)
Disintegration (1990)
Requiem for the Machine (1990)
Welcome to the Masque (1991)
Flesh (1991)
Ex Post Facto (1992)
Confessions (1992)
Ghost in the Machine (1995)
A Report on the Living Dead (A Memoir of the Last Days) (1996)
David Pangborn Takes A Walk (1996)
Afterwards, Drowning (1996)
Afterwards, Burying the Dog (1997)
Mansions on the Moon (2001)
An Enthusiastic Foreword by the Editors (2003)
Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation (2003)
How Benjobi Song Came to Rule Iphagenia (2004)
A New Face in Hell (2007)
King Tales (2007)
Island Tales (2008)
The Situation (2008)
Why the Vulture is Bald (2008)
The Mona Lisa (2009) (with Tessa Kum)
Errata (2010)
The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod (2010)
The Lizard Dance (2011) (with Gio Clairval)
Myster Odd Theme Song (Poem) (2011)
Komodo (2012)
No Breather in the World but Thee (2013)
Fragments from the Notes of a Dead Mycologist (2014)
Marmot Season (2017)
The Strange Bird (a Borne story) (2017)
This World is Full of Monsters (2017)
The Comet Man Book Club Questions (2020)
Epilogue: Clarity, Now With Hellscape (2020)
The Leviathan's Tale (2020)
Wildlife (2022)
Other projects
The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (with Ann VanderMeer, 2010, Tachyon Publications)
Anthologies edited
Leviathan 1 (with Luke O'Grady, 1994)
Leviathan 2 (with Rose Secrest, 1998)
Leviathan 3 (with Forrest Aguirre, 2002)
Album Zutique (2003)
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (with Mark Roberts, 2003)
The New Weird (with Ann VanderMeer, 2007)
Best American Fantasy (with Ann VanderMeer, 2007)
Best American Fantasy: v. 2 (with Ann VanderMeer, 2008)
Last Drink Bird Head, (2008)
Steampunk (with Ann VanderMeer, 2008)
Fast Ships, Black Sails, (with Ann VanderMeer, 2009) – Fantasy pirate stories
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (2010)
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (with Ann VanderMeer, 2011)
ODD? (with Ann VanderMeer, 2011)
The Weird (with Ann VanderMeer, 2012)
The Time Traveler's Almanac (with Ann VanderMeer, 2014)
Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (with Ann VanderMeer, 2015)
The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection (with Ann VanderMeer, 2016)
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (with Ann VanderMeer, 2019)
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (with Ann VanderMeer, 2020)
IN CONVERSATION
Jeff VanderMeer Tells Victor
LaValle Why He Returned to Area X
By Victor LaValle
November 8, 2024
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Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer, photographed by Azhar Khan.
Ten years ago, Jeff VanderMeer penned the unsettling, swampy, bureaucratic hellscape of Area X: a contaminated region off of the Floridan coast that became the setting for his immensely popular Southern Reach trilogy, comprised off Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. The books were devoured by fans across the world and appear especially urgent now as we slide further into our own real-world dystopia of warm waters and toxic air. That VanderMeer has now published a fourth book in the series, Absolution—a follow-up that’s just as unnerving, obsessively researched, and rich in detail—serves as a strong testament to the novels’ enduring resonance. “The line is so permeable that the place where you begin to go off into imagination and the place where the real world is unimaginable seems wonderfully amorphous,” remarked fellow fantasy writer Victor LaValle when the two got on a call hours before Hurricane Milton was set to make landfall last month. In conversation, the two got to talking about their horror-fiction roots, VandeMeer’s beloved social media photo diary, and whether he’d ever consider making another return to Area X in the future.
———
VICTOR LAVALLE: Good morning.
JEFF VANDERMEER: Good morning. How are you? Good to see you.
LAVALLE: Same, same. Are you home, are you safe?
VANDERMEER: I’m safe. Luckily it’s going a little south, so we’re not even getting that much rain. We have a tree that fell gently on our carport that’s now overhanging our roof. It hasn’t caused any damage, but they can’t get rid of it for another week, so it’s like this thing just hanging over our heads that we hope doesn’t shift at all.
LAVALLE: I feel like that’s apt.
VANDERMEER: It is, right? It’s metaphorically correct. Also, Victor, I want to say congrats on the series. I love seeing the photos of you on the set and everything. It’s really awesome.
LAVALLE: Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. It’s interesting–it’s probably a conversation we can save for in-person about the joys and non-joys of the process.
VANDERMEER: Hopefully there have been slightly more joys than non-joys.
LAVALLE: For sure. Even at the moments of frustration, I have a moment where I go, “This is just fun.”
VANDERMEER: It’s amazing, right?
LAVALLE: Yeah. And I think moving into that world has reminded me of my great appreciation for the fact that in the end, I still get to go back and write a book.
VANDERMEER: Exactly. And you’re not going to be completely subsumed by Hollywood either, right?
LAVALLE: For sure.
VANDERMEER: That’s the thing, I want to remain a novelist who maybe dips my finger in every once in a while if I get the opportunity.
LAVALLE: That’s right. Anyway, I also know that we’re talking about the new book. And, maybe this will seem like a slightly cheesy sort of segue, but I was thinking of Southern Reach as a trilogy, and Absolution as seasons, as opposed to one particular tale.
VANDERMEER: That’s a really interesting way of looking at it, because even if you were to make a series out of these books, you would make radically different ones out of each book.
LAVALLE: That’s right.
VANDERMEER: If only one book existed, let’s say Acceptance could exist on its own, they would still be completely different in texture, you know?
LAVALLE: Well, that’s wonderful. I also feel like what was so fun and interesting about Absolution is that it almost feels like a number of seasons were sort of moving across each other in a way. There’s a powerful cumulative effect, at least for myself as a reader, feeling like I could see storytelling threads in each part that speak to one of, if not all of each book.
VANDERMEER: Yeah. After writing it, I realized it kind of maps to the first three books with the three sections. And at the same time, I had this real urgency for various reasons to tell this particular story. I started on July 31st of last year, and I finished it in December. On the last day of the year I had a final draft. So, you know what that means. I had 150,000 words, but that means I’d actually written closer to 400,000.
LAVALLE: Yeah, that’s right.
VANDERMEER: And that structure really helped, because anytime I got a little stuck on one section, I just went to the other. Information that seemed like it was going in part one I’d be like, “Oh, no, that gets pushed to part three.” I just kept pushing stuff which was actually useful to the narrative, and it was fun because the styles are so different that it reinvigorated me to be able to go back and forth between them. I don’t know if you’ve read Gene Wolfe’s, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but it’s three interlocking novellas that form one story. I’ve always been interested in that structure. Even Pnin by [Vladimir] Nabokov, or Ian Banks’ Consider Phlebas, where the story is really completed in this appendix where some emotionally devastating information is conveyed, because you leave the character at a certain point. I like the idea of some of the answers being in Lowry’s deranged, toxic, and absurd toxic masculinity.
LAVALLE: It’s very funny. Well, I appreciated the way that you sort of have to sift through the language. It’s almost like the way he is communicating is getting in the way of communication, which feels like very much a regular theme in the books, that sense of being in direct contact with something, but that doesn’t mean you understand it.
VANDERMEER: Yeah. That makes me think of when I used to be a subcontractor for government agencies, and there were meetings where literally I would say the miscommunication was at 80%, and it was just people talking past each other. And also, what was being said was completely meaningless. It was such a ritualistic experience that you almost become an absurdist by default in how you think about human communication.
LAVALLE: For sure.
VANDERMEER: But that kind of stuff is rife for narrative and conflict. Not an explosion or something, but the kind of conflict and alienation that I find interesting in characters.
LAVALLE: Well, to that point, in the middle section there was this assumption of competence in bureaucracy and authority that was so interesting to me. One of the things that makes things feel almost funny is the horror of bureaucracy and non-communication. And in some strange way, we’re supposed to think that, in the world of the novels, that Area X is strange, but in fact this is much stranger and it’s more miraculous that it works.
VANDERMEER: [Laughs] Yes, and it’s stranger because we often don’t notice it because we’re so kind of conditioned to it.
LAVALLE: Also, one of the joys that I take in reading your books is the amount of times I lose myself in your language about nature and animal life, and feeling so sure you’re making something up and then going on your Twitter, and marveling that it isn’t made up. The line is so permeable, that the place where you begin to go off into imagination and the place where the real world is unimaginable seems wonderfully amorphous.
VANDERMEER: Yeah. That’s a quality about the world that I’ve tried to cultivate ever since I wrote the imaginary city fantasy books, where you’d be researching Byzantine history and find that certain chieftains under Charlemagne rated their importance by the number of field mouse pelts that they wove into their cloaks. Things like that, where it’s like, “Oh, that’s the measure of how big your dick is,” so to speak. But yeah, it is a very special place. It’s a very unique set of ecosystems. It’s not a very developed part of the coast. Most of it’s protected by wildlife refuges and state parks, so it’s underreported. It’s not what people think of with regard to Florida, and I think that’s why it comes across as more mysterious and otherworldly to people who don’t know the area. But I get people who have left Florida and they read Annihilation, and they get nostalgic for the coast there. And Absolution is probably more directly setting based. The first three books I was thinking, I need to do amalgamations of place, even some places on the west coast, and especially for the southern towns. You’re bringing all the history of that place in, and you either better get that right or have an imaginary place where you can kind of layer that in, but you don’t have to be so specific. You know what I’m saying?
LAVALLE: Of course. [William] Faulkner did that and all the rest.
VANDERMEER: Yeah. So you can still be authentic to some degree of your experience, but not betray something, so to speak. There’s a lot of wild places like Wakulla Beach, which has these crazy concrete platforms with fake Doric columns coming out of it that are the only remnants of the Wakulla Lodge from early in the 1900s. And you’ve got these mature palm trees shooting right up out of the concrete right next to one of the most bio-diverse places on the planet. So there are these juxtapositions that are interesting, and they’re directly in the book. Even the jars of dead things that repeatedly occur, that came from a local aquarium that added a psychedelic room of jars lit up like they’re in a rave club. So I’m not dealing directly with southern towns or things like that, I’m doing stuff that’s more focused in, and it is possible to write it directly. I really want every detail of the real world in these books to be something I’ve experienced. Even here, I had the researcher do something that you think would already exist. I said, “Hey, I’m going to be using these environmental sites, can you map them to colonial sites, pre-colonial sites, African-American graveyards, plantations?” And that information did not exist in a central database for this part of the coast.
LAVALLE: Geez. So you created that database?
VANDERMEER: Yeah, and after the novel is out, I’m going to find somebody to put it online.
LAVALLE: To make it public?
VANDERMEER: Yeah. Even if it doesn’t enter into a scene, I like to know all that about the places I’m writing about.
LAVALLE: Absolutely. Okay, but then the other question I had was, do you make a conscious choice of, “Now we are moving out of the realm of what I have experienced or seen into the thing?” Or is it more like you just elevate into it?
VANDERMEER: That’s a good question. I still have to find the real world visceral aspect of it. So let’s say there’s someone melting into a pothole, for example, even if it’s watching balsamic vinaigrette settle after you shake it, I have to have some kind of visceral first-hand experience as an anchor for that. There was a writer, I can’t remember who it was, but he said that people think of my monsters as symbols, but if they’re not tactile or real, then they can’t be. The subtext can’t be on the surface, and the uncanny moments have to live in the body of the reader in some way. They can’t be distant. They can’t stand in for something else.
LAVALLE: Yes. Well, are you more like, “I have this thing happening, what would be the thing like it,” or is it more like you’re just pouring some balsamic vinaigrette and you go, “that feels like something.”
VANDERMEER: Yeah, it’s the texture of it. It’s the viscous nature of it. It’s the slowness of it. But also, I do think of horror movies and the special effects in them. I came out of the horror genre, and I still feel like everything I write has some element of horror to it. So I do take a lot of pride in being up on all that stuff, and not necessarily mapping it that directly, but definitely wondering if it’s an unusual effect after I think about what the emotional resonance is for the characters.
LAVALLE: Right. Speaking as someone who also came up with horror, I really appreciate that point about thinking through what’s been done as opposed to just the default thing. Well, for Absolution, you were talking about the Ambergris, like that movement from an imagined world to the real world if warped and shaped and changed. Is that a conscious feeling, like “I want to ground this more in a world people might recognize,” or did it just happen naturally?
VANDERMEER: I think there was something about setting stuff in an imaginary city, where the constraints on the characters and the way the city manifested, it was a different kind of series of systems novels on one level. And the systems part is kind of stripped down to this bureaucracy and the secret agency. I was kind of played out of imaginary cities at that point, and I stopped reading fantasy in general. I think I told my subconscious, I want to start writing about Florida, because I’ve lived here long enough now to feel like I am integrated with a setting. I can say something meaningful about it. So that’s when Annihilation popped out. I’d always been sure that I could write something set in the real world, because even in the Ambergris stories, there’s no actual fantasy in there.
LAVALLE: Well it’s real for that world, right?
VANDERMEER: Yeah. I mean, it has different rules, but it’s not fantastical. There’s no magic or things like that. And really it’s about the character complications and the politics. So I figured, I’m really writing realistic scenes for the most part, steep with these things that are horrific. And that’s kind of true of the Southern Reach series too. If you look at it, 75% of it is people talking to each other or doing something, and then there’s this uncanny element that occurs. I guess I was just relieved in a kind of weird marketing way, which is to say that being in the airport and someone’s saying, “Oh, what do you do?” And I have to say, “Well, I write about mushroom people in this city.” As opposed to, “I wrote this book about an expedition into a place on the coast of Florida where something strange is happening.” It’s a lot easier.
LAVALLE: Much clearer, yes. Well, maybe this seems like a crass question or whatever, but what I appreciate is that the book doesn’t feel like “here’s the end” of anything. It feels more like a return to something or a visit. So I’m wondering, do you feel you may visit again?
VANDERMEER: That’s a good question. I think a series that continues for too long can become kind of airless and abstract. I didn’t even think about doing a fourth book until this idea just came and overwhelmed me. And I like the fact that it’s kind of sneakily a sequel to the other three books in some ways.
LAVALLE: To all three, which is amazing.
VANDERMEER: Yeah. That was one challenge, in particular: How do you show what happens after acceptance, when it’s going to be so completely alien in a way? And this allowed me to do that. But there’s a character called Cass in this book who’s kind of a mystery in a way, and she shows up in part three too, without giving too much away. I do have some thoughts and questions in my head about how I could show a future from her point of view.
LAVALLE: Interesting.
VANDERMEER: It might wind up being that airless thing. It might be another 10 years before I find the way to tell that story. So for all intents and purposes, this is the last thing.
LAVALLE: Well, I think the nice thing is that people will wait 10 years.
VANDERMEER: Yeah, true.
LAVALLE: And they already did, right?
VANDERMEER: They did.
VanderMeer, Jeff ABSOLUTION MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $29.00 10, 22 ISBN: 9780374616595
VanderMeer extends his Southern Reach trilogy with a deeper exploration of worlds both creepy and bureaucratic.
The charm (and frustration) of VanderMeer's epic saga about the mysterious Area X is how much information is withheld, making the reader unsure of where they stand until the story explodes into uncanny and horrifying terrain. In that regard, the fourth entry in the series sticks to type, roughly focused on events preceding and following the earlier books. The opening sections concern Old Jim, a Central investigator researching the first expeditions by biologists into the Forgotten Coast, which involved the introduction of alligators and unsettling encounters with the rabbits first met inAuthority (2014), as well as a mysterious Rogue that may be working in league with a particularly aggressive alligator nicknamed the Tyrant. Later chapters focus on Lowry, an investigator on a later expedition into the region, observing his colleagues' numbers rapidly whittled down as the malevolent Tyrant emerges. Lowry is profane--few books published in the past 10 years have a higher f-bomb-to-page ratio--and highly drugged, elements that enliven the story in two ways. They convey the contempt and frustration with institutions that have been a hallmark of the Southern Reach series; more ingeniously, they underscore the latter chapters' surrealistic, psychedelic brand of horror, which helps sell some more grotesque incidents Lowry becomes a part of. Indeed, Lowry's sections feature some of the most vivid writing in the entire series, sinuous and delightfully weird. Does VanderMeer resolve lingering questions from the previous novels? Not really. But the main theme of the trilogy was always unknowability--untrustworthy leaders, reckless wildlife, and complicated humans are his constant focus, and here he cannily balances the strangeness with the terror of confronting it. And it's fair to suspect the terror will go on: As he writes, "Nothing in the end could placate Area X."
An extension of a genre-busting narrative, maintaining and complicating its vibes.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"VanderMeer, Jeff: ABSOLUTION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504618/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=27ad5da1. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Absolution
by Jeff VanderMeer 4th Estate, [pounds sterling]20, pp. 441
I have to confess that I am not a fan of horror fiction. I have a stack of unread H.P. Lovecrafts sent to me by enthusiasts. M.R. James scares me silly. Even Elizabeth Bowen's ghost stories remain neglected among her other much-loved books. I have, however, been impressed over the years by writers usually identified as belonging to the movement described in the late 1990s by M. John Harrison as the New Weird, which marries chiefly supernatural themes to realism or naturalism. As a stylist, Harrison remains the greatest of these writers. They included Angela Carter, China Mieville and Jeffrey Ford. The movement is naturally associated with the science fiction New Wave, whose best known practitioner was J.G. Ballard; followers had little interest in weird or supernatural fiction but were often readers of Lovecraft and co.
In the footsteps of Harrison, Jeff VanderMeer wrote books full of exotic characters and baroque cities such as his Ambergris series, but gradually he began producing the realistic characters and surreal landscapes associated with the New Weird. With the publication of his Southern Reach trilogy his prestige grew rapidly. The first of these, Annihilation, was filmed. He became a bestselling author with a wide audience. The work has been compared to Lovecraft, which meant 'unreadable' to me. However, when I eventually overcame my prejudice, I did not for a moment think of Cthulhu or even Arkham town but realised I was in the hands of a remarkably good writer. Comparison could be made to later Harrison or Mieville, but the material was original and came from the author's own unconscious.
Now, ten years on, he has produced a sequel to that sequence. In a way Absolution is a reflection on the original trio--a coda. I'm most reminded of the late Nigel Kneale's Quatermass television series as it developed its mixture of eerie unexplained events and a bureaucracy investigating them.
Secrecy surrounds Sector 20 of a region mysteriously known as the Southern Reach, closed off to the public by the government. The zone being most closely examined is Area X. We are never told its exact location, but it is almost certainly part of Florida, into which extra-terrestrial matter has been introduced (without making any apparent difference to the planet)--driven, like a gigantic thorn into an orange. Many scientific investigators examining this 'thorn' have attempted to bring back information, only to be infected physically and mentally, exhibiting strange hallucinatory symptoms which can't be diagnosed. Most die of unknown cancers.
By the end, only bureaucrats and teams of biologists are left trying to examine phenomena such as a building called 'the lighthouse', manifesting as 'the Creeper', terrifying and unknowable, perhaps made of human matter, constantly changing form and dimension. Absolution is made up of three long novellas, each as deeply satisfying as the original novels. The first is set many years before Area X manifests, echoing the development of the first novels, pretty much all attempts to make sense of the horror having failed.
Some believe VanderMeer was influenced by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic or Ballard's Crystal World, but clearly his chief inspiration came from a long hike he made in Florida, where he has lived for many years, and his subsequent dreams. The entire oeuvre has the sense of waking dreams found in more than one writer of the fantastic. If the books remind me of anything it is Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, controlled by a disciplined mind, a craftsman with a wealth of inspiration.
VanderMeer, like the late Brian Catling has become a true original who can be read for the authority of his prose alone. While his original Sector 20 book was primarily a fine piece of genre work, this final volume is as stimulating as the best New Weird writers. VanderMeer has mastered his craft quite as much as his old heroes and transcends most of them.
Like his peers he has continued to focus on tone and brevity of affect. Largely dismissing their label, the masters of the New Weird produced remarkable, poetic prose, creating a much deeper and lasting meaning in their work. Harrison is perhaps the first to be recognised with non-generic awards. For a while it seemed that VanderMeer had given up his ambitions, but Absolution offers his old lyrical tautness and imaginative individualism--making it gloriously wild yet beautifully controlled. His is a fine talent which lovers of the fantastic and weird must surely appreciate. This novel and its companions should be recognised as classics of their kind.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Moorcock, Michael. "In the danger zone." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10236, 2 Nov. 2024, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815088536/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d7d53a8f. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
The author's Southern Reach trilogy, which began with ''Annihilation'' in 2014, now has a fourth installment, a prequel.
ABSOLUTION, by Jeff VanderMeer
In a 1943 essay, the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote, ''There is an untranslatable English epithet, 'uncanny,' to denote supernatural horror.'' Instead of further defining it, Borges offered a few vivid illustrations.
One image, from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, is ''a southern sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.'' Another is from G.K. Chesterton, who ''imagines that at the western borders of the world there is perhaps a tree that is more or less than a tree; and that at the eastern borders, there is something, perhaps a tower, whose very shape is wicked.''
According to Borges, one of the earliest literary examples of the uncanny is William Beckford's 1786 novel ''Vathek,'' in which a caliph descends an underground staircase to ''the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.'' In Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel ''Annihilation,'' the characters go down a similar set of steps in the woods, entering a tunnel -- which the narrator sees as a tower -- that seems somehow alive: ''The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat ... and they were not made of stone but of living tissue.''
''Annihilation,'' which was later adapted into a joyless but very effective horror movie, is the first volume of VanderMeer's Southern Reach series. All the installments -- including the sequels ''Authority'' and ''Acceptance'' -- were published 10 years ago as a continuous narrative, which has now been extended by a fourth novel, ''Absolution.''
Like its predecessors, ''Absolution'' centers on Area X, an unidentified coastal region surrounded by an invisible barrier. Those who venture inside find an exhaustive checklist of uncanny phenomena, including geometry that is ''neither circular nor square''; apparently man-made objects that turn out to be eerily organic; and that classic standby of weird fiction, the doppelgänger.
In the previous books, VanderMeer describes a horrific succession of failed attempts by scientists -- who ''had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny'' -- to understand the anomaly, which by the end is expanding beyond its borders. ''Absolution'' is a prequel that resolves some questions while raising countless others. For most of its length, it focuses on Old Jim, a peripheral figure in the original trilogy who seems to be the proprietor of the local bar. In fact, he's an undercover operative for the intelligence agency that later evolves into the Southern Reach, the organization tasked with exploring Area X.
The opening sections feature some of VanderMeer's best writing, with a compelling relationship between Old Jim and his investigative partner, Cass, who is initially assigned to him because she resembles his estranged daughter. As they uncover sinister events in the period before the barrier appears, the novel delivers the sort of conventional but satisfying scenes -- the kind where one character threatens another with a gun -- that the series once avoided, along with eerie images like this: ''A large white rabbit with bloodshot red eyes calmly ate a fiddler crab, crunching on the carapace, gulping it down, and starting on another.''
VanderMeer, a noted Borges fan, dwells on the mundane details of Old Jim's everyday life, aware that the power of the uncanny -- like its German equivalent unheimlich, or ''not from home'' -- lies in its uneasy contrast with the ordinary. Because he writes best in an eloquent but narrow range, however, VanderMeer has trouble shifting between registers, with even his supposedly hardheaded scientists filling their journals with implausible flights of poetry: ''There came the distant sounds of conflict, but always at some vast remove.'' The most unsettling works of the uncanny, like Mark Z. Danielewski's ''House of Leaves,'' are more expansive in tone, producing a deeper sense of displacement as reality shades into a nightmare.
As readers of H.P. Lovecraft know well, such stories teeter constantly on the verge of the ridiculous. VanderMeer is usually careful not to risk it, which makes the conclusion of ''Absolution'' truly inexplicable. Old Jim's story is followed by 100 interminable pages from the perspective of James Lowry, the sole survivor of the first expedition into Area X. VanderMeer clearly despises him, and his attempt to write in Lowry's profane but punishingly monotonous voice destroys any lingering reverberations from the rest of the novel. Admirers of the earlier books can safely skip all but the last three chapters of this section.
And yet VanderMeer still deserves to be mentioned alongside Poe, Chesterton and Borges's other exemplars of the unheimlich, whose confrontation with the uncanny is central to the mission of speculative fiction. Faced with the unnamable, we fall back on reason, language and other tools that Old Jim dismisses as useless: ''The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.''
This struggle can seem especially relevant at times of social dislocation. As one character reflects in ''Acceptance,'' ''the world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult.'' When these words appeared in 2014, VanderMeer was ahead of the curve. Now, like the rest of us, he has to work hard to keep up.
ABSOLUTION | By Jeff VanderMeer | MCD | 441 pp. | $30
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This article appeared in print on page BR14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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Nevala-Lee, Alec. "Uncanny X-Men." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Nov. 2024, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A816374219/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2129e8b3. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Known for his blockbuster Southern Reach series, the author talks about his eerie new installment, ''Absolution,'' keeping mysteries alive and what people get wrong about alligators.
Jeff VanderMeer has been called ''the poet laureate of weird fiction,'' the ''king of weird fiction'' and ''weird Thoreau.''
So it's notable that VanderMeer says his new novel, ''Absolution,'' is his weirdest book yet.
''Absolution'' is an eerie and unsettling coda to the books that make up his best-selling Southern Reach trilogy, which were published in quick succession in 2014. The series went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies in the United States alone, and was translated into 37 languages. In the first three novels -- ''Annihilation,'' ''Authority'' and ''Acceptance'' -- a shadowy agency sends ill-fated expeditions of researchers into a contaminated region on the Forgotten Coast called Area X, where human inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared and the plants and animals have undergone strange mutations, evolving into something alien. When the series concluded, Area X was spreading, and readers were left pondering the fate of humanity and the planet.
VanderMeer delighted fans this year when he announced he'd written a surprise fourth volume. And in his trademark hallucinatory fashion, the new novel delivers as many questions as answers.
The fourth book, ''Absolution,'' goes back 20 years to the Forgotten Coast, the region where the mysterious aberrations first began to manifest. In three sections, Vandermeer chronicles three missions to explore and understand the region, which all go horribly wrong in different ways. The first section follows a group of biologists who witness strange and unnerving animal behavior. The second centers on an operative for Central, a secret agency, who comes to realize that he is being manipulated by his handler. The final section is a trippy, expletive-laced first person account from a soldier named Lowry who is sent on a reconnaissance mission into Area X -- and steadily loses his mind as he confronts the incomprehensible.
During a video interview from his home in Tallahassee, Fla., Vandermeer spoke about why he wanted to return to Area X, how he's kept the mystery alive for a decade and why he thinks alligators are misunderstood.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What made you want to go back to Area X?
In 2017, I had this idea for an expedition of biologists to the same location 20 years before the events in ''Annihilation.'' I wrote the first few pages of ''Absolution,'' and then I thought, what does it mean, who's mediating this experience? For a long time I didn't know the answer to that, so I set it aside.
What jump-started it again?
There was a long gestation period. It was after what I would say were some pretty terrible years during the pandemic, and I hadn't written anything for a while. Then I woke up and had the complete vision for the novel in my head. I was writing morning, noon and night. I was in the grip of the thing, it was flowing out of me. There are certain scenes I don't remember writing.
A lot of readers wanted to learn what happens after the end of the trilogy, when the situation is pretty dire: Area X is spreading uncontrollably and looks like it will colonize the planet. Why did you decide to go back into the past instead?
To describe what happens after ''Acceptance,'' when Area X takes over, would be almost impossible. It would be so alien or removed that it felt like a perspective I couldn't really write. But this book is kind of like a prequel, contiguous with the prior few books, and it's also sneakily a sequel. So it kind of allowed me to do what I didn't feel like I could do directly, and that was exciting.
Why do you think you and so many of your readers are still thinking about Area X?
I think because it did come so deeply out of my subconscious. The fact that I was sick when I wrote it, recovering from dental surgery, and the fact that I was still unpacking its meaning in my mind after it was written, and then it took on so many different meanings from other people. There have been so many different interpretations, because of the ambiguity in the books. So people can see a lot of different things in the books, and then when they reflect it back at me, it makes me think about the books differently as well.
How did readers' reactions make you think differently about the series?
There's something like 17,000 academic papers on the Southern Reach books. To give you just one example, Alison Sperling wrote this paper, ''Second Skins,'' and all the questions she raised about contamination, permeability, the environment in that paper, I thought they were fascinating.
When I wrote ''Absolution,'' there's a really key aspect that I credit her with: Lowry's fear of contamination from the suit. It really adds something to his character and your understanding of him, and it wouldn't be in here without that paper.
One of the unusual things about these books is how much remains a mystery at the end. How do you strike the right balance of giving readers a satisfying conclusion while also engaging them with questions that might not have answers?
It's the conundrum of the series: If I explain too much, I betray the whole idea of exploring the unknowability of the universe. It's important in fiction sometimes to show our position relative to the universe, because we often feel like we have more control or more knowledge than we actually have. But it's also up to the readers. Readers are willing to complete this in their imagination. You're entering a pact where you're giving room to the reader to engage their imagination. And here they're filling in, in a sense, a more total explanation.
Some readers and critics see an urgent message about the climate crisis in the series. Is that something you hoped readers would take away from it?
I have to be careful about thinking too much about those types of questions directly, because I really don't like didactic fiction. In terms of those environmental themes, I think they're in there indirectly and they're posed more as questions. They're never really resolved in the narrative, because I don't know that fiction is supposed to supply those kinds of definitive answers. But it can raise some interesting questions. It can do things that make you uncomfortable.
How do you feel about being called the ''king of weird fiction?'' That's quite a title.
I don't mind it. I would say that ''Absolution'' leans harder into that than a lot of my prior books, even my prior Southern Reach books. It's the most uncanny of the four. I like the term ''weird fiction'' because I thrive best when there's not strict categorization around my books, and weird, being kind of amorphous, helps with that.
But it also speaks to the nature of these books, which is that weird fiction is, at its heart, providing a fourth way of interpreting the world, by allowing fiction -- rather than religion, philosophy or science -- to try to interpret the unknowable.
You live in Florida, and there are some big moments in this book involving a very unusual alligator.
I didn't tackle alligators until this book. I feel like alligators in Florida are like a cliché, so I wanted, by the time I wrote about them, for it to be something big and different. I have a lot of experience jumping over alligators and things, and I wanted to get that experience in there, in a loving tribute, and thus was born the Tyrant. Alligators are much misunderstood. They're good parents and they're very social animals. No one will believe me.
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PHOTO: Jeff VanderMeer (PHOTOGRAPH BY DUSTIN MILLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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Alter, Alexandra. "Q&A / Jeff VanderMeer." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Nov. 2024, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A816374216/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=10b45fd7. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Absolution.
By Jeff VanderMeer.
Oct. 2024. 464p. Farrar/MCD, $29 (9780374616595); e-book (9780374616601).
With this prequel to the best-selling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, 2014), VanderMeer lures readers back into the hallucinatory clutches of Area X, an anomalous coastal region in the United States. Three linked stories explore the years leading up to the Area X Event, weaving deftly in and out of the time line established by the trilogy, obliquely referring to key characters and moments that will reward careful readers. "Dead Town" takes place 20 years before Area X, as Old Jim, a Central agent turned analyst, reconstructs events from Central's piecemeal files concerning a team of biologists surveying the Forgotten Coast as they fall prey to an uncanny figure called the Rogue. The next section, "The False Daughter," takes place 18 months before Area X, as a reactivated Old Jim investigates the Rogue while mourning his daughter's disappearance. The final section, "The First and the Last," follows the inaugural expedition into Area X from the profanity-laden point of view of anthropologist Lowry. No character escapes with their sanity intact, though their madness may reveal greater truths that have far-reaching implications for the series. Still, VanderMeer understands that the mystery is the point, and, as told in beautiful prose infused with bizarre and disturbing images, Area X remains as fascinating and unknowable as ever.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Hutley, Krista. "Absolution." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 22, Aug. 2024, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808396735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c84c5db5. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.