Asking the Wrong Questions

Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, in which a stretch of Florida coastland is transformed into a weird, otherworldly space, leading to repeated attempts to comprehend and control it, is a fascinating instance of mid-career breakout, in which a writer who had seemed like a well-kept secret suddenly became a household name and public intellectual. In the decade since, VanderMeer has gone from strength to strength, and so his decision to return to Area X with a new novel is an additional, unexpected twist in the tale. I review Absolution at the Guardian . Much of what made the original Southern Reach books powerful and disturbing can be found in this new volume. Once again, VanderMeer produces a near-seamless shading between the weirdness and danger of Area X, and the natural environment that preceded it. Old Jim is rattled by a stand of trees left dead by the inland incursion of seawater, seeing in it a hint of the unearthly, while a superintelligent alligator who is the Ro...

Last winter I wrote about the Stephen King-edited volume of Best American Short Stories , and more generally about the discussion that that anthology, and King's introduction to it, kick-started about the future and viability of the short form, a discussion which was enhanced within genre circles by Jeff VanderMeer's thoughts on editing, with wife Ann, the first volume of a new series from Prime, Best American Fantasy (the second volume of which is forthcoming; table of contents here ). After my post went up, Jeff e-mailed me and kindly offered to send me a copy of Best American Fantasy , mischievously noting that some in-genre reviewers had found it a hard slog (for a mixed but overall positive review, see Gwyneth Jones at Strange Horizons ). The first volume in a projected series of anthologies, and especially a best-of-year series, of which there is a glut, is essentially a statement of intent. The VanderMeers, and series editor Matthew Cheney, seem almost to be girdi...

Just popping my head in to say that my review of Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword appears in today's Strange Horizons . If you're coming here from there, you might also be interested in my review of VanderMeer's earlier novel, Veniss Underground . England lovely. Weather beastly. Having a wonderful time.

There are several ways in which Veniss Underground , Jeff VanderMeer's first full-length novel, fails. The first is in the attempt to convey, as VanderMeer managed to do so powerfully in his earlier and much-lauded collection, City of Saints and Madmen , a palpable sense of place. Only a few pages into the first Ambergris story, "Dradin, In Love", the reader forms a vivid impression of the city's shape and size, of its politics, government, rituals and castes. It is a tale told by a madman, who catches a glimpse of the city at its most tumultuous and irrational, and yet the Ambergris that emerges from "Dradin" has an undeniable logic to it. The city works, and it develops a palpable weight in the reader's mind, becoming its own character. None of these things happen during the 200 pages we spend wandering around the post-apocalyptic enclave once known as Dayton Central but now, following a collapse and fragmentation of its government, called simply Venis...