Jeff VanderMeer’s Earthy, Passionate, and Creepy New Lovecraftian Genre

A.L.R. Garlow
Aug 26, 2017 · 4 min read
St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, the Wilds that Inspired the Southern Reach

Recently, I started reading Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel Borne. Like his last few novels — the Southern Reach trilogy — the story is about a woman confronted with entities that graze the boundaries of sub- and super- natural, and a growing fixation on one of those entities.

I’m only beginning this one, so I can’t speak for Borne itself (though I’ll have much to say on it once I read further in!), but I’m always ready to sing the praises of the emerging Jeff VanderMeer genre, marked by its weird nature, a complex and compelling female lead, and a descent into Lovecraftian chaos. This tasty mix of concepts driving the fiction is something I didn’t know I needed before the first entry in the Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation, and now is something I know I need a lot more of. VanderMeer’s works manage to capture what is simultaneously foreign and welcoming about natural environments — from freaky plants to cooling sea breezes — and often does so through the eyes of women who are not forced to perform “being a woman in a novel”; having to make it clear that the character’s not a man at every chapter by doing or saying something the audience will deem womany enough. VanderMeer makes it clear: we don’t have time for that, something huge and biological is about to come murder the shit out of us. And it will be beautiful.

As beautiful and untamed as the artwork for the print paperback editions of the Southern Reach trilogy.

I deeply cherish the balance these novels have struck with human conflict and natural occurrence as narrative devices. It exudes narrative quality that reminds me of Star Trek: The Next Generation — these science-fantasy stories are driven by equal parts interpersonal conflict as they are things that go far beyond the characters’ control. People in VanderMeer’s novels are allowed to interact without falling in love, without falling in hate, without falling into archetypes that real humans rarely inhabit. Characters are also allowed to fall in love without being cliché, or without turning the story into a romance. You come out the other end of these novels knowing that two characters loved each other deeply, but never once mentally categorizing it as a “romance”. Characters have nuanced flaws and aren’t written with a judgemental slant; sometimes you can get a sense of what players in an author’s story you’re being lead to dislike. You can tell how they want you to view these players and, in that way, an author can become their own unreliable narrator, a human as naturally flawed in perception as the humanity they attempt to depict.

VanderMeer’s characters exist — if the audience is judging anything they do, who they are or how they behave, it isn’t coded into the language used to describe them, it comes from the reader’s own heart. In stories driven by female protagonists, this matters. Fictional women allowed to simply be, and to simply do, matters. Despite eschewing some sentimentalist tropes, these novels are also love letters to how absolutely wild plant and animal biology can be. They are a romance insofar as one human can romance the entire planet and every bizarre living thing in its gritty, pungent soil.

Essentially, these are not dramas about exaggerated human experiences. They’re not having Jonathan Franzen-esque escapades and acting like lovedrunk, narcotic reality TV celebrities (though I enjoy Franzen, some of his characters are hilariously over-dramatic) like so many scifi, fantasy, and even contemporary adult protagonists do in order to stand out or catch the reader’s attention (not to take cheap shots at writers in the YA genre). Instead, at times these people embody a relatable mundanity, a structure and continuity that most working, busy people are all-too familiar with. Yet they are also epics about these characters who embody real human experiences encountering exaggerated near-natural phenomenon.

Evelyn Ankers as Gwen in The Wolf Man (1941)

When confronted with something shocking or bizarre, we do not real back in a cartoonish, movie-quality horror — we worry, we prepare, we seek to understand, and sometimes we fail. Our screams aren’t the beautiful operatic things of pulpy, black and white Hollywood horror films. Human anxiety and desperation are animalistic and rudimentary, off-pitch and embarrassing, not produced for an audience.

The Southern Reach trilogy began an emerging science-fantasy genre, rife with viscerally real protagonists and extraordinarily strange ecosystems, that needs to catch on in other books. Until it does, I’ll just keep reading this one.

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A.L.R. Garlow

Written by

Video games enthusiast, environmental and animal rights advocate, 3D printing tech hobbyist.

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