Few novelists are as adept at inspiring both horror and awe as Jeff VanderMeer. The author is perhaps best known for his award-winning Southern Reach series, of which the first three installments—Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance—were published in 2014. The books follow cadres of scientists on expeditions into Area X, a swath of pristine wilderness along Florida’s coast where nature has inexplicably shifted, changing not only itself but anyone or anything deemed a threat to its existence.
None of VanderMeer’s novels is easy to categorize, but many fall within the tradition of weird fiction, a genre that combines elements of fantasy and science fiction while trafficking in the unknowability of the universe. The genre is at its most skittering, most slithering and most uncanny in VanderMeer’s world, where wild landscapes and their inhabitants take on traits usually ascribed to humans: plants and the sky itself seem to watch; rabbits look as if they understand; insects are simply too aware.
This month VanderMeer continues this weird saga with the publication of the fourth Southern Reach novel: Absolution. Like its predecessors in the series, it’s rife with humor, horror and a visceral compassion for the natural world. Told in three parts, it exemplifies the author’s keen attention to detail and narrative structure, qualities in his writing that he says were informed by an interest in science. “I’m interested not only in science but in the narrative of science, how science corrects itself over time,” he says in a video call from his home in Tallahassee, Fla. Like weird fiction, he adds, “science can’t ever explain everything because we are continually learning new things.”
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