Jeff VanderMeer is a poet laureate of weird fiction, the speculative subgenre that traffics in the Gothic and unknowable, and he wears the “weird” descriptor with pride. “Marketing labels can obviously make things overly commercial or restrict what you can do,” he says via phone from his home in Tallahassee, Fla. “But in this particular case, it actually widened things up to the point where major publishers were publishing stuff that was pretty edgy that I don’t know they would’ve been able to without the label.”
In his trilogy of Southern Reach novels, VanderMeer has created a strange new world called Area X, a coastal habitat marked by bizarre cellular mutation and interspecies mingling, most of it both beautiful and dangerous. The Southern Reach, a Kafkaesque military bureaucracy, does its best to explore and reign in the land. The novels—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all published in 2014—made VanderMeer a leading light among fans of the uncanny; Annihilation was adapted into a movie, directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman, in 2018.
And though he has published several novels since finishing the Southern Reach trilogy, somewhere in the back of his mind, VanderMeer knew he wasn’t done with this land of fecund awe and terror. “There were unanswered questions for me that I thought might lead to further questions,” he says. “And that created this really powerful drive to write.”
With Absolution (MCD, Oct.), VanderMeer returns to Area X. It’s a sprawling work that reads a little like a second trilogy. Broken into three sections—“Dead Town,” “The False Daughter,” and “The First and the Last”—the book, which can be funny but also terrifying, chronicles expeditions that predate the one in Annihilation and occur after the events in Acceptance, focusing on a secret agent named Old Jim who is attempting to unlock the secrets of Area X. Absolution, VanderMeer admits, doesn’t lend itself to easy plot summary: “The problem with an elevator pitch for this novel is that there are 13 floors and they’re all haunted.”
The fantastical petri dish of Area X springs largely from VanderMeer’s experiences with nature and wild spaces. His parents were Peace Corps volunteers in Fiji when he was a boy. “It was pretty much what you’d expect from a tropical paradise,” he says. He would marvel at the eels and frogs at the local botanical gardens, and his father, an entomologist, would take him out to see the rhinoceros beetles on the region’s outer islands. He learned at an early age to experience a certain awe of the natural world. But he also suffered from serious asthma attacks and allergies.
“There was this weird contrast between things being so beautiful and also sometimes feeling very physically miserable,” he says. “That was a juxtaposition that I think comes through in the work, where you have really beautiful things, and then things that are disturbing or unsettling at the same time.”
After a stopover in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father taught at Cornell University, VanderMeer moved to Gainesville, Fla., in 1979—and there his imagination really began to run wild. “North Florida is very different from what people think of as Florida,” he says, pointing to the Forgotten Coast, a largely undeveloped and underpopulated region of the panhandle, and Bald Point State Park, where one can find bobcats and deer roaming the beaches. “There are these little havens of biodiversity. It’s a really interesting environment, with a coast that is relatively unknown.”
In 1985 VanderMeer enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He’d planned to study journalism but grew enthralled with fiction. He also picked up a team of mentors to match his new passion. Novelist and professor Jane Stuart critiqued his earliest writing during office hours. Fantasy writer and local librarian Meredith Ann Pierce marked up his manuscripts on a weekly basis. And poet Enid Shomer helped him refine his use of language. “My mentors were mostly just individual writers outside of the creative writing department,” VanderMeer says.
He dropped out after his junior year to pursue writing, working technical editing jobs to pay the bills. “I figured I would do that the rest of my life unless I could make a living with fiction,” he explains.
For a while, VanderMeer’s fate as a fiction writer looked uncertain. He says that when he was shopping around his first novel, Veniss Underground, his agent—unbeknownst to him at the time—primarily represented children’s authors. The fantasy revolves around an amoral crime lord and is definitely not a children’s book. It wasn’t until his story collection City of Saints and Madmen made a splash in 2001 that Veniss Underground finally saw the light of day in 2003. He then wrote Shriek: An Afterward (2006), Predator: South China Sea (2008), and Finch (2009) before turning his sights toward Area X with the Southern Reach books.
Sean McDonald, VanderMeer’s editor on all of the Southern Reach novels and the publisher of MCD, was surprised when the author first mentioned a possible return to Area X. But he was more than happy to come along.
“I find Area X really haunting, so it’s kind of thrilling for him to be able to revisit that,” McDonald says. “What makes him unique is the way he engages with the world, the craziness to the way he imagines things. But he’s also deeply connected to this urgency and his view of what the world is and what it’s going to become.”
One of the central themes of the Southern Reach novels is unknowability. This is evident not just in the mysteries of the region itself, where angry nature seems to be reclaiming the environment for itself, but also in the interactions between characters. Southern Reachers have a way of talking past, rather than to, one another. Motives are suspect, and language often seems inadequate.
“The Southern Reach series is filled with characters misunderstanding each other, not able to connect, and so subsumed by trying to grapple with the unknowable that it contaminates their personal lives,” VanderMeer says. “The character arcs are complete, but the story arc cannot be, because the characters will never know everything.”
They are also, to a large degree, alone: with their thoughts, their fears, and in a universe that often seems to find them superfluous. Nature in Area X is certainly, to quote Tennyson, red in tooth and claw. It is also, for all its fearsomeness, rather indifferent.
“We can form communities and everything, but there’s also the question of the essential aloneness of people and the inability to ever really inhabit another person’s mind, no matter how close you are to them,” VanderMeer says. “There are certain things that will always be unknown.”
