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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