If it's difficult to describe Jeff VanderMeer’s work, maybe this is because the weirdness of his novels is less about the genre-bending that has come to characterize accounts of weird fiction, and more about the ways in which it seems to actively resist summary or synthesis. His novels, as one might claim is true of the larger project of the contemporary Weird, collectively attempt a kind of un-knowing — an engagement with what cannot be represented, stories that cannot be told. Rather than shy away from attempts to inhabit unknowable, often nonhuman narratives, VanderMeer’s fiction seems to acknowledge the limitations of the human while still committing to the imaginative work of exploring the impossible. Offering only partial understanding and knowledge for readers, VanderMeer’s work engages in a form of critical negativity that perhaps reflects the increasing estrangement of humanity from the ability to comprehend and act (effectively, collectively) in response to the global devastation of colonialism, late capitalism, and the effects climate change. His new novel, Dead Astronauts, perhaps the most stylistically weird yet, is an exploration into the ways in which resistance to these forces (which are embodied in the novel as the nefarious “Company”) can and should persist even in the face of impending failure.
Reverie feels like a dream. People shift from one thing to another, locations switch when you're not looking, and logic and forward momentum take a backseat to the exploration of the subconscious. At times, that can make it a little hard to follow the progression of the plot, but if you think about it, dream logic is good logic in a book about fighting dreams.
The title OF Timothy J. Hillegonds’s debut memoir, The Distance Between, aptly captures the tension that saturates the book’s narrative — the points of measurement are unstated, creating the feeling of a sentence fragment with blanks the text promises to fill in. But the title’s strategy is even deeper than that, highlighting one of the major dilemmas that almost every memoirist faces when embarking upon a project: how do you calculate the distance between two points when one or both of those points are not known? The question reveals a daunting truth — the task of the memoirist is, in this sense, in constant flux. They may be able to fix an exact time and location to examine in the past, but they cannot help doing so from a present that is always on the move. Time changes the way we tell stories.
Manifestos give vent to thoughts of things that are desperately wanted, which may never happen, but which might. The original Communist Manifesto even began by mentioning the ghost of something that hadn’t happened. The spectre of Communism: a ghost of the future. Manifestos are for writers what two tails might be to a dog — although, if one thinks about it, very few writers, characters better known for their writing in other places, are renowned for their writing of manifestos. Words in manifestos often take on a life of their own and maybe that’s disconcerting to a certain kind of writer, the kind that cleaves to authorship.
Julian Hanna’s absolutely wonderful little book continually riffs over these kinds of thing. His ninety-five mini theses, written ‘rapidly and rashly, with passionate conviction and not a lot of forethought,’ does the best job anyone ever could of showing us the true hand of the manifesto.