Weird is the word: Jeff VanderMeer on writing about the ecstatic unknown

In the early stages of his career, Tallahassee, Fla.-based writer Jeff VanderMeer was something of a cult figure. While his fantastic fiction, including stories set in the imaginary world of Ambergris, was highly regarded by critics and peers and received many genre awards, he was far from a household name.
All that changed in 2014, when the first three novels of his Southern Reach series — “Annihilation,” “Authority” and “Acceptance,” published over an eight-month period — introduced the writer, and the esoteric Weird Fiction genre, to a mass audience and to the bestseller lists.
The Southern Reach novels document the explorations of a mysterious region of Florida’s Forgotten Coast by a secretive and ruthless black-budget organization. Inside Area X, sealed off from the rest of the world, nature has begun to mutate and to change all those who encounter it. (“Annihilation” was adapted into a 2018 film directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman.)
Now, a decade later, VanderMeer has published “Absolution,” the fourth book of the series, releasing it into a world that is weirder, and darker, than even he could have imagined.
He’ll be launching the book in Toronto at the Paradise Theatre on Wednesday, Nov. 20, in conversation with Canadian author Iain Reid.
Are you surprised by how well these books have been received?
On some level, I am. I feel like there’s an alternate universe where they’re out in small press editions with dark, gloomy lighthouse covers and they’re read by specialty-press aficionados, which isn’t a bad thing. The other thing I’m always astonished by is the number of people who tell me that “Annihilation” got them back into reading. I never would have guessed that a book with a narrator who is obsessed with nature and landscape — there must be something in the emotional resonance that carries them through.
To what do you ascribe the popularity of these books?
I think unreliability is very much the case in the real world. We’re often having to parse through disinformation to facts. For simple facts we’re having to triangulate four or five or six different sources now. I think in some ways the books have, in the last decade, become more relevant and more indicative, even in their paranoia, of our modern condition, at least here in North America. At least here in the U.S.
It’s also interesting that when I see people commenting, they’re always talking about the characters. They’re not talking about the uncanny situations.
That makes sense to me because I’m always writing or trying to write from a deep interiority of character, and everything else comes out of that. The pyrotechnics of the uncanny elements may be what linger in the mind at first, but it’s the characters that bring them back.
I think you said in a New York Times piece that “Absolution” was the weirdest novel you’ve written. As a reader, I don’t find it that odd. In many ways, it’s quite straightforward.
I think the New York Times misinterpreted what I was saying to some degree. What I meant was it has more uncanny scenes and elements than any novel I’ve ever written before. I do feel like it’s fairly straightforward.
That makes sense. The New York Times mistook small-w weird for capital-W Weird. Which seems like a good time to ask: can you define Weird Fiction?
I think it basically comes down to grappling with the unknown. I mean, a true unknown, not something that has already entered the subconscious of the culture and has all these echoes that come in with it. A crude example would be, if you use vampires, usually there’s a whole set of cultural things that come in immediately, so it’s not really an unknown. It’s more of a renovation you’re doing when you write about them.
In Weird Fiction, you’re grappling with something that’s truly unknown about the universe, or some perception of the unknown. The difference in Weird Fiction as opposed to horror, is that in the Weird, that encounter with the unknown, can be ecstatic. It can be beautiful.
I don’t mind being classified as Weird Fiction, but I would say it has the potential to have that same universality as the snow falling at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” because it’s the same kind of moment.
These books are, along with many other things, filled with a tremendous sense of wonder about the natural world, and a deep concern for it.
To some degree, it’s to protect things in my mind, because we also had the Gulf oil spill, which happened a couple of years before I wrote “Annihilation.” At a certain point, it wasn’t clear it was going to be capped. So you would wake up with the oil in a spiral in your head and this anxiety, thinking all your favourite places along the (Florida) coast are going to be destroyed, the Gulf was going to be completely destroyed. I think Area X was my subconscious trying to protect that area, the St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge.
But then, as a novelist, you’re not really interested in providing simple answers, so the paradox of something that wipes out almost every expedition that goes in, while it’s also cleansing the land of human pollution, creates this question of how much harm we cause.
I think that a novel is more of a laboratory and a series of questions than it is answers. I’m not trying to make a statement with Area X. I’m trying to set up these situations that raise questions about how we live.
Are you an optimist?
I’m an optimist in the details. For example, talking about climate change. There’s a practical list of regulations and actions we need to do and policies we need to enact. None of it’s particularly utopian. But it gets more utopian the longer we wait.
I’m kind of laughing at the absurdity of the situation, but I guess where my optimism lies is that we just have to do these things. We’re not currently doing enough of them, but it’s not like it’s magic. So I still have optimism. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write.
This interview has been edited and condensed.