Often, speculative fiction betrays itself, becoming predictable just at the moment when it’s supposed to be “out there.” But the Southern Reach books make it all the way out.

But they’re also experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of Thoreau, and meditations on the theme of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka. Broadly speaking, the novels, “Annihilation,” “Authority,” and “Acceptance,” are eco-sci-fi: they’re about researchers exploring a mysterious, deadly, and unaccountable wilderness called Area X. VanderMeer, in short, is a genuinely weird writer.Īll that said, last year, he transcended “weird.” He wrote three books-the Southern Reach trilogy-so arresting, unsettling, and unforgettable that even non-weird readers read and loved them. Gray-cap mold is everywhere their fungal constructions grow to the size of buildings, blocking streets, billowing in the wind, and luminescing at night. “Answer the question.”) But, standing next to one, you feel its “humid weight.” You can torture a mushroom person by pouring water on its head, but if you cut it into pieces it stays cold and dry. (“You stupid fucking mushroom” a cop says while interrogating one of them. In VanderMeer’s “Finch,” the mushroom people (“gray caps”) are people-shaped, and they can seem like character in an ordinary detective novel. Lovecraft is weird Kafka is probably the ultimate weird writer. Stephen King is tremendously imaginative, but H. Still, when you’re in the presence of the genuine, uncanny article, you know. A lot of fiction, moreover, merely pretends to it, invoking its atmosphere without being, in fact, all that weird. He writes in the genre-his 2009 novel “Finch” is a detective story, reminiscent of “Blade Runner,” set in a city divided between normal people and mushroom people-and he champions it: with his wife, the influential sci-fi and fantasy editor Ann VanderMeer, he’s edited the anthologies “ The Weird” and “ The New Weird.” It’s self-defeating, of course, to try and define weirdness (although VanderMeer has offered definitions). His name is Jeff VanderMeer, he’s from Tallahassee, Florida, and he’s the King of Weird Fiction. The three weirdest books I read last year were all by the same writer. Photo Illustration by Honjo Photograph by Russell G Sneddon / Writer Pictures / AP If Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy has a moral, it has to do with the dignity of the search for even partial truth.

The southern reach