VanderMeer’s writing renders words sometimes as elegant brushstrokes, and other times, like Lego bricks haphazardly kludged together by a hyperactive yet brilliant child. But Borne was the most stylistically accessible work of Weird you’re likely to find, a fable of an altered world told as a traditional three-act adventure, even overtly including epic fantasy tropes only superficially altered for context.ĭead Astronauts is a new novel set in the Borne future, but one whose execution seeks to rewire your brain with nearly every page. Sure, the Southern Reach trilogy achieved pure surrealism in its final volume, Acceptance. Which brings us to Jeff VanderMeer, whose status as perhaps the most successful purveyor of New Weird fiction is taken to the next level with Dead Astronauts, a story unlike anything even he has tackled before.

But without stories that push against convention and make an effort to expand our understanding of what narrative fiction can be as an art form, a lot of us would get bored being in our safe zones all the time, much more quickly than you might think. I won’t say each and every literary experiment is successful. But it does raise a question about so-called “difficult” books and whether or not they’re challenging literary norms in an artistically valid way, or just presenting unnecessary roadblocks to their readers, when their themes could presumably be more effectively communicated by not making everyone wonder if they’re just too stupid to get it.Ĭonsider me a staunch defender of difficult books. If you think of critics as cats, then Finnegan’s Wake is basically a literary red laser pointer, keeping them and their pretentious, academic, gatekeeping ways occupied so they’ll leave normal people alone to read what they please. Joyce answered that he just wanted to give critics something to do for the next 300 years.

There is a story about James Joyce that’s probably apocryphal, but it goes like this: A journalist asked Joyce why he made Finnegan’s Wake so freaking hard. Share book reviews and ratings with Thomas, and even join a book club on Goodreads. Book cover artwork is copyrighted by its respective artist and/or publisher. All reviews and site design © by Thomas M.

Dead astronauts review