Name: This World Is Full of Monsters
Rating: 3.733333333333333 (15 reviews)
ISBN: 9781250165718

Jeff VanderMeer

An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth, in this Tor.com Original science fiction tale from Jeff VanderMeer, the New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A Tor.com Original

This World Is Full of Monsters

Tim Pendry

Jeff Vandermeer is quite definitely a writer of the weird. This is one of those cases where I admire the writer greatly while not being 'simpatico' with the underlying thought processes for Vandermeer is very much a child of his time, worrying about the anthropocene and the natural. This work (which I experienced alongside the equally remarkable 'Secret Life') positions, like 'Secret Life', the human in the context of the alien where the alien is the more natural force. Indeed, his alien worlds are really expositions of the power of the natural to overcome the human. From this perspective, Vandermeer is not a trans-humanist writer (at least in these two stories) but rather a writer of the post-human where the displacement of humanity into the alien-natural is a consummation devoutly to be wished for - not at all my view since I don't like human self-hatred. One might compare this implicit negativity towards his own species - the despair perhaps of the intellectual in a world he no longer controls - with the very different and more overt conservative pessimism of Ligotti. One is a green, the other a nihilist. Sometimes I don't see the difference. These are two sides of the same despairing class - one sinking into the despond of the occult and meaningless and the other sidling into a green preference for anything living that is not human. Both seem to prefer the company of the alien. Having said that and prejudices aside, both stories are very finely written, taking enormous risks with narrative and the suspension of disbelief and managing to get away with it because the worlds being drawn have a coherence that pulls you in as the narrative unfolds. 'Secret Life' does not follow a simple narrative trajectory. The setting is an office block whose initial caricatured corporatism is brother to Ballard's High Rise and sister to Ligotti's corporate tales of sinister meaningless doings behind the doors of the offices of 'managers'. But it rapidly moves on from there into high weird fantasy as individuals come to terms with the appropriation of the human by the alien-natural, becoming integrated with nature in some cases as the corporate structure becomes the jungle. The influence of Ballard is clear enough. 'This World is Full of Monsters' takes another approach. Here the alien-natural is truly alien but is an alien invading the world of man through bending time and space in monstrous evolutionary adaptations of familiar biological forms. It is the unnatural natural. This novella has more in common with Lovecraft than with Ballard (though the influence is there) but the tone is still very different. There is none of Lovecraft's cold detachment. Vandermeer is engaged with his alien worlds and sympathetic to them. He wants to make them real for us. The narrator goes through terrors and horrors that are presented ultimately as a rebirth into something new and post-human, in tune with 'creation' (in pre-scientific parlance) or with 'nature' (if nature is taken to be all possible evolved forms). The writing in 'Secret Life' is simple and readable. In 'The World is Full of Monsters', it is more lush and allusive although the tale hooks you despite the jump starts from one state of being to another. And yet it is not over-literary though some will find it 'difficult'. The narrator is not the detached observer of H G Wells' 'War of the Worlds' (ironically doing precisely what he says the Martians have dispassionately done to us before the invasion) but an emotional being trying to cope with radical horrible changes that could be mistaken for madness. Jeff Vandermeer is a fine writer and I was happy to ignore what I consider to be the negativity of wanting 'nature', perhaps existence itself, to conquer and transform humanity. I prefer things to be the other way around but I know that is now unfashionable amongst depressed liberal intellectuals.

Maria

2.5ish? very weird and though i enjoyed the prose i haven’t the slightest what was going on the entire time. might have to revisit again sometime when it’s not 1AM

Janice Hopper

Well, that was a thing. I'm not sure I'm quite bright enough to know what was actually going on here.

But the words and descriptions were nice.

It was a quick listen.

Emily Perkovich

I’ve had this sitting open on tor.com for awhile, and I somehow kept skipping over it. I found out that Vikas Adams did the audio recording, though (I am slightly obsessed with him), and I am really happy I decided to listen instead of just read. His voice was perfect for Vandermeer’s writing. Anyway. This was equally as weird and spooky as what you would expect. Not sure why the low ratings.

This World Is Full of Monsters A Tor.com Original

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