THE MARINE BIOLOGIST INSIDE THE WRITER AT PLAY IN THE MICROWORLDS OF AN OVERGROWN POOL

IN ABSOLUTION, THE SURPRISE FOURTH VOLUME OF THE BEST-SELLING SOUTHERN REACH SERIES OF LITERARY SPECULATIVE NOVELS, JEFF VANDERMEER CONTINUES TO PROVOKE CRITICS AND ESCHEW LABELS WHILE PLUNGING READERS INTO THE VAST, UNPREDICTABLE WILDS OF AREA X.

KATE TUTTLE

EARLY in Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation, we meet a biologist, one of the four unnamed female characters on an expedition into the mysterious Area X, the setting of the novel: “My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist, was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up.” The biologist remembers how quickly that overgrown pool became the center of a blooming ecosystem. “Moss grew in the cracks in the tile path that circled it. The water level slowly rose, fed by the rain, and the surface became more and more brackish with algae. Dragonflies continually scouted the area. Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always present,” VanderMeer writes. “Inside…

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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2024

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