This is a bizarre, utterly foreign, and frightening playground for VanderMeer to explore and develop. But there are also worms that can diagnose illness and injury from inside your body, beetles that deliver new memories when consumed, minnows that dissolve on your tongue into an alcoholic cloud, and medicinal pills in the shape of small nautilus shells. Mord, his vicious proxies, and children bearing claws and carapaces are constant dangers to Rachel and Wick. And the only three named humans in this book-Rachel, Wick, and the Magician-all must find ways to survive among the miracles and madness.Īfter all, the biotech is like any other technology, really: capable of being used for good or bad it’s a constant threat and a valuable tool for survival. The Company’s headquarters is now a wreck, cracked open like an egg, its contents spilling and spreading, both good and bad. Mord, a Godzilla-sized flying bear, is the most extreme example. Because at the heart of this neighborhood sits the Company, which intentionally released its biotech into the streets, an experiment with no controls. But in this neighborhood, the changes came faster and carried more consequence.

There is talk of the world changing due to climate change, a slow but inevitable descent.

It’s an odd and heady mix that kept me riveted, even as elements in the story both beautiful and horrifying.īorne takes place in a ruined neighborhood located in the middle of a devastated world.

Although there is some disagreement over the precise nature of the genre, it seems to be a sort of mashing together of speculative elements to produce a setting and story that are unsettling and discomfiting while also presenting that story in a literary fashion. But I suppose that is what the New Weird is all about. Looking at the list of genres above, it’s clear that I had difficulties categorizing Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne.

Borne vandermeer review