VanderMeer belongs to a loose group of literary writers, the New Weird, who bend the old devices of genre fiction to unaccustomed ends. The postapocalyptic imagination is shot through with unacknowledged wish fulfillment. And, where the historical myth of the Western is now being eaten away by national guilt over the treatment of Native Americans, the zombie story provides us with the undead, a new category of nonhuman humans who can be mowed down without a twinge of conscience. What is a zombie saga like “The Walking Dead,” if not a Western? Its premise replaces the civilization that makes our lives soft and easy with that most tenacious of American dreams: the frontier, where settlers get to reinvent society from the ground up and prove their worth in feats of manly valor. This is postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that, for all its lamentation over the loss of the world we live in now, often runs on a current of nostalgia for an earlier age.
It’s essential that their home, a place they call the Balcony Cliffs, be unidentifiable from above, because their unnamed city is intermittently terrorized by a ravenous giant bear named Mord, and Mord can fly.
Her lover and partner, Wick, remains holed up in their booby-trapped, warrenlike refuge, a former apartment building disguised as a midden. Rachel, the twenty-eight-year-old narrator of Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, “Borne,” lives in a harrowed, poisoned, semi-ruined city, where she scavenges scraps of food and tradeable detritus from the wreckage, a dangerous enterprise in a landscape haunted by the similarly desperate.
“Borne” brings an acute intimacy to the tropes of genre fiction.
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