[music]

Alison Stewart: This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It has been 10 years since award winning author Jeff VanderMeer first introduced readers to Area X, a place on the southeast coast where nature behaves abnormally. Sometimes it turns humans into animals, sometimes Area X creates doppelgangers. Despite sending a dozen expeditions into Area X, a secret government agency investigating the phenomenon it can't explain or stop what happening, which is troubling, especially since Area X seems to be growing. This is the premise of what's called the Southern Reach Trilogy. The Southern Reach being the name of the clandestine agency studying what's going on.

If this sounds familiar, the first book in the series, Annihilation was turned into a film starring Natalie Portman and directed by Alex Garland. Now, Jeff VanderMeer has returned to Area X. His latest novel is called Absolution. It acts as both a prequel and a sequel to the series. While it provides some answers to the mysterious of Area X, it raises a lot of unanswered questions, like how prepared are we to handle something that we really can't understand or barely have the vocabulary to explain? Joining me now is Jeff VanderMeer. Jeff, welcome back.

Jeff VanderMeer: Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: So this idea came to you in a dream?

Jeff VanderMeer: It did after dental surgery. It's kind of hard to tell someone, how do you write a New York Times bestseller in a workshop? Because it's like, have dental surgery, have a strange dream, write it down, and write a novel around it.

Alison Stewart: Do you think in your subconscious that you wanted to return to the Southern Reach series?

Jeff VanderMeer: Yeah, I think so. I think that some of the mysteries haunted me as well, and so I did want to. Once I had this idea for this three-part book with different character viewpoints, I just went for it.

Alison Stewart: You tweeted something so interesting you wrote, still continues months in to be one of the most immersive, obsessive writing experiences of my life, and still today, doesn't matter how distracted or tired, once I set pen to paper, it's just almost writes itself. How do you handle that? When something is just coming to you. Do you sit down and write? Are you in a room? How does it happen?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, I mean, first of all, it takes several years of thinking about something and then suddenly the inspiration strikes because you've had years to absorb and write little fragments and stuff, but literally on July 31st of last year, I woke up and I had this vision in my head of all three parts of the novel, and I just started writing. I was writing so swiftly and without forethought that I actually had to hire a research assistant to do research, to fill in things after the rough draft, because I thought if I stopped, that the music in my head, the progressions of it, the beats, that I would lose all of that. I literally lost track of what day it was, what week it was, sometimes what month it was, I was writing morning, noon and night for six months, and then I had a finished novel.

Alison Stewart: Does the outside world influence you at all in those periods or no?

Jeff VanderMeer: Yeah, I think so. Everything gets absorbed by the novel. I'd walk outside and there'd be some detail of the natural world that would wind up in the novel, like it becomes all encompassing, if it's the right kind of novel.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jeff VanderMeer. The name of his book is Absolution. Absolution starts 20 years before the events described in Annihilation, the first book in the series. It opens with a man named Old Jim. He appears to be a regular at the bar, maybe even working at the bar, but then we come to understand he's in fact working for the government. Yes?

Jeff VanderMeer: Yes, that's correct, yes.

Alison Stewart: Why is Old Jim the first character you introduce us to?

Jeff VanderMeer: I think it's because he's central to the whole idea of the espionage elements in these novels, because in addition to being uncanny, there's this whole secret agency, dysfunctional kind of, almost a dysfunctional family in a way in terms of the relationships between the agents. He's the fulcrum or the point of interest there, and he's been in the agency for a very long time. He's washed up. He's paired with a newer agent who has mysterious origins as well. He's an interesting character to follow because he's both compromised and he's trying to, at the same time, solve this mystery of what's going on on the forgotten coast.

Alison Stewart: You have a selection you're going to read for us?

Jeff VanderMeer: I am, because one thing about the book is that although it doesn't have anything to do with the movie, I was always struck by the albino alligator in the movie version of Annihilation. I really wanted to one up that alligator. I'd avoided alligators because they're kind of a cliché. In Florida, you can find them just about everywhere. We almost think of them as like scaly basset hounds. I came up with the idea for this alligator called the Tyrant, who figures very prominently in the plot and appears unexpectedly. Every page of this book has spoilers, so I'm not going to give much context, but in this scene, Old Jim is investigating a clue to the mystery of Area X in an old ruined building, and something very unexpected happens.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Jeff VanderMeer: Into the silence came again the odd drip of water, more urgent now, more as of a body rising from a swimming pool, of a body pulling itself from a pool of water partway onto land. Old Jim did not want to turn farther to his right. He did not want to be in the room anymore. His mind had gone blank at the sound that should not be there, the sound so thick and weighted as of a person in the room with him. So that he was back at the bridge behind the village bar in the dark, feeling like he was alone, but he turned anyway. As there came such a rush of fast, immeasurable speed, as the blackness there raged into abundant and ferocious matter, the Tyrant.

There was a way in which it was so real and immediate and yet felt impossible and drawn out. Maybe he could not contain the feverish intensity of it and also the overwhelming beauty of it, how he could be reduced down to his bones by fear and yet also feel so alive. For there, impossible in the back of the room, a pool of water of limitless depth that appeared where the watermark had been, the edges stippled with the faint bioluminescence of specks of uncanny algae and duckweed.

While in the center of that space, filling it, the great head of the beast known as the Tyrant had risen to regard him with a carious yellow eye erupting from those supernal waters toward him, the mighty head so armored in scales, reflecting its own strange light as of tarnished silver, with the gleam shining through the whorls of that. The way the bioluminescence at the edges of the pool leapt up as the Tyrant leapt up and intensified so that it formed a collar around the great beast's neck and then fell away, exhausted by velocity.

Old Jim screamed, he drop the flashlight, and it skittered across the floor, went out forever. He could not escape. He was in the Tyrant's jaws even as he turned to run wider and wider until the pressure held him entire and he surrendered, lay limp as prey. He thought he was about to die, anticipated the rending of his flesh, the crack of his bones, but that moment did not come, for the Tyrant had him gently in her jaws. Just the slight febrile pricking of those teeth held tight, but not too tight against his clothes, his skin, and that maw wide and deep enough to hold him secure as he crumpled into agreement with his fate. He knew somehow, instinctually, to hold his breath as the Tyrant receded back into the pool, into that impossible body of water, that impossible, impossible water, and together they disappeared down into the depths.

Alison Stewart: That was Jeff VanderMeer reading from Absolution. Did you say her?

Jeff VanderMeer: Her. Yes.

Alison Stewart: The Tyrant is a her?

Jeff VanderMeer: That's correct.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Jeff VanderMeer: I don't know. Maybe because there's too many male alligators in fiction these days.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: The Tyrant isn't the only animal you write about in Absolution. You write about these bizarre rabbits that eat crabs. They munch on crabs. Those are kind of nasty. There's a woman who steps on a centipede. It sets off as extremely unsettling reaction. How do you approach writing about animals, particularly ones that have unusual characteristics?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, sometimes if you're trying to create a sense of unease or even horror, after all Halloween is coming up, you think of what an animal usually isn't thought of doing, and then you also think of the reaction of the prey. In that scene with the rabbits, the fiddler crabs don't actually mind being eaten, which I think is even more unsettling. It's actually something I've talked to with writers Stephen Graham Jones and Victor LaValle, about how you one up what readers or even viewers expect, because there's a wide genre of film and TV that has jaded readers as well to those kinds of moments in novels.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Jeff VanderMeer: Yes, and so we've talked about having to be up on everything, like watch and read everything to instill that sense of unease in a new way, and so this is one way that I've done it, through these unnatural actions of these animals.

Alison Stewart: Do people have to read the three previous novels to understand Absolution?

Jeff VanderMeer: The data is still coming in, and the data indicates that you can read Absolution on its own, that there's enough context to do so, and then you could go to the other three books. You could also start with the second book Authority, if you like. That's another thing I found out when they first came out.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Jeff VanderMeer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: A listener let you know that? A reader let you know that?

Jeff VanderMeer: Readers let me know that, because they picked it up by mistake and they're sealed vessels enough, the first two books, that you can read either one without too much of a spoiler situation.

Alison Stewart: What question did you want to answer with Absolution?

Jeff VanderMeer: I wanted to, in a sneaky way, write a prequel that was a sequel, so I could describe what happens after Acceptance as Area X is advancing. The idea of doing it in a forthright way seemed impossible, given the alien nature of Area X. In this book, being able to show how, in a way, without giving too much away, humans adapt to Area X and encounter it in the future in a different sense was very compelling to me.

Then, also, in addition to Old Jim, there was this organization called the Seance & Science Brigade. I was always struck by how I had come up with it, which is to say there's this place called the Coral Castle built by an eccentric Lithuanian in Miami. It's got all these crenellations and fortifications, and during full moons and the equinox, the rays shine perfectly down through different areas of it. One day when, the day that I was there, there was a team of psychics investigating it and a team of scientists in a separate place. They're both applying what they thought were logical methods to try to explore why this place was set up that way, and that's where I came up with the idea. When thinking of Absolution and thinking of all the stuff about that organization that I could not put into the first three books, that there was fertile territory for Absolution.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jeff VanderMeer. We're talking about the book Absolution. By the way, Jeff will be in conversation with Emily St. John Mandel tonight at 7:30 PM. The event is presented by Greenlight Bookstore and is being held at St. Joseph University on Clinton in Brooklyn. For details, you head to Greenlight Bookstore's website. All right, you've lived in Florida. You're about to move. We'll talk about that in a second, but you've lived in Florida 30 years?

Jeff VanderMeer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What impact did living in Florida have on you when you were writing about this Area X?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, I think that there's both a timelessness to that forgotten coast and an ephemeral nature because of hurricanes, because of other extreme weather events, the coastline adapts to it by reforming all the time, and so literally the maps get redrawn. There's something really compelling about the fact that it seems so permanent, yet it's always changing. It's also extremely remote. It's one of the few places I know of where you can be on dirt roads with no GPS signal at all and get lost. I think that also lends itself to narrative. It's absolutely, stunningly, prehistorically gorgeous as well.

Alison Stewart: You recently wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times titled I've Lived with Hurricanes for Years. The Decisions Keep Getting Harder.

Jeff VanderMeer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What keeps getting harder?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, the storms get more violent. They come up faster, they're more frequent, and so the fatigue is very real in deciding whether to stay, whether to go. They're very unpredictable. You literally wind up spending a lot of money, a lot of mental effort just simply deciding what to do. You often make bad decisions on where to go because they're unpredictable. For example, I wound up in Greenville, South Carolina, which turned out to be okay, but I was headed for Asheville because I thought it would be safer. It got, of course, completely washed out. No one could have guessed that. In fact, several people in Tallahassee have retreats back into Asheville in that area for that very reason when hurricanes strike.

Alison Stewart: You're planning on moving to Portland, though?

Jeff VanderMeer: I am, yes. Yes.

Alison Stewart: What went into that decision process?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, I mean, I've written about the West Coast quite a bit in my novels, including in the Southern Reach in Authority. One character basically seeks sanctuary on the West Coast, and then a whole other novel, Hummingbird Salamander, is set there. I think, for me, it's just time for a change of scenery. It's similarly biodiverse. There's a really wonderful community of writers there. Although I'll always maintain ties with Florida, it's important for me to get a fresh start at this point for inspiration and all kinds of other things.

Alison Stewart: Who are among your first readers?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, first of all, there was the research assistant, Andy Marlow, who wound up actually writing things that wound up in the book.

Alison Stewart: Like what?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, they did translations of Schubert from the original German, because in addition to being a research assistant, they turned out to be the most decorated FSU undergrad ever, apparently. I did not know this one when I hired them, and also created the montage photograph images that are in the book. Then also my friend Leila, who basically vetted all the dialogue between Old Jim and Cass, the old and young agent in part two, and actually rewrote some scenes for me. That was incredibly useful given the rapid pace at which I was writing, because I had the general tone of things right, but she pointed out things like, there are too many jokes in situations where they need to be situationally aware. They would never be joking while they're in this tense situation.

Also just simply getting more to the heart of what that friendship was. Because when you're writing really fast, it's sometimes useful to have a reader who's willing to actually jump in and suggest things. In a way, that's almost collaborative. As I've gotten older and had more muscle memory and gotten more relaxed about writing, I don't mind those interventions. I don't mind actually, in a sense, collaborating with people while I'm writing the novel. I even did that by posting excerpts on Twitter and social media and readers responding, because for this series, they've been really, really generous. They entered into imaginative play with the excerpts and cheered me on, and that helped as well, because it was a very intense writing process.

Alison Stewart: Is it Bronson Pinchot reads your book?

Jeff VanderMeer: Yes, and he's emailed me several times about it. He called it My Great Expectations. That's what he thinks it is in terms of the kind of novel it is. He reveled in the fact that in the third part, there's a character on anti-anxiety drugs who, as a side effect, drops the F bomb a lot. He apparently loved being able to read that part. I'm looking forward to hearing that.

Alison Stewart: How does your voice differ as an opinion writer, someone who writes for The New York Times versus someone who writes for novels or someone who even writes for social media?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, I mean, I think that the op-eds, because they're an environmental space, and then articles like the ones I've done for Time and Nation and Current affairs, I feel a greater obligation to be a journalist. I went to college to be a journalist before I realized I just wanted to do creative writing, and so the voice is very different in that context. I try to, even in the op-eds, let other people's voices, who are experts, scientists and whatnot be quoted in such a way where it takes the burden off of me as a mere fiction writer to get the facts across.

Social media is different, because for me, that's a place to play. Because the only way to do it for me is to play. That includes promotion. For example, for Absolution, I took an advanced copy of the book and I tossed it in the sea and videotaped it washing back up to shore. I put it in a jar because there's jars of dead things in the novel. I set it on fire. This is all very disturbing to some readers.

Even though it was just the same book, they kept thinking I was destroying more than one book. It's like, no, no, no, it's one book. It created a very interesting texture to the promotion. At one point, I even just said on social media, would you just buy the book? What else do I need to do to this book to get you to buy it? People respond to that because we have a rapport online where I can be playful and let my guard down just a little bit.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Absolution. It's by Jeff VanderMeer. He will be in conversation with Emily St. John Mandel tonight at 7:30 PM. The event is being presented by Greenlight Bookstore. It's being held at St. Joseph University on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. Thank you so much for coming to WNYC.

Jeff VanderMeer: Thanks so much for having me.