“What is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”

When I first encountered The Mist and “Mrs Todd’s Shortcut”, Stephen King planted an intriguing suspicion: perhaps the world was stranger than it appeared.

So ‘Uncle Stevie’ showed me a door in the wall.

But it was Jeff VanderMeer who threw the door wide open. 

Then VanderMeer shoved me through it, and quietly closed it behind me.

Reading Annihilation wasn’t simply discovering a remarkable novel.

It was discovering Weird Fiction as a place you could keep returning to – a literature where the unknown isn’t something to conquer, but something to encounter. The questions grow larger than the answers. The landscape refuses to explain itself. The map becomes part of the mystery.

Entering the Southern Reach has changed me – at least as a reader.

Since then, I’ve found myself drawn back to these stories. And beyond. Without VanderMeer there would be no Arthur Machen. No Robert W Chambers. No Algernon Blackwood. No HP Lovecraft in my intertextual kitbag. The appeal isn’t that they solve puzzles – they remind me that our ways of understanding the world are always incomplete.

Weird Fiction isn’t about impossible worlds at all. Perhaps it’s about discovering that we’ve been looking at the possible one through only a narrow slice of the spectrum.

Imagine looking at a garden through the eyes of a bee.

Maybe that’s why this quotation resonates. We tend to think of maps as objective. They’re anything but. Every map decides what deserves to be seen – and what quietly disappears beyond its edges. 

Maybe that’s true of stories, too.

Happy Birthday, Jeff VanderMeer.

Join the conversation: tell me about a text which opened up a whole new genre for you.