This World Is Full of Monsters
Ratings15
Average rating3.1
Contains spoilers
Ok, so this one is a tough read. It doesn't hold your hand and it's best to just kind of give yourself up to it and just take in the words if you can't take in the meaning quite yet. I would suggest using this as an exercise in developing media literacy and avoid looking up explanations while reading. It took me till about 2/3rds of the way through before my thoughts started to become cohesive about what I was reading.
Keep reading if you'd like to hear about what I think is happening:
I believe that this story is about evolution. The huge environment changes and the strange creatures melding into the narrator or giving things like their eyes to them feels like a poetic way to describe the evolutionary process. For awhile, I thought that the narrator was never human like I thought but was making their way to human and perhaps started as plant or small single celled creature. But towards the end, with the single eye (or potential space helmet) and launching into space thing, I believe that it's possible that narratively, evolution is used to describe the dramatic shift in humanity. Could be wrong but being right ain't really the point!
Classic Wtf-is-it-a-thing-or-not-a-thing VanderMeer. Enjoyed it!
The World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer
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Horror Fable
This is obviously an extended fable about writing and authorship. The story begins with the author holding a story, which burrows into him, and then transforms him, and, then, there is a sleep of 100 years and more and more transformation.
This short story is not a story. It does not have a discernible plot and is written in something like a stream of consciousness format. However, we can discern from the weird transformations and descriptions that are strange and horrifying that author, Jeff VanderMeer, is still working out some of the themes that formed the core of his Southern Reach trilogy.
If you are interested in a story that could be a bad acid trip, then this story is for you. If not, give it a miss.
I don't know how I feel about this book.
On the one hand, it is unusual, has fascinating imagery and something I have never read before. Yet a part of me wants to protest it, resist the world it drags me into. It all feels like a bad dream - cloudy, incredibly dense and constantly shifting.
And it's not just the atmosphere of the story that is dense. The novella is merely 32 pages long, but I read it very slowly, trudging through all that imagery. It's not a bad thing, though - I think it was worth the effort.
