How Jeff Vandermeer Creates A Fucking Mood

There are many sentences that will improve your writing, but I want to talk about just one. It's a sentence that fuses two of my favourite ideas together—using verbs to describe the inanimate to flood the scene with life, and making the ordinary alien—and it's written by Jeff Vandermeer. 

Jeff Vandermeer is many things: an environmentalist, a racoon stan, a Tallahassean who lives perched like a bird over a ravine, filming backyard wildlife and petitioning to save Florida's wetlands. He's also an eco-novelist, his worlds overgrown with the untameable: sentient alien fungi, neo-predators that lure with human voices, defiant borderland dimensions. I would have described him as an SFF writer with an anti-colonial fixation (the colonisers in this case being the entire human race, invading spaces made for stranger, more resilient creatures), until I came across his 2021 novel, Hummingbird Salamander. Though the world remains hostile, alien, even, the setting for his latest work is distinctly terrestrial, the monsters and machinations entirely human, divorced from the fantastical for a sharp, strange eco-thriller with only a hint of sci-fi potential in the closing pages. As a reader I'm drawn by the unreality of fiction (verisimilitude is often just peacocking for a Booker) so I was surprised at the pull of such an anti-fantastical story. Stripping back the oddities of fantasy left a pristinely peeled Vandermeer, highlighting one of his best features as a writer, and one that I have previously lost amidst his ideas: the internality of places.

New York is a character. Its reputation as a city with a specific, sometimes unpalatable personality is so resonant, it's the basis of N.K. Jemisin's Great Cities duology, the foundational lore of which imagines human hubs magically personified. Yet we know New York from the outside: it broadcasts its many facets like a foghorn, negating the need to enter the city's mind. Vandermeer's places, wild and remote, are reflective; it is possible to step into the heart of the Pacific Northwest and hear its aches from the inside. And another remove: although his places emanate emotions, they aren't characters. Living, breathing, but perfectly inhuman, Vandermeer's locations have identities that exist outside of human conceptions, but are still vibrantly sentient—just like the wildlife he spends his life arguing for. There's something that touches me about empathising for salamanders and their strange terrains equally while respecting their inhumanity.

But I said this was about a sentence. A white lie there: on closer inspection it's actually a paragraph, a cluster of short spurts that run together so well, I remembered it as one sentence that struck me so hard, I folded the top corner of the page to bookmark it forever. It was this one, from Hummingbird Salamander (emphasis mine):

I drove home. Past fast-food restaurants and baseball fields, parks and the brief ache of that particular coffee shop. Drove through a grid and grief of traffic so predictable it lacerated me now, when I wanted to go fast and reckless. We all expected the slowness, even if it didn't slow us down. All of our minds drifting there together alone. 

I find an argument here in this one paragraph that cuts both ways.

These are the feelings of the protagonist, Jane Smith, projected onto places.

These are the feelings of places, projected onto the protagonist Jane Smith. 

The first reading is traditional, human-centred, character-focussed, and it's evidenced well: the coffee shop aches because it's the location where Jane's journey began, or where her old life ended. Traffic, too, is a common human grief, and the minds that drift are of the drivers, separate in their cars, together as party to the ecosystem of roads. But Vandermeer isn't human-centred. His stories argue for different sentient perspectives, prioritise them. And so the second reading: 

These are the feelings of places, projected onto the protagonist Jane Smith. 

Coffee shops are places of brevity and soreness: the ever-swinging door, the quick turnaround of human traffic, the gasping need that is filled by caffeine. They are also linked inextricably with extraction: forest clearing, bean harvesting, depletion of soil and the hands that plant in it. Traffic is a grief on humanity, sure, but roads serve as veins between human spaces; the greater harm of the grid, a rigid human structure, is its laceration on the earth, now reflected back at Jane, an ecosystem lashing back at its colonisers, even if only through irony. The minds, drifting there together alone, may as well be birds murmuring through a polluted sky, unable to change a world that changes them. 

So often we forget the world around us is alive. Landscapes become backgrounds, the ocean is a white noise machine, birds are B-roll on a baking show. Vandermeer takes verbs—the most alive words—and spikes them into inanimate places, infusing them with a distinctly non-human but ultimately emotional internality that wakes up his worlds. This is my favourite example of two spectacular writing techniques layered together to create movement, emotion, and frankly, a fucking mood. It's a great reminder that techniques aren't ice cubes floating around in a tinkling glass of cool refreshing text: they're ingredients in a word soup, blending and bouncing off each other to powerful effect. In the end, it's just a gut-punch of a paragraph that made me think about an absorbing thriller on the level of grammar and word choice, which is its own achievement. 

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