Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jeff VanderMeer is a poet of the postapocalypse. His Southern Reach trilogy (its first book, Annihilation, is becoming a movie starring Natalie Portman, helmed by “Ex Machina” director Alex Garland; its third, Acceptance, is reviewed by me here) is set in a wilderness where nature has turned monstrous and malevolent. His latest novel is an urban counterpart.

The ravaged cityscape of Borne makes Mad Max’s Fury Road look like the tonier blocks of Park Avenue. Buildings have been reduced to rubble, food and potable water are scarce, a poisoned river suppurates with pollution, and feral children prowl and pounce.

This fine kettle of synthetic fish has been brought to you by the wonderful folks at a defunct company referred to simply as the Company, who were none too careful cooking up artificial life and cleaning up after themselves, resulting in all manner of misshapen quasi-life forms crawling, shambling and otherwise infesting the vicinity. The largest of these is a monstrous, ursine creature called Mord that rules the ruined city like an angry god. We are talking about a bear as big as Godzilla, and not as nice. That flies.

Against this cataclysmic landscape is set the none-too-tender romance of Rachel the Scavenger, a young woman with sketchy memories of her parents and a world that used to be better before it descended into chaos, and Wick, who used to work for the Company and still cooks up his own biotech from Rachel’s pickings. In a collapsed apartment building they’ve fortified with false entrances and traps, they scrabble for survival and make desperate love.

One day, from a foray into the fur of the slumbering Mord, Rachel brings home Borne. At first Borne seems little more than a potted plant or a virtual pet, but he develops, and thereby hangs VanderMeer’s tale.

VanderMeer has a highly specific vision of horror that I surmise is rooted in his personal connection with nature. Out of his fecund imagination spring and slither monstrosities that would give Bosch and Lovecraft the heebie-jeebies.

But VanderMeer also has a knack for damaged but resourceful female protagonists in the tradition of Ellen Ripley of the Alien franchise. Borne succeeds both as cautionary science-fiction and a compelling survival thriller.

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