Sloppy joes. I ate them as fast as I could so I could finish reading the second volume of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. The other night I fell asleep reading it and ended up half-awake convinced that everything in the book was real — and who’s to say it isn’t? I don’t think I’ve read anything so creepy since the horror novels I liked when I was a kid. It reads like a pulp novel from an earlier era (which is not to disparage the skill with which it’s crafted) and gives you the real sense of encountering something alien. In most such books or movies, an “alien” becomes a funny looking animal from another planet, or a variation of a monster we’ve seen before. What’s so uncanny is how these books try to describe something that may be literally impossible for us to comprehend. This is not to say it’s necessarily an alien from outer space; at the point where I am, we have no idea what it is at all.

(Photo: A page from Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a classic antecedent to the Southern Reach trilogy.)

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