Cthulhu in the swamp

Seeing the eerie side of Florida in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

First there was the hour-long drive through corridors of spindly new-growth pines, blurring past like a barcode as my friends blasted esoteric heavy metal on the car stereo. Then we were wading into the water of a natural spring that shone bright blue as Curaçao, far from the blackwater swamps and murky ocean shorelines in my home state of South Carolina. 

My friends and I visited a natural spring at a state park in north Florida several years ago, and despite living my whole life in the American South, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had landed on an alien planet.

I could see caves beneath me, could have swam into them if I were a more confident diver. I crawled out of the spring and shivered. I noticed that the treeline and the clear sky were reflected in hyper-saturated blue on the water’s rippling surface.

With the water still dripping from our clothes, we walked along a path beside the spring. My Florida-native friend made us stop several times while he prodded at conical indentations in the sand with a stick.

The cones were traps set by antlion larvae, which snipped and writhed around the stick as my friend antagonized them. I squatted to get a better view. Up close, antlions are squatty, armored, six-legged bugs with horrifying mandibles. They hide at the bottom of pits and wait for smaller insects to fall in. Then they strike.

Ants often put up a fight at this point, but it’s little use. I watched as one antlion flung an ant back and forth, bashing its body against the walls of the pit until it submitted. Once an antlion gets a firm grip, it injects its quarry with enzymes and begins digesting its soft bits from the inside out.

Like I said, I felt I had entered alien territory, and a brief survey of insect life heightened the sensation. Only antlions aren’t aliens at all; they’ve walked this earth for at least 150 million years. They have been around nearly as long as we have, and I’d give them good odds on surviving us.

Like Annie Dillard prowling Tinker Creek, I thought about the antlion’s daily toil and recognized that nature is abundant, and abundant with violence. Antlions teem, snatch, kill, and devour while we go about our lives more or less unaware.

I was thinking about antlions and the wilds of Florida this weekend as I finished reading Annihilation, a 2014 bestselling novel by Jeff VanderMeer set in a baffling coastal habitat known as Area X. VanderMeer lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and he has said in interviews that he drew inspiration for Area X from a hike across the nearby St. Marks Wildlife Refuge.

The protagonist, identified only as “the biologist,” is a member of an expedition seeking to understand Area X, which has supposedly been expanding and encroaching on civilized territory. Her husband, a doctor, was a member of a previous fact-finding mission that went awry, and she is trying to understand what happened to him.

There are hints from the beginning that the biologist will never find answers. Her senses betray her — maybe because the psychologist on her expedition has hypnotized her, maybe because she inhaled some mysterious spores — and the physical laws and geographic boundaries of Area X seem to shift at random. Early on she becomes obsessed with an unseen beast she calls the Crawler, which leaves a slimy trail on the spiral stairs of a subterranean tower that plunges for unknown stories into the earth.

VanderMeer is considered a leading voice in the post-2000 literary movement known as the New Weird. His work blends elements of speculative fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, creating an atmosphere of unease that sometimes feels more important than plot or character development.

The New Weird borrows elements from what we now retroactively call the Old Weird. The beast on the steps of the Tower, for instance, reads like a callback to H.P. Lovecraft’s mind-shredding cosmic monster-god Cthulhu, particularly as characters approach it and begin to feel their sanity slipping away.

In attempting to define the New Weird, the novelist Elvia Wilk (whose excellent 2019 book Oval served as my introduction to the genre) wrote in Literary Hub recently that the New Weird is uniquely suited to discussing the horror of climate change:

That discomforting implication of the limits of the human mind and the potential dissolution of the category Humanity makes Lovecraft’s fiction seem like a precursor to the contemporary awareness of the Anthropocene age. In an era defined by the planetary catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change, discussions of Lovecraft have come into prominence in philosophy, literature, and the arts. The horror of the archaic sea creature coming back to claim its due is a narrative (too) easy to map onto our current moment.

Where the Old Weird was a product of early modernism, the New Weird is thoroughly postmodern. Annihilation, for example, is explicitly concerned with the construction and meaning of texts. This concern is reflected in long passages about the cryptic run-on sentence that some sort of plant has “written” with its tendrils on the walls of the tower (“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead …”). The reader is left to guess whether the text has any meaning, whether it offers clues, or whether it is a form of procedurally generated creepypasta. The biologist speculates:

I had to assume, or thought I did, that the Crawler didn’t just live in the Tower — it went far afield to gather the words, and it had to assimilate them, even if it didn’t understand them, before it came back to the Tower. The Crawler had to in a sense memorize them, which was a form of absorption. The strings of sentences on the Tower’s walls could be evidence brought back by the Crawler to be analyzed by the Tower. 

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

Not to give too much away, but when people die in Area X, they are subsumed by the place. Their bodies don’t just decompose and turn to fertilizer, but in some mysterious way their bodies, wills, and even facial features become part of the ecosystem that lives on after them. There is an eerie moment when the biologist recognizes something uncanny in the eye of a dolphin and only later theorizes that it might have been her husband looking back at her.

VanderMeer said in a 2018 Yale Climate Connections interview that he wanted to challenge the notion “that we are separate from our environment — that environment is something way over there, nothing to do with us, instead of what surrounds us.” 

This, as I understand it, is an important point of divergence between the Old Weird and the New Weird. It’s also a fine description of life in Florida, where local “wildlife” routinely shows up in people’s homes, pools, and automobiles. I don’t mean to portray Florida as a Boschian hellscape, but it is as good a place as any to contemplate the horror of fecundity and the weird experience of being just another member of the fauna amongst the flora.

Florida provides clear examples of nature shaping humans, of humans shaping nature, and of human-shaped nature coming back to haunt humans. The Everglades seethe with dangerous exotic pets let loose by South Floridians. The great city of Miami is disappearing into the ocean. And springs like the one I visited with my friends are turning murky and toxic thanks to fertilizer and manure runoff, depletion of aquifers, and leaching septic tanks.

In her essay exploring the feminist possibilities of the New Weird, Wilk revisits a pair of stories (Anne Richter’s 1967 “The Sleep of Plants” and Kathe Koja’s 1991 “The Neglected Garden”) in which women characters “plant” themselves in the ground — in the former by literally stepping waist deep into a pot of soil, in the latter by impaling herself on a backyard fence post. Wilk reads these stories as portrayals of despair, but also protest.

Here, there is no ancient Cthulhu creature, no threatening outside, but a generative inside within the body of the woman planted in the earth …

Given the reality of planetary extinction, driven by the notion of the human as bounded figure with unique agency over the landscape, one could argue that this is exactly the type of knowledge currently needed. This is a knowledge about how to actively annihilate the supremacy of the self, and in turn the category of human selves altogether. This is the knowledge that death by landscape is not death at all; where landscape is not a threat, but a possibility, perhaps the only possibility.

We are caught in the jaws of phenomena that we can analyze but not fully comprehend. I’m reminded of the short-lived moniker “global weirding” that some writers proposed to replace global warming. The argument was that climate change would produce all sorts of unforeseen extreme events, from forest fires to violent snowstorms.

The term didn’t catch on, but the feeling remains. I feel it reading the news, and I felt it reading Annihilation.

***

I’m just now getting into the New Weird, but if you’re interested in checking out some speculative fiction with a literary bent, I’d recommend China Miéville’s 2016 short story collection Three Moments of an Explosion. Elvia Wilk’s Oval, which I hope to write about at greater length some other time, is one of the best novels I’ve read in years and is also a trenchant satire of neoliberalism in the face of systemic collapse.

As always, the books I’ve mentioned are available to order via the Brutal South Bookshop. If you aren’t familiar, Bookshop is an ethical alternative to Amazon that gives a portion of every sale to local independent bookstores and another portion to affiliates like me. 

I was listening to the album Ecosystem by San Francisco-based experimental black metal band Botanist while I wrote this week. Botanist creates concept albums about plants reclaiming the earth. The lead instrument is a hammered dulcimer.

The image at the top is captioned “Trees/plants covered in kudzu in Floyd Bennett Field.” It was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license by the user Rhododendrites. The other image is of an American alligator fighting a Burmese python in the Everglades; it was taken in February 2008 by Lori Oberhofer for the National Park Service.

I wrote a song several years ago about my visit to Florida’s Silver Springs State Park. If you like, you can listen to it here.

As always, thank you for reading. If you enjoy my writing, please consider pitching in $5 a month to support my work.

Peace, Love, & Concrete,

Paul