Strange Bird: A Borne Story

I love an author with the skill to just start telling the story as assuming the reader has an IQ. Great book and follow up to Bourne.

It's an extension of the world built with his other novel "Borne" which tells us the events we'd already seen from another point of view, the one of the strange bird, used and misused by the ones that cross it's path. Jeff Vandermeer will never cease to amaze me.

I loved every second of it, seeing the story of the strange bird expanded was awesome. almost as good as borne

More than 5-Stars! Exquisite heart, exquisite prose. A small masterpiece. A small miracle of light and joy and pain and, in the end, of love and life. VanderMeer once again transports us to his dystopian world of "Borne". Notes and quotes: And even then she did not know that the sky was blue or what the sun was, because she had flown out into the cool night air and all her wonder resided in the points of light that blazed through the darkness above. But then the joy of flying overtook her and she went higher and higher and higher, and she did not care who saw or what awaited her in the bliss of the free fall and the glide and the limitless expanse. Oh, for if this was life, then she had not yet been alive! - The Strange Bird had perched for safety on a hook near the ceiling and watched, knowing she might be next. The badger that stared up, wishing for wings. The goat. The monkey. She stared back at them and did not look away, because to look away was to be a coward and she was not cowardly. Because she must offer them some comfort, no matter how useless. Everything added to her and everything taken away had led to that moment and from her perch she had radiated love for every animal she could not help, with nothing left over for any human being. Not even in the parts of her that were human. - In the lab, so many of the scientists had said “forgive me” or “I am so sorry” before doing something irrevocable to the animals in their cages. Because they felt they had the right. Because the situation was extreme and the world was dying. So they had gone on doing the same things that had destroyed the world, to save it. - At true north lay the great bear Mord, [the Magician's] mortal enemy for control of the city. At true south lay the Company building, a place that the Strange Bird knew as a kind of laboratory on a scale far outstripping the one from which she had escaped. To the west, the Magician’s regard for her transformed children, her observatory headquarters, while to the east, forever changing in the intensity with which the Magician regarded them, were a scavenger named Rachel and a competitor of the Magician’s named Wick. Rachel worked with or for Wick and Wick made creatures much as the Magician did, and used them to barter for goods.

Listened to this three-hour digital original Amazon single with audible narration over the past couple of days. I don't know what they are calling the stuff that Jeff VanderMeer is writing, but I have decided to label it "Cryptofiction." Apparently this is a riff on a novel entitled Borne. This 86 page novella takes certain elements and characters from the periphery of that larger work and spins them out into their own wildly evocative, surreal and for me at least profoundly compelling narrative. I'll definitely listen to it again in the next few days. It takes place in a nightmarish post-apocalyptic world. Dreamlike. A bit like Tim Burton channeled through Michael Crichton. That is, audacious and strange but not too flowery or fantastic. It's hard to explain, but you'll see what I mean. Reminded me a little teeny bit of an old story called Rachel in Love. But that was really just one tiny string in a ball of yarn with countless strands. I also believe VanderMeer was intentionally angling for a parallel with The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. The stories share impossibly bleak and relentlessly cruel landscapes. In the case of The Painted Bird, a strangely primeval and hateful post-World War II Poland. In this case, a strangely primeval and hateful post-apocalyptic United States. Both are full of monstrously original images. But definitely not to all tastes. If you hated all that southern reach stuff, you had better stay away from this. Still though, I loved it. The ending was really something. Uplifting, actually.