It is a book narrated by a deeply unreliable narrator and one that confronts hauntological questions both at the level of eerie agency and also at the level of how a person can be haunted by their personal history. This is a book that tries to engage with difficult questions regarding the impact of humanity on the global environment and how humanity is impacted by anthropogenic climate change. It’s a haunted book, one in which the question of agency looms large and where the agent is most generally marked by their absence. Rather than being a book about a presence that should not be this is what Mark Fisher would describe as a book about the eerie. However this book is not a weird fiction book per say. I wrote about his work previously in my discussion of the New Weird, a term he was instrumental in coining. VanderMeer is principally known as a weird fiction author. VanderMeer’s prose is lyrical and carefully crafted and his use of a carefully developed palette of related metaphors demonstrates a singular artist.

As this is a brand new book, if you have not had an opportunity to read it yet and feel like surprise is integral to your enjoyment of fiction I’ll put up front that it is an excellent book which I would strongly recommend reading. In the course of this review I will be talking about elements of the plot including its conclusion. Hummingbird Salamander is a 2021 science fiction / ecological thriller written by Jeff VanderMeer.

Hummingbird salamander review