This World Is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer

An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth, in this Tor.com Original science fiction tale from Jeff VanderMeer, the New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Classic Wtf-is-it-a-thing-or-not-a-thing VanderMeer. Enjoyed it!

This was like a dreamy, surreal poem.
I hate dreamy poems.
DNF.

The World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer

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Horror Fable

This is obviously an extended fable about writing and authorship. The story begins with the author holding a story, which burrows into him, and then transforms him, and, then, there is a sleep of 100 years and more and more transformation.

This short story is not a story. It does not have a discernible plot and is written in something like a stream of consciousness format. However, we can discern from the weird transformations and descriptions that are strange and horrifying that author, Jeff VanderMeer, is still working out some of the themes that formed the core of his Southern Reach trilogy.

If you are interested in a story that could be a bad acid trip, then this story is for you. If not, give it a miss.

Ok, so this one is a tough read. It doesn't hold your hand and it's best to just kind of give yourself up to it and just take in the words if you can't take in the meaning quite yet. I would suggest using this as an exercise in developing media literacy and avoid looking up explanations while reading. It took me till about 2/3rds of the way through before my thoughts started to become cohesive about what I was reading.

Keep reading if you'd like to hear about what I think is happening:

I believe that this story is about evolution. The huge environment changes and the strange creatures melding into the narrator or giving things like their eyes to them feels like a poetic way to describe the evolutionary process. For awhile, I thought that the narrator was never human like I thought but was making their way to human and perhaps started as plant or small single celled creature. But towards the end, with the single eye (or potential space helmet) and launching into space thing, I believe that it's possible that narratively, evolution is used to describe the dramatic shift in humanity. Could be wrong but being right ain't really the point!