Like a dream, the pieces of Dead Astronauts fit together only loosely and often with a logic of their own making. Yet those pieces are exquisitely crafted, making it a joy to cobble together, although it is frequently an exhausting effort.

A sequel or continuation to the magnificent Borne this is not, yet it goes deep into that world. While Borne was a story with some trippy elements, this feels like a hallucinogenic trip with some elements of story. Told from the perspective of many narrators and timelines, and alternate realities, the identities and ordering of which often feel like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, to quote Winston Churchill.

It is fragmented, disjointed, ethereal and often confusing, with a style best described as experimental, often crossing into stream of conscious. More questions seem to arise than answers. A saving grace is that VanderMeer kept it short. Despite all the challenges, I find this post-apocalyptic world of shattered alternate realities and runaway corporate biotech deeply compelling and evocative.

Dead Astronauts is the second novel in Vandermeer's Borne World. For those of us who haven't previously stepped through the sticky portals into this treacherous world, it is an unnerving experience. And, our journey is not made any easier by the format which eschews traditional exposition and tangles with wondrous prose and sometimes devolves into things that there are few poetic licenses for. Don't expect all the answers or even a leveling off of your confusion. Just absorb the imagery and the rhythms and enjoy the ride.

What is this world we have so boldly entered? It is a dystopian future where much of everything is wasteland but teeming with bioengineered life. Okay, teeming with odd biotech life like blue foxes, raining salamanders, gigantic behemoths, orbs, one-eyed astronauts named Grayson, a moss-like creature that oozes through all biology, Chem who sees the future in equations, a duck, a flying monster, a mad scientist, and a sinister all-powerful company.

At first, it felt like a weird western with the three ( Grayson, Moss, and Chem) setting out across the wilderness to make war against the company and its creations. But, no western was ever this weird, different, odd.

There are parts of it so splendid it's worth reading again, but others that are just incomprehensible.

Set in the postapocalyptic universe of Borne, "Dead Astronauts" tells the story of three characters caught up in an epic battle against the Company, a biotech enterprise that has produced bio-engineered creatures and organisms which subsequently changed the face of the earth forever: Not only has the environment been destroyed, time and space have lost their meaning, and the three "astronauts" travel through various versions of the world /the City while arriving at various stages of the Company's power. Yes, these are Schrödinger's astronauts, both dead and alive, and the terrain they explore is like a möbius strip - if you look for a breezy read, look elsewhere, but if you look for something unusual and original, you came to the right place, my friend.

Although with around 250 pages, this is a rather short-ish novel, it took me quite some time to finish it, as the entrancing, sprawling sentences require close attention: There are so many worlds within the individual paragraphs, so many singular images, so many colors, sounds, and smells. When I started out reading, I was frequently confused, but then I realized that the book presents a story and then ventures into the perspectives of different characters, thus explaining what the story we just heard was all about. We hear the backstories of the three astronauts (one of them "a tall black woman of indeterminate age" named Grayson; one of them a shapeshifter named Moss who consists of...oh yes, you guessed it; and one of them "a heavyset man" named Chen with a guilty conscience), we learn about the motivations of the enigmatic traumatized villain Charlie X and of the bio-engineered creatures our protagonists encounter, like the duck with the broken wing, the behemoth, the salamanders, and, my favorite, the blue fox.

In order to make sense of this daring book, it is instructive to search for clues in all narrative strands. In fact, VanderMeer turns his readers into dead astronauts as well and sends them on a mission: While on the one hand, this is your classic po-mo extravagaza where we are expected to re-establish narrative cohesion by connecting the dots of the different storylines/angles, it soon becomes apparent that this rabbit hole of a text also forces us to travel to the sources of the apocalypse, the human impulses that lead to the state of the world we are experiencing in the book. The perspective offered by the blue fox, an animal formerly tortured by scientists working for the Company, is particularly harrowing to read, and this chapter exudes a relentless vibe that shares a strange kinship with Darren Aronofsky's disturbing movie "Mother!".

This book will certainly divide opinion, as it operates with a disparate structure (that reflects the shattered state of the world depicted), makes the reader work pretty hard and - although there are multiple worlds, astronauts et al. - radiates a grim, claustrophobic feel that goes hand in hand with its message about the Faustian will to play God and humanity's penchant for cruelty. IMHO, it pays off to take this dangerous trip and look into VanderMeer's narrative abyss: Yes, the abyss will look back into you, but sometimes, you need to muster your courage and prepare for some punches in order to experience something new, smart, and fascinating.

I’m a fan of Jeff VanderMeer, having enjoyed and recommended both the Southern Reach Trilogy and Bourne. However, I just couldn’t grab hold of this one. A short novel, but a weird one, even at VanderMeer standards. It felt like it needed something to tether the various ideas together.

Until now my experience with Jeff Vandermeer has been restricted to reading Borne. I liked Borne so much, loved it even. So when I saw a new book of his come up on Netgalley, I requested it right away without even reading the plot…or finding out that it is, in fact, a sequel of sorts to Borne. That should have just been the added bonus, but thing is my memory being what it is and my reading being as prolific as it is, I didn’t remember the minute details of Borne’s plot, such as dead astronauts mentioned in the book. I reread my review of Borne and it did jog the memory to the general idea of it, but nothing about dead astronauts. Well, apparently they got their own book. Although to be fair it shared a lot of page space with other side plots, some tangential, some featuring a prominent Borne universe character. And mind you, Borne universe is a place so wildly imaginative, so strikingly original in its mixture of biology and technology that it is well worth another visit. But this wasn’t the visit one might have planned. In fact, not quite sure what this was. Initially I remember having some trepidations about reading the New Weird Vandermeer is so famous for, but Borne made the genre so accessible and enjoyable with Borne, I figured it was safe to continue. But no, he was just saving up the real weirdness for this book. This is so very weird, so stylishly stylistically bizarre…that, frankly, it’s kinda offputting. And that’s weird in itself, because Vandermeer is such a terrific writer, his language is a thing of beauty, a genuine pleasure to read. But one cannot survive on language alone and plotting here is all over the place, it does technically maintain some semblance of linearity and rationality, but it’s so overdone and convoluted and needlessly longwinded, it’s difficult to get into or (conventionally, at least) enjoy. After a while you start realizing the narrative tricks Vandermeer utilizes and he doesn’t just use, he abuses them all. The repetitions, the juxtapositions (like something right out of the Tale of Two Cities), the repetitions…again. This thing…where he alternates a set of the same sentences for pages (seriously, pages) on end, sometimes with minute variations, sometimes without, only to highlight the punchline at the end. Such as…what the f*ck am I reading? what is this? Is it suppose to be like that? (this goes on for 3 pages) to be followed up with…Yes. Because Weird is the name of the game. Vandermeer literally uses the same trick 3 times within the same lengthy chapter of the book. So yeah, after a while, it just gets tiresome. And the entire reading experience almost never coheres into something engaging and the direct connect with Borne doesn’t even show up until the very end. It’s all these gorgeous linguistic trees that never add up to a forest. And outside of that, the main thing the book had going is how quickly it read, maybe 215 minutes or so. But the overall experience is…bewilderment, mainly, at the fact that this is how what follows the lovely Borne and this comes from the same author and this is probably totally gonna blow someone’s socks off. Different strokes and all that. But for me, it was a major disappointment and a waste of time, despite all the gorgeous imagery. Thanks Netgalley.