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wyrdwit 's review for:

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer
5.0
adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes

What a mind-fuck. 

While the style of "Borne" and "The Strange Bird" are very similar, "Dead Astronauts" slams into you like something out of the Southern Reach. The hard, unexpected shift in vibe really threw me at first. Some real Lowry shit. Annotate. Take notes. Pay attention. There are obscure hints all over the place (and likely some diversions, if I have VanderMeer pinned like I think I do). If I wasn't doing a buddy read, we probably both would have missed the single greatest detail in the entire book—2 sentences about 50 pages apart—that connected enough for me (
hint: fish mouths
) to overturn my initial frustration when I finished the book with not understanding what the fuck happened.

JVM, you're a menace. Why do these books feel so crucial to one another, yet each also feels like it could stand on its own? There are so many layers of depth and complexity that only reading this series once is unthinkable. Am I fabricating all these connections? Or did you actually put those little treasures in there for us to discover? GIVE ME MORE!