This World Is Full of Monsters

A Tor.com Original

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

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 best-selling author of the Southern Reach trilogy.

©2017 Jeff VanderMeer (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

weird weird weird... so good

This book is great, I love it. It's kind of like Kafka's metamorphosis... but like, more imaginative

great performance

wtf even was that. I've read the area x trilogy but this was so far beyond that. and even then it was relevant to 2020 somehow.

Weird, beautiful, and icky.

This felt more like poetry than prose to me. I see a lot of reviewers calling it pretentious, but I didn't get that vibe from it. It seemed like a really successful attempt at conveying something otherworldly within the confines of human language and conciousness. If you like strange, dark, and kinda creepy then you'll dig this.

Think of the MC like a Sim from the Sims Game

I'm not sure what to make of it all except that this bizarre world felt pretentious and really reaching for that artistic feel rather than settling into it. Once i started thinking of the MC as a Sim from a Sim game and the great "single eye" of all the characters as those little green diamonds, it all felt infinitely funnier and entertaining. Like when a teenager first discovering the use of prose-writing and 80 hour minimum story play in video games decides he could do that too. Am i glad this was free? yes. am i glad this was only an hour? also yes. will i be listening to other titles by this person? probably not. the narrator was spectacular though, really made the whole thing feel grandiose and important.

Tedious

The world is a sorta alien, surreal and dark universe. The character transforms. But the undercurrent of family drama is superficial, tedious, and detrimental to the story. For such a short story, it drags badly.