In a ruined city, Rachel, a scavenger, finds a small creature named "Borne" tangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic bear made by a biotech firm. She knows her lover, Wick, is keeping secrets about working there, so she searches his stuff and finds a journal titled "Mord." What is he hiding?
What an original little book. Borne (who in my mind usually looked like Philippe from Achewood, only a tentacled vase?) is a weird creature found by the main character, Rachel. Despite being set in yet another post-collapse dystopia, this book is anything but cliché.
Fantastic bit of worldbuilding and every bit as weird as I was hoping for. There is alot more fantastical elements to this story than Vandermeers previous books. This was a feature to me, while it may not be for others. Be warned though, this ride will be very pulpy and hard to stomach. The beauty is there, it just requires a greater toll.
Addon after completing the series, hopefully this helps someone know what they're getting into: I would say Borne is great as a standalone and doesn't need any of the other two books. Strange Bird adds a heart breaking and beautiful layer of nuance to the world and makes for a great Duology. Dead Astronauts does for me what Strange Bird did, while requiring a huge cognitive lift to really enjoy.
This is a wonderful book. In the aknowledgments the writer thanks his cat for inspiring some of the behaviors of the creatures in this book and it makes sense. I kept thinking about my cats while reading this.
Annihilation consumes the reader with raw horror; Authority creeps around the readers' expectation for thrills with a keen, conspiratorial unravelling; Acceptance delivers an alien-yet-familiar world.
Borne tells of a humanity that the reader carries with them through the end-of-the-world to the other side; Borne shapes what comes after. Borne consumes what came before, what the reader could not have shaken off otherwise.
