Borne

by Jeff Vandermeer
323 pgs

Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne is one of the stranger books among those in the dystopian fiction genre. It’s narrated by Rachel, a 28-year-old who lives with Wick in an old apartment building, filled with booby traps and disguised as a refuse heap. Rachel spends her days scavenging for scraps of food and supplies throughout the destroyed city they live in. She and Wick also live their lives hiding from Mord, a bear the size of a department store…who can fly.

One day, while scavenging, Rachel comes across a dark purple object about the size of her fist, and takes it back to her and Wick’s apartment. The object resembles a cross between a squid and a sea anemone. It can change color, starts to grow, begins to move, and one day…begins to speak. Rachel names it Borne and begins treating it like a pet. But Wick is suspicious of Borne. Small objects and even animals begin to disappear and Wick believes Borne is responsible.

He suspects Borne comes from the same place as Mord did, “the Company,” an enigmatic biotech company that filled the world with strange and bizarre products before going silent. But Borne is different than any other biotechnology they’ve come across before. It has the ability to learn and to transform itself into any object, living or non-living at will.

Vandermeer never explains how the world got to the state it’s in when his story starts. Readers should be prepared to have a lot of questions they’ll have go unanswered throughout the story. But if they can avoid getting hung up on those questions, they should enjoy the story for what it is, a bizarre and unsettling story about human and non-human intelligence and how far it could go.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆