Literature in English, North America Commons^™

‘Her Brains Are All Over Her Body’: Jeff Vandermeer’S Avian Weird, Toyah Webb

Animal Studies Journal

Drawing on the thinking of Donna Haraway and other transdisciplinary thinkers, this paper makes the case for an ‘avian Weird’ by exploring the representation of birds in the New Weird fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Distinct from the Lovecraftian ‘Old Weird’ of the twentieth century, the New Weird has been defined by VanderMeer himself as “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy” (2008, 31). However, VanderMeer’s oeuvre is also something of a textual aviary, where the avian comes to represent the entangled and monstrous ontologies of the ‘Chthulucene’. A substitute for …