![]() ![]() Alongside the stuffed bird, there’s a single piece of paper “with two words written on it and a signature. ![]() ![]() “The key is a trap,” she informs us, “but you don’t know that yet.” The address leads Jane to the Imperial Storage Palace, where in a unit marked seven she discovers a taxidermied hummingbird inside a cardboard box (“Frozen wings. She asks the reader to imagine receiving an envelope, abrupt and unexplained, from the local barista, which holds a key, a scribbled address, and the number seven. The opening and closing sentences that bookend the prologue – “Assume I’m dead by the time you read this / “I’m here to show you how the world ends” – provide a taste of the novel’s noir-ish and apocalyptic tone while introducing us to Jane Smith (not her real name). Having given us existential horror, modernist science fiction, and portal fantasy, VanderMeer turns the genre dial to the hard-boiled end of the scale with a tale of the Anthropocene told in the language of noir. With due regard to Jeff VanderMeer’s earlier work, which I adore, his new novel, Hummingbird Salamander, continues an extraordinary run of books that began with the publication of Annihilation in 2014. ![]()
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