After watching the Annihilation movie and reading The Strange Bird I decided to delve into some of VanderMeer’s older work, which I’ve been meaning to catch up on for ages. Veniss Underground hearkens back to Orpheus & Eurydice and Danté’s Inferno as VanderMeer takes us on a harrowing journey through the eyes of three distinct yet powerfully connected characters in a vividly realized weird fiction world. Here “Living Artists,” with one in particular one venerated as a neo-god, treat human and animal bodies alike as their chosen medium for remaking existing beings or creating entirely new ones. This wasn’t my favorite VanderMeer novel, but it was thoroughly engaging from the start and is easily one of the strangest and most grotesque stories I’ve read in a long long time. It’s also very interesting to see how VanderMeer has grown as a writer, developing and refining his style since he published this debut novel in 2003.