This World Is Full of Monsters Audiobook By Jeff VanderMeer cover art

This World Is Full of Monsters

A Tor.com Original

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This World Is Full of Monsters

By: Jeff VanderMeer
Narrated by: Vikas Adam
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An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth, in this Tor.com Original science fiction tale from Jeff VanderMeer, the New York Times best-selling author of the Southern Reach trilogy.

©2017 Jeff VanderMeer (P)2019 Macmillan Audio First Contact Genre Fiction Horror Literary Fiction Science Fiction
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This book is great, I love it. It's kind of like Kafka's metamorphosis... but like, more imaginative

weird weird weird... so good

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wtf even was that. I've read the area x trilogy but this was so far beyond that. and even then it was relevant to 2020 somehow.

great performance

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This felt more like poetry than prose to me. I see a lot of reviewers calling it pretentious, but I didn't get that vibe from it. It seemed like a really successful attempt at conveying something otherworldly within the confines of human language and conciousness. If you like strange, dark, and kinda creepy then you'll dig this.

Weird, beautiful, and icky.

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I'm not sure what to make of it all except that this bizarre world felt pretentious and really reaching for that artistic feel rather than settling into it. Once i started thinking of the MC as a Sim from a Sim game and the great "single eye" of all the characters as those little green diamonds, it all felt infinitely funnier and entertaining. Like when a teenager first discovering the use of prose-writing and 80 hour minimum story play in video games decides he could do that too. Am i glad this was free? yes. am i glad this was only an hour? also yes. will i be listening to other titles by this person? probably not. the narrator was spectacular though, really made the whole thing feel grandiose and important.

Think of the MC like a Sim from the Sims Game

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The world is a sorta alien, surreal and dark universe. The character transforms. But the undercurrent of family drama is superficial, tedious, and detrimental to the story. For such a short story, it drags badly.

Tedious

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So allegorical and self-referential that it was unbearable to listen to the whole thing; meta-fiction at its very worst.

allegorical to the point of being nonsense

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I imagine this is the result of a writer isolated in some hidden location with too many mushrooms.

This title is not for me

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I hate this type of writing. The author is the only one that gets it. Im sure "smart people will say im wrong and shoehorn some deep meaning into it. Its like slam poetry or interpretive dance. Annoying and self important. Ill be getting a refund.

Its like a modern art piece for pretentous douches

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Nothing wrong with the reading - the reader in fact did a great job bringing life to this mess.

I say “mess” charitably, since it’s doubtful that any amount of tidying could remedy the situation. I liked Annihilation and I wanted to see more of what he writes, but this reads like he took a stenographer along to record the result of an acid trip.

::sigh::

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