This is postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that, for all its lamentation over the loss of the world we live in now, often runs on a current of nostalgia for an earlier age. It’s essential that their home, a place they call the Balcony Cliffs, be unidentifiable from above, because their unnamed city is intermittently terrorized by a ravenous giant bear named Mord, and Mord can fly. Her lover and partner, Wick, remains holed up in their booby-trapped, warrenlike refuge, a former apartment building disguised as a midden. Rachel, the twenty-eight-year-old narrator of Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, “Borne,” lives in a harrowed, poisoned, semi-ruined city, where she scavenges scraps of food and tradeable detritus from the wreckage, a dangerous enterprise in a landscape haunted by the similarly desperate. “Borne” brings an acute intimacy to the tropes of genre fiction.
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