Secret Life

by Jeff VanderMeer, Theo Ellsworth, Theo Ellsworth, Jeff VanderMeer

Overview

An uncanny and eye-opening journey into a mysterious building, adapted from a short story by Jeff VanderMeer

To the west: trees. To the east: a mall. North: fast food. South: darkness. And at the centre is The Building, an office building wherein several factions vie for dominance. Inside, the walls are infiltrated with vines, a mischief of mice learn to speak English, and something eerie happens once a month on the fifth floor. In Secret Life, Theo Ellsworth uses a deep-layered style to interpret Nebula award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer’s short story. What emerges is a mind-bending narrative that defamiliarizes the mundanity of office work and makes the arcane rituals of The Building home.

When his manager borrows his pen for a presentation, a man is driven to unspeakable acts as he questions the role the pen has played in his workplace success. The despised denizens of the second floor develop their own tongue, incomprehensible to everyone else in The Building. A woman plants a seed of insurgency that quickly permeates every corner of the building with its sweet, nostalgic perfume.

With deft insight, Secret Life observes the sinister individualism of bureaucratic settings in contrast with an unconcerned natural world. As the narrative progresses you may begin to suspect that the world Ellsworth has brought to life with hypnotic visuals is not so secret after all; in fact, it’s uncannily similar to our own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770464032
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	09/28/2021
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding.

Editorial Reviews

08/23/2021

With his meticulously drawn, uncanny comics, Ellsworth (The Understanding Monster) proves a fitting and unnerving match to mine this eerie, parable-like short story by VanderMeer (Hummingbird Salamander). The narrative is presented in brief segments, each centering on various drone-like workers of a Kafkaesque office building. Whatever their respective positions, these denizens seem more like captives than employees, while corporate life is presented as either oppressive or downright sinister. In one story thread, a woman’s job consists of the single task of stamping paperwork; in another, the company occupying the lower floors carries a name “never spoken aloud,” that “glows a fiery gold when looked upon,” causing any reader to flee the building or rapidly ascend its ranks. Meanwhile, a vine that one woman has brought in to beautify her office grows to immense proportions, spreading its leafage everywhere, eventually taking over the structure—as well as the narrative—as humankind, for all its bureaucracy, is no match for the implacable forces of nature. Throughout, Ellsworth’s minute crosshatching captures a foreboding, otherworldly atmosphere while imbuing each character, no matter how grotesque, with poignancy. This bizarre, fantastical vision will charm art comics and surrealist lit fans alike. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

This is a vision of office life gone very surreal, with warring tribes who develop their own language and mice who learn to speak English.” —New York Times

“The incendiary collision of two singular talents… Ellsworth adapts VanderMeer’s tale of a mysterious building where 'office culture' connotes secret languages and unspoken rituals, and a cherished desk plant with a tantalizing fragrance grows to menacing proportions.” —Poets and Writers Magazine

“It’s impossible to look away.” —Alex Dueben, Orion Magazine

“Secret Life captures the dark pulsing horror of office life with a bizarre honesty found only in bad dreams and good nightmares. An engrossing, unsettling, beautiful work.” —Patrick McHale, Over the Garden Wall

“This bizarre, fantastical vision will charm art comics and surrealist lit fans alike.” —Publishers Weekly

“Unique, striking, and surreal... Corporate culture, capitalism/consumption, social hierarchies, and domination notwithstanding, only a vine flourishes here.” —Booklist

“An allegory about work life like no other.” —NOW Magazine

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
If two-time World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer's first short story collection, City of Saints and Madmen, failed to convince every single one of its readers of his singular speculative genius, his second collection, Secret Life, will surely convert the rest. As stylish as it is surreal, this collection is -- as indicated by the mind-blowing jacket painting by Scott Eagle -- a work of art to be savored again and again.

The sheer diversity of this collection is remarkable. With settings ranging from 13th-century Cambodia to a microcosmic office building and from Spanish-ruled Peru to a postapocalyptic Earth, these stpores are anything but predictable. Noteworthy entries include "The General Who Is Dead," an eerie narrative about a Korean War soldier stationed in an abandoned city surrounded by the corpses of 40,000 Chinese soldiers frozen in death. The last true descendant of the Inca emperors lies on his deathbed in "Ghost Dancing with Manco Tupac," as he recalls leading a conquistador into the mountains decades earlier in search of the lost treasure of the Incas. The gold-obsessed Spaniard finds riches beyond his wildest dreams -- and an unexpected gift. "Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose," a new Ambergris tale set in VanderMeer's signature realm, pits a detective searching for a missing girl against a fungal foe of "sporrific" proportions.

Speculative fiction neophytes who have yet to experience the imagination of Jeff VanderMeer owe it to themselves to do so as soon as possible. Secret Life, a collection of 23 wildly palatable literary appetizers, is the perfect starting place. Paul Goat Allen

bn.com