THE DEEP ONES: "The Cage" by Jeff VanderMeer

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Cage" by Jeff VanderMeer

2AndreasJ
Mar 16, 2022, 10:54 am

This was the first piece of fiction I've read by VanderMeer. Apart from a blog post or two, I previously mostly knew him from the introductory pieces in The Weird.

Acc'd my sister, who is a VanderMeer fan, this story probably suffered a bit from being read alone rather than in the context of the whole of City of Saints and Madmen. Anyway, I found the setting intriguing if occasionally bewildering (are we supposed to know what the grey caps are, or why there's seemingly fungi everywhere?), but the actual plot a bit pedestrian.

3housefulofpaper
Mar 19, 2022, 10:05 pm

My strongest reactions to the story weren't on the level of its being a Weird tale - it was the resonance of the precautions against infection with the real-world situation, and a slightly embarrassing realisation that the modernist/literary style -free indirect discourse, chiefly - itself seemed strange. I put this down to a recent diet of really old stuff and rather pulpy fare. The story's intro in The Weird, like the intro's in the old pulp magazines, points the reader to the "moral" of the story- "the dangerous impulse to seek out the weird" and the Vandermeers ought to know what was in the writer's mind, if anyone does! But it's not the obsession of a lone Lovecrftian scholar: it's intimately bound up with Hoegbotton's family - the disappearances a century ago but also the current family dynamics, and his feelings for his wife, and the fact that we can't really know what another person is thinking and feeling, even those closest to us (and further, Hoegbotton loves his wife (or tells himself he loves her - free indirect discourse - even as he's lying to her).

This counterpoint of interior mental reality and outside reality is no doubt more sophisticated than the common run of pulp-era weird tale but, though I don't think I'd call it pedestrian it doesn't feel fresh - maybe the techniques of literary fiction are just getting stale after a century or more of use?

It's evident from the Wikipedia entry for the book (which I didn't read until today, so after reading the story) that some of the background would be clearer if the story is read in context. It worked well enough as disorientating, weird "texture", but there is a backstory to and a link between the fungi and the grey caps.

4RandyStafford
Mar 21, 2022, 10:10 pm

I rather liked this one -- and I didn't expect to given one or two other VanderMeer stories I've read.

Presumably, the Ambergis Cycle provides more information on what the gray caps are. Initially, I thought they were just a very lethal form of fungus, but then the story suggests they are intelligent which the Wiki entry confirms. Then there is the odd preserved scene of Hoegbottom's relatives. Is it some kind of message? And what exactly is Rebecca's nature? And, of course, does Hoegbottom survive his encounter with that caged entity.