A weird book. Weird, in the ways that weird can be: unusual, unfamiliar, unsettling. I’d read VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and really enjoyed the tension created by characters struggling to grapple with the unwinding reality they find themselves in. For Borne, you’re the one who is grappling with a totally unwound reality.
The world of Borne is presented as-is, and it took me a good half the book to get comfortable with some of the upended expectations of typical sci-fi creation. Example: one of the macguffins (if you can call it that) is a skyscraper-sized bear named Mord. Mord can fly.
But once I stopped dwelling on the absurdity, I really liked how things unfolded. It’s a book like no other, for better or worse.