Jeff VanderMeer on Absolution and Alligators

Alligators are a casual thing for Floridians, sometimes as familiar as if they were scaly basset hounds. Which is another way of saying, we can become too comfortable around them – in my case leaping over one when I was a teenager, due to the alligator appearing on a one-way-out raised berm trail. The trick, then, is to convince yourself that you’re about to time your leap properly and not land on the scaly back, in which case the massive head obscured by reeds will surely whip around and apply massive teeth to cracking your bones.

If alligators are a Florida staple, at least one assigned to every holding pond, then this means they can also be seen as a cliché, and so despite my personal experiences with them and my admiration for them, I’d held off on using them much in my fiction until my new Southern Reach novel, Absolution. 

Part of this change reflected my ambivalence about the use of an albino alligator in the movie version of Annihilation, where it replaced the dolphin with a human eye in my novel. I remember with great clarity talking to the director and telling him no good movie had yet been made featuring a white alligator. ‘Jeff, this will be the first,’ he replied. And while he wasn’t wrong, the alligator scenes in the movie galvanised me to think about how I might use alligators in a novel.

The thing about alligators is we often see them wrong or put expectations of alienness or ferociousness on them that fit neither their temperament (mellow, usually) and their lifestyle. American alligators are good parents and form strong social bonds. They communicate in a complex fashion and, in general, we might appreciate them more if they looked more like mammals. They also appeal to me because they are so ancient and prevalent in the fossil records and yet, like some remnant of the age of dinosaurs, still among us. Seeing a huge alligator bellowing out a mating call, that in the water also registers as a subsonic vibration, creating a pattern of bubbles, is a primal and primordial sight.

Further, I’d had a kind of monstrous experience adjacent to how one might conceive of an alligator encounter while canoeing in the Wakulla River. An island of mud and grass appeared as I paddled upriver, against the current. It came right toward me, in a straight and unnervingly artificial way – with seeming purpose. I entered a state of almost panic in avoiding it, some part of my brain thinking it must be an enormous alligator with an impromptu island obscure its back. 

Instead, it turned out to be a meteorological experiment, with a motor beneath the water and a bobber above the surface that had been collecting the grass and mud. Still, I could not shake the idea that something unknown and huge had been lurking.

So it was with all of this in mind that I conceived of the alligator in Absolution. Set free as part of an experiment by a team of biologists on the Forgotten Coast twenty years before the Area X border comes down, ‘the Tyrant’, as she’s nicknamed, becomes a real character in the novel. The expedition that set her free figures prominently in how the mysterious Area X manifests along the coast, and the Tyrant herself becomes linked to an agent of chaos nicknamed ‘the Rogue’.

In describing an immense alligator with a mind of her own, one whose presence spans two decades of the novel, I found a satisfying way to express the physicality of alligators and to pay tribute to an animal I find both fascinating and misunderstood.

There was, too, my most recent alligator encounter, haunting me, and influencing the mood of scenes where an agent from the secret agency, Central, investigating a proto-Area X, comes across the Tyrant.

A few months before writing Absolution, I hiked one of my favourite North Florida trails, at the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, and came across a digression, a narratological aside you might call it, of a raised berm leading out into the marsh flats and then curving back to the main trail in a half-circle. The berm seemed newly cleared of vegetation to me, as if the sand and rock were meant to encourage a side expedition. Maybe it was my over familiarity with the main trail and thus lacking caution or just out of a need for the new that I decided to explore, calculating risk as low and my tread as low impact.     A quarter of the way I noticed an abundance of signs of wild pigs, my least favourite encounter on hikes, and quickened my pace. There came both a stillness and a watchfulness from the underbrush. After a while hiking you can tell if a stillness is meaningless or disguises the possibility of sudden and definitive motion. This was the possibility, not the meaninglessness. 

With a feeling of relief, I approached the last stretch leading back to the main trail. There was only one problem – the path I had taken ended short of a return. Instead, a deep channel of dark water lay between me and safety – while at my back lay the retracing of steps to where I just felt in the prickling of hairs on my neck held any number of wild pigs.

I stood on the edge of the rising embankment held together by a gnarled oak and looked down toward the other side, calculating whether the three roots crossing above the divide were the roots of a route – each not more than ten inches wide and slippery – or constituted a near-future disaster. I just knew I did not want to go back, and I did not want to be in that water. So I threw my pack across to the other side, to tumble into thick grasses, and then my camera, cushioned inside my hat. Then I clambered down to the largest horizontal root and began to clamber across. But in just seconds the root loosened beneath me and I scrambled to keep my balance, turning at the same time to seek purchase on the side of the overhang.

Dangling there above the water, distributing the weight of my legs across a second root, I was staring right into the hollow space below the oak, encircled, cocooned by its roots, creating a kind of creche… and in that space, built atop the sand with mud beneath it… lay a huge alligator nest.

To say I panicked would be understatement. So without thought, I became ‘lizard brain’ and shimmied so fast across the root that I got rope burns and bloodied my hands – my thighs were sore for days after from clenching the root like a rope – convinced that the nest was active and the alligator mother lay somewhere in the dark water beneath me. 

When I had recovered, everything around me took on a special sort of brightness. I had survived my own bad judgment – the stupidity of taking the trail, the stupidity of my solution to facing a stretch of water.

A bit shakily, I continued on to encounter soon enough, yes, the wild pigs, a bobcat and a seemingly irate otter. But none of these compared in any way, other than a perhaps irrational exhilaration, to staring into that sudden mouth of darkness beneath the outcropping.

The gap is what undid me – the unexpectedness of it, and the surprise of what waited there – and yet it was something entirely natural and at peace with the landscape around it. 

Through that gap, then, strode the Tyrant – right into my novel.