Nature offers sanctuary for a woman with a violent past. But anything can happen when borderlands are crossed in a short story about the menace next door by a New York Times bestselling author.

Sam has retreated to her late father’s rental house, a safe place to commune with the animals in the greenbelt out back, tend to her garden, and keep her secrets. Her sense of security slowly returns—until an aggressive neighbor from the other side of the ravine fells a tree on her property. How little he regards nature. Or understands its darkness. How little he knows Sam.

‘Wildlife’ is part of ‘Trespass’, an Amazon Original Stories collection of wild stories about animal instincts, human folly, and survival.

Jeff VanderMeer’s fifty-six-page story is a complex, often obscure, but ultimately satisfying, exploration of the power of the human instinct to be territorial and to respond to threat. It looks at how our instinct for action sometimes wars with our self-doubt, our regret, and our shame, leading us to grieve for our lost innocence and be haunted by actions that cannot be undone.

Jeff VanderMeer isn’t into straightforward exposition. He immerses the reader in the fractured mental and emotional state of Sam, the main character, and leaves the reader to figure out what is going on. This isn’t easy as Sam is recovering from a trauma, initially referred to only as ‘the incident’ and doesn’t always trust her own perceptions or her sense of time. She’s living in a property at the edge of a ravine, surrounded by forest. She wants to get back to nature as a way of either escaping or atoning for what her nature made her do. She has only two neighbours, and the reader’s difficulty in deciding what is happening in reality and what is a product of Sam’s paranoia and guilt is made more difficult because one of her neighbours is an aggressive, territorial asshole, and the other is lying by omission.

Sam is trying to focus on rewilding her garden and observing the wildlife through hidden cameras, but she keeps being troubled by her memories and by the invasive actions of her neighbour. 

What Sam doesn’t see, but the reader does, is that there may well be an additional external threat that her neighbours are telling her about. 

I admired the skill with which Jeff VanderMeer slowly raised the sense of threat, using Sam’s instability, her remembered trauma, and the tension with her neighbours to create a feverish dissociation that seems beyond Sam’s control. 

He even used the numbering of the story segments to increase the tension. At first, I didn’t understand why the story segments were numbered to count down from sixteen to zero. The story was linear and moved forward, not backwards, so the direction of the numbering disturbed me like a deliberately discordant note. Then I realised that it amplified the feeling that Sam’s grasp of time was off, while also counting down to a confrontation like a loudly ticking clock in a Hitchcock movie. 

This story about territorial instincts is filled with borders of different kinds. Sam’s land borders the wilderness as well as her neighbour’s land. While her neighbour seems to be marking his territory by cutting back undergrowth, setting a moat and keeping porch lights on at night, Sam is rewilding her garden and inviting the wildlife onto her property. At night, she prowls across borders, spying on her neighbours with night vision goggles and recording wildlife with motion-activated cameras.

I liked that the end of the story was dramatic but open to interpretation. It triggers Sam’s territorial instincts but then confronts her with something unexpected and deeply frightening. Sam’s slowly dawning fear finally ends her dissociative behaviour. It brings her back to reality, but it also terrifies her.