Jeff VanderMeer sells horror / mystery series The Strange Architect to FSG
And Natalie Portman is adapting one of his shorter stories as a film
Jeff VanderMeer has sold a new, four-part series to publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for seven figures, according to Variety. The series is titles The Strange Architect, and it'll kick off in 2029 with its first installment, How to Be Free. It's described as a "horror and uncanny mystery," and he characterized them as his "most mind-blowing and most directly uncanny novels yet.
The series will follow the story of a man named Arthur Bream, who had worked to build a utopian community. His plans are upended when his daughter goes missing after some sort of catastrophic incident, and he as he comes to believe that she's trapped in a spirit realm, he spends the rest of his life reckoning with his experiences and in doing so, begins constructing houses with a symbol on their stairs, hoping that he'll be able to bring her back to the real world.
Publishers Weekly has a couple of additional details:
The horror-mystery novels “explore the legacy of the mythic Arthur Bream, a man whose dreams of building a utopian community are wrecked by cataclysmic loss,” per the publisher. “Bream’s pain leads him and others into a complex entanglement involving a mysterious symbol, unknown entities, madness, surveillance, and the dangerous discoveries that await in realms beyond what we can see.”
FGS has published a number of VanderMeer's novels in the last decade: it released his Southern Reach series starting in 2014 with Annihilation (and followed it up the same year with Authority and Acceptance), and published his novels Borne (2017), Dead Astronauts (2019), Hummingbird Salamander (2021). In 2024, he published a new installment of the Southern Reach series, Absolution.
This new series sounds enormously ambitious, and I'm keen to see what VanderMeer has in store for us. On Facebook, he's noted that they'll be shorter novels (around 60,000 words each,) that they'll take place in various buildings that Bream builds. I'm also interested in seeing how these books fit in with the rest of his recent work – not canonically, but thematically. With Southern Reach, he really leaned into the state of the environment, a theme that he plays with in Borne and certainly in Hummingbird Salamander.
Andrew Liptak
We'll have a couple of years before they arrive, but this feels a bit like the same sort of anticipation that Southern Reach had building ahead of it.
That's not the only VanderMeer-related news, either. Buried in the Variety article is a note that Natalie Portman and Sophie Mas's production company MountainA is developing an adaptation of a story that he recently published with MIT Technology, "Constellations" about the survivors of a crash on an distant planet.
Portman, of course, was the star of Alex Garland's 2018 adaption of Annihilation, and it's cool to see that she's still attached to his work. I liked the film a great deal, and her work in it. VanderMeer noted that there's still a long way to go before (and if) this is realized, but that he's "psyched at the prospect of her starring in it."
It's not the only project that's been in development recently: in 2019, AMC optioned Borne, Dead Astronauts, and a shorter story Strange Birds for a television series. Variety notes that it's still in development.