“What are Jeff VanderMeer’s Best Books?” We looked at all of VanderMeer’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Jeff VanderMeer and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Jeff VanderMeer

31 ) The Book of Lost Places

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 28
• Amazon: 29
• LibraryThing: 27

30 ) The Day Dali Died

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 26
• Amazon: 25
• LibraryThing: 25

28 ) Balzac’s War

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 29
• LibraryThing: 27

A deadly invasion of a far-future ecologically ravaged earth. A terrible secret discovered in a ruined city. Earth is no longer ruled by humans, but by the species they uplifted. Creatures called fleshdogs are their emissaries, and humanity must fight this implacable enemy or face extinction. Balzac must confront monsters and more trying to find his lover. And when he does find her, will the price be too great? This novella is part of Jeff VanderMeer’s cycle of far-future stories, which culminated with the critically acclaimed novel Veniss Underground. As an added bonus, this e-book also includes two extras: an incomplete story set during the same time period as “Balzac’s War” and VanderMeer’s original afterword to the UK edition of Veniss Underground, shedding light on the original creator of the creatures that take center stage in “Balzac’s War.”

28 ) Dead Astronauts

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 19
• Amazon: 28
• LibraryThing: 27

A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden. Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts presents a city with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth – all the Earths.

27 ) Acceptance

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 23
• Amazon: 27
• LibraryThing: 21

If J. J. Abrams, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Weisman collaborated on a series, it might be this awesome. This collection includes all three novels in the epic Southern Reach trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. Praised for its evocative prose, chilling psychological twists, and intriguing story arc, this series has amassed high critical and popular acclaim, with book one landing on the New York Times best sellers list. Dive into the mysteries of Area X, a remote and lush terrain that has inexplicably sequestered itself from civilization. Twelve expeditions have gone in, and not a single member of any of them has remained unchanged by the experience – for better or worse.

25 ) Authority

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 25
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 20

The bone-chilling, hair-raising second installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy. For 30 years, a secret agency called the Southern Reach has monitored expeditions into Area X – a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization. After the 12th expedition, the Southern Reach is in disarray, and John Rodriguez (a.k.a. “Control”) is the team’s newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and more than two hundred hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves – and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he’s promised to serve.

25 ) Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 29
• Amazon: 21
• LibraryThing: 19

Whimsically illustrated, this bite-sized bestiary is the deciding vote on which fantastical creatures are kosher. Embarking on an undomesticated romp from A to Z, the ritual cleanliness of E.T., hobbits, Mongolian Death Worms, and the elusive chupacabra are discussed. This hilarious kashrut is the offspring of a debate that began on Jeff Vandermeer’s blog, between his alter-ego, Evil Monkey, and his editor/wife. Addressing questions such as Is a vegetable-lamb a vegetable or a lamb? Does licking the Pope make you trayf? What exactly is a Pollo Maligno? and Is Sasquatch roast stringy? this irreverent abecedary is a perfect gift for anyone seeking to broaden their imaginary culinary experiences guilt-free.

24 ) Komodo

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 30
• Amazon: 9
• LibraryThing: 27

An incendiary speculative fiction novelette from the NYT bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy. Meet your cast of characters: Angels and ghost frogs, transdimensional komodo dragons and secret forces using luna moths for surveillance. Want to traverse space and time to avoid the komodos tracking your scent? All you have to do let yourself be devoured by a giant undead bear. Confused yet? You should be. But this is the secret world our nameless narrator has stumbled into, ever since being rescued by the angels from an exploding airplane. And she’ll make sense of it for you, or die trying.

23 ) Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 27
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 24

WHY SHOULD I CUT YOUR THROAT? is an engaging, sometimes controversial look at the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror from a man with almost two decades of experience as a reviewer, fiction writer, and editor. The reviews, interviews, essays, and articles collected herein are insightful and entertaining, sure to appeal to the casual reader and the hardcore genre fan alike. Written from the perspective of a writer, not an academic, the work is lively and engaging, full of humor and sharp observations. New Journalism-style reports from conventions and book tours provide an often hilarious insider’s view of the genre.

22 ) The Surgeon’s Tale

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 21
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 23

In a world where magic is fading and science begun to ascend, a young surgeon in medical school experiences an obsession so forbidden that its realization will change him forever. “She looked as if she were asleep, still with that slight smile, floating on the thick sargassum, glowing from the emerald tincture that would keep the small crabs and other scavengers from her. She looked otherworldly and beautiful.” Sometimes life is not enough. Also including five more stories of dark wonder from Rambo and VanderMeer, from “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March” to “The Farmer’s Cat.” Enter a world of rat suitors, severed arms, and Fungi Et Fruits de Mer, served up with prose both appetizing and uncanny. Dark fantasy has never been quite so decadent . . .

21 ) Greensleeves

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 30
• Amazon: 2
• LibraryThing: 27

A beautifully crafted modern fairy tale where absurdity joins with revelation, and a transcendent experience leaves behind chaos, a hint of cinnamon, frog spit, and subtle musics. GoldenGryphon.com The story of a resigned librarian who can see shades of silence and talks to portraits. A fairy tale romance with a strong sense of fantastic. A story with a big frog. “A big one -five feet long and four wide. Stands three feet at the shoulder. Found him myself in the South American rainforest. Very rare. And smart, devious – even Machiavellian – in his intrigues” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeff VanDerMeer, World Fantasy Award winner, is a full time fantasy best seller author. You can also read his essays and reviews for The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and many others.

20 ) Annihilation

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 19
• Amazon: 21
• LibraryThing: 18

If J.J. Abrams, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Weisman collaborated on a novel . . . it might be this awesome Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. This is the twelfth expedition.

19 ) The Situation

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 29
• LibraryThing: 16

The Situation is based on a short story by Jeff VanderMeer which Margo Lanagan called “darkly hilarious” and Kevin Brockmeier “a work of surreal humor, bemused sadness, and meticulous artifice…as if the workplace novels of Sinclair Lewis and Joshua Ferris had been inverted, shaken, and diced until they came out looking like a Terry Gilliam creation.”

18 ) Breaking Windows

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 22
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 21

17 ) Veniss Underground

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 17
• Amazon: 20
• LibraryThing: 14

In the far future, on an Earth of many-leveled cities, such as Veniss, and man-made deserts, the bioengineering known as Living Art is burgeoning. If you can afford them– and as always, few can–you can have manufactured creatures to do whatever tasks you set them. Living Artist wanna-be Nicholas wants a meerkat and is prepared to work for the prodigious Quin, greatest of Living Artists, to get one. When Nicholas disappears, his twin sister, Nicola, tries to find him; after acquiring a meerkat herself, as a gift, she is all but killed by . . . Nicholas. Her ex-lover Shadrach, who grew up in subterranean Veniss and escaped to the surface to better himself, then sets out to find her, Nicholas, and, eventually, Quin. VanderMeer, founder of the sf-fantasy small press Ministry of Whimsy, is nothing if not adventurous. The novel’s three parts are in the first, second, and third persons, respectively; its milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow. Ray Olson

16 ) The Time Traveller’s Almanac

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 13
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 17

The Time Traveller’s Almanac is the largest, most definitive collection of time travel stories ever assembled. Gathered into one volume by intrepid chrononauts and world-renowned anthologists Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, here is over a century’s worth of literary travels into past and the future. The anthology covers millions of years of Earth’s history – from the age of the dinosaurs to strange and fascinating futures, through to the end of Time itself. The Time Traveller’s Almanac will reacquaint readers with beloved classics and introduce them to thrilling contemporary examples of the time travel genre. The Time Traveller’s Almanac includes stories from Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock and, of course, H.G. Wells.

15 ) Secret Life

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 25
• LibraryThing: 2

This collection of 23 stories reflects a diversity of approaches to key questions about the human condition, including questions about mortality, love, obsession, and creativity. “Balzac’s War” is a harrowing, powerful far-future novella that pits brother against brother in a landscape ravaged by war with Earth’s newly sentient human-made species. In 13th-century Cambodia, a lone artist is torn between his love of his craft and his unspoken love for a woman in “The Bone Carver’s Tale.” In “The Emperor’s Reply” and “The Compass of His Bones,” set in 17th-century Peru, the last Incan Emperor, having brutally fallen at the hands of the Conquistadores, seeks his revenge.

13 ) City of Saints and Madmen

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 8

A master of postmodern game playing, VanderMeer (The Exchange) here gathers all the fiction published in his earlier trade paper collection (also titled, in a typically Borgesian maneuver, City of Saints and Madmen), plus an equal amount of new material. Set in the haunted city of Ambergris, with its Borges Bookstore, these stories feature bizarre recurring characters and intensely self-referential plots. Among the highlights are the World Fantasy Award$winning Transformation of Martin Lake, the tale of a talented painter who’s obsessed with a great composer; The Strange Case of X, which concerns an incarcerated lunatic found wandering the streets of Ambergris carrying the very book being discussed in this review; the wonderful new story The Cage, in which an antiques dealer becomes infected with a fungus that’s slowly taking over much of the city; and, oddest of all perhaps, an untitled short story, which fills the entire dust jacket and concerns an unnamed traveler who has a close encounter with a giant squid in the river that runs through Ambergris. Other pieces take many forms, including a history of the city complete with footnotes, psychiatric records from a local hospital, an amazingly funny work of pseudo-biology entitled King Squid and entirely bogus bibliographies and glossaries. This beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn’t for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding. (May) Forecast: Recently named by Locus On-Line as one of the 10 best short-story writers in the field, VanderMeer has avoided doing the kind of thing the big, increasingly commercial houses are willing to take on. Serious review attention could break him out though it will take a novel that makes some concessions to the marketplace to lure a major publisher.

13 ) Secret Lives

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 24
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 11

In this new collection by World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer, the secret lives of librarians, doctors, lawyers, university students, bank tellers, sex shop clerks and dozens of others are revealed for the first time. Ordered by profession, these short-short stories range from the hilarious to the somber, the absurd to the revelatory. Using real people as the springboard, VanderMeer has created a rich blend of the factual and the imaginary in which everyone gets the secret life they deserve. A luminous little book meant for dipping into one secret life at a time.

12 ) The Third Bear

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 11

The award-winning short fictions in this collection highlight the voice of an inventive contemporary fantasist who has been compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka. In addition to highlights such as ‘The Situation,’ in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta ray to be used for educational purposes and ‘Errata,’ which follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world, this volume contains two never-before-published stories. Chimerical and hypnotic, this compilation leads readers through the postmodern into what is emerging into a new literature of the imagination.

11 ) Borne

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 14

In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company – a biotech firm now derelict – and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech. One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump – plant or animal? – but exudes a strange charisma. Borne reminds Rachel of the marine life from the island nation of her birth, now lost to rising seas. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts – and definitely against Wick’s wishes – Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford. “He was born, but I had borne him.” But as Borne grows, he begins to threaten the balance of power in the city and to put the security of her sanctuary with Wick at risk. For the Company, it seems, may not be truly dead, and new enemies are creeping in. What Borne will lay bare to Rachel as he changes is how precarious her existence has been, and how dependent on subterfuge and secrets. In the aftermath, nothing may ever be the same.

9 ) Monstrous Creatures

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 26

An entertaining, eclectic chronicle of modern fantastical fiction, Monstrous Creatures delivers incisive commentary, reviews, and essays pertaining to permutations of the monstrous, whether it’s other people’s monsters, personal monsters, or monstrous thoughts. A two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, Jeff VanderMeer is one of speculative fiction’s foremost voices. For the past 20 years, he has not only written weird literary fiction translated into 20 languages, but written about it extensively, influencing the way people think about fantasy through reviews in major papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as through interviews, thoughtful essays, blog posts, teaching, and guest-speaking. Monstrous Creatures, a follow-up to his 2004 nonfiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, collects all of his major nonfiction from the past five years, including such controversial pieces as “The Romantic Underground,” “The Triumph of the Good,” and “The Language of Defeat.” Interviews with writers like Margo Lanagan and China Miéville are an added bonus, creating a dialogue with VanderMeer’s own interpretations of the monstrous in the fantastical.

9 ) Booklife

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 7

Offering timely advice in an era when the burden of production and publicity frequently falls on authors, this essential reference reflects on methods for being focused, productive, and savvy in the craft of writing. Discussing a wide range of essential topics for self-promoting authors, this important guide explores questions such as How can authors use social media and the internet? How does the new online paradigm affect authors, readers, and the book industry? How can authors find the time to both create and promote their work? and What should never be done? Through good-humored encouragement, practical tips of the trade culled from 25 years of experience as a writer, reviewer, editor, publisher, agent, and blogger are shared. Including topics such as personal space versus public space, deadlines, and networking, the benefits of interacting with readers through new technologies is revealed.

8 ) Shriek

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 23
• LibraryThing: 5

Narrated with flamboyant intensity by one-time society figure Janice Shriek, and presenting a vivid gallery of strange characters and even stranger events, this is an account of the adventures of her brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a dark secret that may kill or transform him. It involves, too, a war between rival publishing houses which threatens to change Ambergris forever, and rivalry with a marginalised race known as the “grey caps” who, armed with advanced fungal technologies, wait underground for their chance to recover the city that was once theirs. This story of the family, “Shriek” is an exotic and colourful novel of love, life and death which brings to fruition the author’s genius for capturing the truly weird.

7 ) Finch

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 6
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 10

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

6 ) The Steampunk User’s Manual

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 9
• LibraryThing: 8

Steampunk, the retro-futuristic cultural movement, has become a substantial and permanent genre in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. A large part of its appeal is that, at its core, Steampunk is about doing it yourself: building on the past while also innovating and creating something original. VanderMeer’s latest book offers practical and inspirational guidance for readers to find their individual path into this realm. Including sections on art, fashion, architecture, crafts, music, performance, and storytelling, The Steampunk User’s Manual provides a conceptual how-to guide that motivates and awes both the armchair enthusiast and the committed creator. Examples range from the utterly doable to the completely over-the-top, encouraging participation and imagination at all levels.

5 ) The Steampunk Bible

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 11

Steampunk – a grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk rock attitude onto various forms of science-fiction culture – is a phenomenon that has come to influence film, literature, art, music, fashion, and more. The Steampunk Bible is the first compendium about the movement, tracing its roots in the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells through its most recent expression in movies such as Sherlock Holmes. Its adherents celebrate the inventor as an artist and hero, re-envisioning and crafting retro technologies including antiquated airships and robots. A burgeoning DIY community has brought a distinctive Victorian-fantasy style to their crafts and art. Steampunk evokes a sense of adventure and discovery, and embraces extinct technologies as a way of talking about the future. This ultimate manual will appeal to aficionados and novices alike as author Jeff VanderMeer takes the reader on a wild ride through the clockwork corridors of Steampunk history.

4 ) Dradin, in Love

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 4

3 ) Evolutions

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 6

When humanity expanded beyond the safety of Earth to new stars and horizons, they never dreamed what dangers they would encounter there. When the alien juggernaut known as the Covenant declared holy war upon the fragile human empire, millions of lives were lost – but, millions of heroes rose to the challenge. In such a far-reaching conflict, not many of the stories of these heroes, both human and alien, have a chance to become legend. This collection holds eleven stories that dive into the depths of the vast Halo universe, not only from the perspective of those who fought and died to save humanity, but also those who vowed to wipe humanity out of existence.

2 ) The Strange Bird

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 3

The Strange Bird – from New York Times best-selling novelist Jeff VanderMeer – expands and weaves deeply into the world of his critically acclaimed novel Borne. The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory – she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege, and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape. But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology – satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans – all of them now simply scrambling to survive – who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home. With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne – a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.

1 ) Wonderbook

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 1

This all-new definitive guide to writing imaginative fiction takes a completely novel approach and fully exploits the visual nature of fantasy through original drawings, maps, renderings, and exercises to create a spectacularly beautiful and inspiring object. Employing an accessible, example-rich approach, Wonderbook energizes and motivates while also providing practical, nuts-and-bolts information needed to improve as a writer. Aimed at aspiring and intermediate-level writers, Wonderbook includes helpful sidebars and essays from some of the biggest names in fantasy today, such as George R. R. Martin, Lev Grossman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Catherynne M. Valente, and Karen Joy Fowler, to name a few.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Best Books

Jeff VanderMeer Review Website Bibliography Rankings