Haunted Earth: Genre, Preservation, and Surviving the End of the World in Jeff Vander Meer’s Hummingbird Salamander

In the twenty-first century, the ecogothic is unavoidable.Environmental hauntings abound.Our daily weather becomes less predictable, and species go extinct at terrifying and unprecedented rates.The unpredictable and unprecedented have quickly become the new normal, however, and we adjust to the regularity of these losses and the ongoing threat of wildfires, floods, snowstorms, droughts.These environmental issues are the result of our own past actions, accompanied by the desire to preserve the world as we know it and the more pressing need to learn how to live with environmental change.We are haunted by our past-by what has been lost, what remains, and our responsibility for all of the above; we are also haunted by futures that have not yet come to pass.Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander (2021), an ecogothic eco-thriller set in the present and near future, grapples with these hauntings and their consequences.