The series' first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula[2] and Shirley Jackson Awards,[3] and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland.

[5] VanderMeer has been called "one of the most remarkable practitioners of the literary fantastic in America today,"[6] with The New Yorker naming him the "King of Weird Fiction".

[11] VanderMeer's writing has been described as "evocative" and containing "intellectual observations both profound and disturbing,"[12] and has been compared with the works of Jorge Luis Borges,[12][13] Franz Kafka, and Henry David Thoreau.

[14] When VanderMeer was 20, he read Angela Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which he has said "blew the back of my head off, rewired my brain: I had never encountered prose like that before, never such passion and boldness on the page.

VanderMeer has also worked in other media, including on a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church.

In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published VanderMeer's Southern Reach Series, consisting of the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance.

[4] The film stars Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez,[25] Tessa Thompson,[26] Jennifer Jason Leigh,[27] and Oscar Isaac.

As with the Southern Reach trilogy, the novel was highly praised, with The Guardian saying, "VanderMeer’s recent work has been Ovidian in its underpinnings, exploring the radical transformation of life forms and the seams between them.

"[29] Publishers Weekly said the novel reads "like a dispatch from a world lodged somewhere between science fiction, myth, and a video game" and that with Borne Vandermeer has essentially invented a new literary genre, "weird literature.

VanderMeer is a frequent writer of critical literary reviews and essays, which have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic,[33] The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and other places.

He has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference.

He and Mark Roberts were also finalists for the same award the next year for the anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.

[40] VanderMeer has been called "one of the most remarkable practitioners of the literary fantastic in America today,"[6] with The New Yorker naming him the "King of Weird Fiction.

[11] VanderMeer's fiction has been described as "evocative (with) intellectual observations both profound and disturbing"[12] and "lyrical and harrowing,"[41] with his mixing of genres producing "something unique and unsettling.