Into the “Insane Midden”: Mystical Experiences of Exhaustion in Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecological Fiction

The novelist Jeff VanderMeer has a penchant for plunging his characters into overwhelming piles of decaying stuff. This paper contends that passage through these piles can be read as a form of mystical absorption apposite to the experience of being overwhelmed by climate crisis. Climate crisis is often presented as a problem of scale, yet scale alone cannot account for its maddening, and at times deeply stupefying, particulars. Nor should scale be the sole connection point between climate crisis and the scholarly study of mystical techniques and experiences. I argue that VanderMeer’s recurring motif of piles depicts mystical experiences of excess born not of inexhaustibility but of exhaustion, and thus offers resources to resist transcendentalizing climate crisis in a way that distracts from its politics.