#im pretty sure he released like this exact passage a few years ago but its okay its SO good

[12thbiologist]

"In the summer of their first year, the biologists established their headquarters in the ruins of a ghost town that had once pretended to be a county seat. The vegetation had taken it back in its suffocating embrace quickly and did not seem inclined to suffer a second defeat. Even after the biologist had taken over, the expedition did not feel comfortable there. The decision to bivouac inland had been made by someone higher up, someone who thought a location on the beach would seem to “flaunt,” as one biologist put it in their diary. (The diary, retrieved, had been gone at by beetles and rot and in the searing shades of green, the watermarks that seemed more like records of tidal patterns, had the look of a found object in an art exhibit. Old Jim had run his hand over the roughness of that faux coastline more than once as he read the faded pencil marks, before he’d thought, almost quaintly, of contamination, and put the journal back.)

Early on, a local from the village bar claimed that he saw a biologist “leap into the air and catch a dragonfly with his teeth,” so delicate this maneuver that the lithe biologist spit the insect unharmed into a glass jar, where it vibrated a confused and blurred emerald. Old Jim labeled that tale apocryphal, but already, almost from the start, the biologists were changing in the eyes of the locals into something uncanny. One day, a local would be walking down a weed-strewn trail on the forgotten coast, glimpse a biologist from the corner of their eye, and not be sure of what they had seen."

excerpt of the 4th area x novel from jeff vandermeer's twitter