“Dead Astronauts” pointedly inhabits these strange, nonhuman consciousnesses. Swaths of text appear in different shades or zigzag across the page; other pages contain only single paragraphs or single sentences. Scenes are even narrated in verse: A young Botch “evaded toad and frog to scuttle-crawl between holding ponds / flop-plopped into water deft of fin / mud clear as bright sun / cavorted with others of his kind.” VanderMeer, a committed environmentalist, is a master at describing the pungent immediacy of being, say, a salamander. “The thrill of liquid against the body, the constraint of that. The way it reminds you the world matters in a way that breathing air cannot.”

Violence and horror and death suffuse the book, in a cyclical, inevitable pattern perpetrated mostly by humans who don’t value other forms of life. One section, narrated by an animal, consists only of the sentences “They killed me. They brought me back” repeated 185 times. But Charlie X, the deranged Company scientist who performs those experiments, is haunted by a father who performed equally sadistic experiments on him: “And he would stave in my skull and I would wake up on the slab. And he would drive a kitchen knife into my heart and I would wake up on the slab.” Abuse spawns abuse no matter who, or what, the victim is.

[ For some horror writers, including VanderMeer, nothing is scarier than a changing planet. ]

Amid all its grimness, the novel finds some small redemption in the power of love. But VanderMeer’s brilliant formal tricks make love feel abstract and unconvincing by the end, a flimsy human ideal. Late in the book, the blue fox recalls his capture by the Company, staring into his mate’s eyes as he’s dragged away from her. “The sentimental tale,” he tells us coolly. “The tale you always need to care. Which shows you don’t care. Why we don’t care if you care.” It’s precisely that ferocity that makes “Dead Astronauts” so terrifying and so compelling.