Maybe you’ve heard this one: a mystery sends a would-be detective into a spiral of sexual entanglements, shadowy threats, and violent encounters, all of which serve to undo his personal and professional life. He’s in over his head, but he can’t leave it alone, all because a mysterious and entrancing woman contacts him about an avian statuette, which might be worth millions or might ultimately be just another misdirect.

Now make The Maltese Falcon about environmentalism, and make the protagonist modern and female, and you’ve got the foundation of Hummingbird Salamander. VanderMeer’s latest is a return to the urgency and suspicion of the Southern Reach trilogy—with its many conspiracies and wildlife-related threats—but with more of a Noir feel to it, what with all the shadowy figures and terse, economical writing. There are also nods to VanderMeer’s evolving mythos, his favorite archetypes: blue foxes, bears, lighthouses. References are swift and coy, not cloying, and remind me of another author who likes cheeky self-reference: VanderMeer is becoming the bio-horror Stephen King.

King, though, puts narrative first, always. VanderMeer is more experimental by nature, letting his protagonist flounder in darkness and confusion to make his larger points. Here in Hummingbird Salamander the climate threat is immense, and embroidered on all sides by private interests looking to cash in on the crisis. The narrator herself is tangentially a part of it: she sells the idea of safety to people who think their biggest worry is cybersecurity, and not ecological collapse. The job is only that to her—a job, and not a very challenging one—so when she’s sent a cryptic message from Silvina, it’s no real surprise that she wants to follow the breadcrumb trail instead of the well-trod career path. The note leads to an abandoned storage unit on the outskirts of town, and within it is a single taxidermied specimen, the titular hummingbird. No further information arrives from this Silvina, but our narrator is a relentless woman and a solid researcher.

Silvina, it seems, was an heiress turned activist  turned possible ecoterrorist possible utopian visionary who wanted to fight the global appetite for animals.  Her own family was complicit in that selfsame industry however, and profited so immensely from it that they have become very dangerous indeed. Her battle becomes the narrator’s battle as Silvina’s family and yet other forces conspire to keep the status quo.

The narrator calls herself “Jane Smith,” a fabrication we can only perpetuate in order to refer to her. We readers and Jane are all such petty little liars, Vandermeer tells us, eager to think that anonymity (and the tragedy of the commons) absolves us from responsibility. Jane is complicit in any number of petty little lies already: she sets limits on her drinks and then exceeds them, she promises herself her flirtations will not become infidelities and then goes seeking a stranger’s room, and so on. Jane is not an unreliable narrator; she’s too transparent to the reader for that, even if she’s not entirely able to see herself. Hers are exactly the kinds of lies that are so easy to tell: the well-meaning ones, the transparent ones that everyone goes along with because rejecting and repairing them will be very, very hard. The parallel that VanderMeer is making is with the animal consumption industries, whether factory farms or roadside charms for luck, whether rare species or common rabbits’ feet.

This criticism is not didactic or even particularly personal. VanderMeer is not carping about energy-efficient dryers or Meatless Mondays. His indignation is huge, his horror bigger still: we are complicit in systems that are killing the planet. Easy little lies in the grocery aisle, or when shopping for a winter coat, are aggregating faster than we can put them right, and the effect snowballs—well, even that metaphor fails, because soon there won’t be snowballs. There won’t be snow. There won’t be anything but monotonous heat, and monotonous landscapes without salamanders or hummingbirds.

VanderMeer puts an unusual face on the horror: an endangered, perhaps-extinct hummingbird, a commonplace wonder. Details of its miniscule size and massive yearly migration are astounding without any embellishment, and VanderMeer doesn’t try, just lets the facts speak for themselves. Jane is swayed by these bare facts, and it’s not hard to see why: the hummingbird is incredible, almost miraculous. A job in security consulting, a suburban life: these pale before the epic majesty of a ten centimeter creature traveling hundreds of miles across hostile wilderness, fed only by flowers.

Yet there’s a nagging sense that Jane is deluding herself with this hummingbird and Silvina, the equally delicate-strong woman who gave it to her. Silvina is maybe a bioterrorist or maybe just another capitalist; maybe a visionary or maybe just a hack; maybe dead or maybe still alive. That’s bad enough, but Jane can’t even answer a more basic question: is Silvina’s message even for Jane? Or is Jane just Roger Thornhill in all of this, thinking she’s Sam Spade?

That Jane might be throwing her life away for a lie is bad enough; that she might be throwing her life away for a fabrication largely of her own making is tragicomic. But VanderMeer never lets up on the danger or the horror, insisting that Jane plow through the absurdity with a maximum of seriousness. This keeps the book from descending into parody, but the relentlessness—which is probably intentionally wearying, for us and for Jane—can be counterproductive to the narrative. There seems to be no joy, almost no hope, in pursuing Silvina’s clues. There’s only devastation. Why, then? Why does Jane keep poking the dragon?

Jane doesn’t read as the anti-establishment type, the wise-cracking anti-hero who just can’t resist needling opponents. She has no nascent ideology to stoke at the beginning of the book, nor even much curiosity. She only knows that she still fits poorly into her own life, and always has. The promise of a grand conspiracy seems like a better distraction than an affair, a chance to indulge in her self-destructive impulse without the sordid consequences. Other, more dire consequences soon rear their heads, however, and even very early on Jane knows that there’s little good to be gained from her quest. What she gives up is massive, the totality of her life; what she gets in return is ugly and cold, and it hurts her all the time. Any number of spooks stalk her, threaten her, pursue her in black SUVs. Exactly how many corporate cabals are there? And exactly what is the end goal? She doesn’t know. She’s not a freedom fighter. She has no terrorist cell to turn to, nor even a handler. She’s alone, pursuing a goal that might very well be illusory. Jane doesn’t know much at all. She just wants to know, compelled by something deeper than curiosity. Jane wants meaning.

Humans are meaning-making creatures, and that might be the kindest thing Hummingbird Salamander can say about us. Jane wants to believe that there’s still meaning in a desiccated, taxidermied hummingbird and in the memories of hunting for salamanders with her brother. She wants to believe her own largely terrible childhood had a purpose beyond survival. She wants to believe that Silvina’s life was bigger than her intrafamilial struggles and her medical conditions. And she wants to believe that meaning can be made out of the great senseless murder of the earth, the deaths of glaciers and species and habitats.

She wants the hugeness of that, the big conspiracy and the big reveal. She’s always lived a life in which she is the most intimidating person in the room: she’s very tall and physically strong, and she’s emotionally tough as nails from her miserable upbringing. But Hummingbird Salamander makes her come undone from the work of the most delicate and intimate things: a miniscule hummingbird, a fragile young activist, and, ultimately, her own family history—which she must examine instead of pummel into her subconscious if she wants to have any hope of solving Silvina’s mystery. It’s not low-flow toilets or gun battles that will save us. Change at the most fundamental, intimate level is what is required.

To Jane—and perhaps to VanderMeer—this hope is not a happy prospect. Hope means a hard evolution: to biology, change means death. It’s awful and awe-full, once Jane starts thinking on that sublime scale and realizes how wonder, but not joy, can persist even as our institutions implode. Governments and corporations are empty, family will fail us, and yet we will endure. Or something sufficiently like us, transformed by the consequences of our persistence.