A Haunting Return to Area X

Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution serves as a captivating conclusion to the Southern Reach trilogy, delving deeper into the mysterious Area X and its enigmatic allure. The novel offers a fresh perspective, exploring the origins of the anomaly and the consequences of human intervention.

VanderMeer masterfully weaves a narrative that is both thought-provoking and unsettling. The prose is evocative and atmospheric, painting vivid images of the desolate landscape and the strange creatures that inhabit it. The characters, while few in number, are complex and well-developed, each grappling with their own demons and uncertainties.

One of the strengths of Absolution is its ability to raise profound questions about the nature of existence, consciousness, and the limits of human understanding. The novel challenges our preconceived notions and forces us to confront the unknown with a sense of awe and trepidation.

While some readers may find the pacing to be slower than in the previous books, the deliberate exploration of themes and the rich world-building make the journey worthwhile. Absolution is a satisfying conclusion to a remarkable trilogy that will leave a lasting impression on readers.

My Goodreads, Storygraph, and Fable reviews are all far simpler than what I'm about to say here. But my god. If this is a conclusion to the series, it's a damn good one. I have thoroughly enjoyed each of these books and it is now 1:05am because I couldn't put Absolution down once I hit Lowry's perspective. This feels like a conclusion, but if it is not, I will happily read all future installments. I loved every bit of Old Jim's story, and love how Jeff VanderMeer doesn't seem to waste a single word (even with Lowry's perspective...all the fucks...but I mean, he was high, so it's forgiven). I love how he is easily able to connect threads from the other books in new ones, so that everything feels cohesive even when the style changes slightly to accommodate new perspectives. Thank you, truly, for the opportunity to read this before publication.

Absolution is prototypical VanderMeer, for better or for worse. More similar to his more recent works, this was a fever dream wrapped in a K-hole, complete with body horror, cosmic horror, and the meandering prose that the genre is known for. Fans of Annihilation may not like this, but if you liked Authority and Acceptance, then you will.

Absolution is a set of three stories around the "creation" of Area X. We start with a group of biologists who are tasked with running mysterious experiments in the marshes near the town where Area X begins. This is the story that is most like Annihilation, filled with intrigue, horrific experiences, and hazy mystery as we follow the groups slow departure from sanity. The second story, in many ways occurs in tandem to the first, following Old Jim, the bartender in the nearby town, but in reality an operative from Central. Tasked with finding out the details of what happened to the biologists, he is forced to report to Jackie, the daughter of Jack who is the head of Central, and with Cass, the doppleganger of his vanished daughter. This story is much more similar to Hummingbird Salamander, and Authority/Acceptance, more noir in tone with an unsettling mystery at its center. The last story follows Lowry, the head of Central during Annihilation/Authority/Acceptance, and the know only survivor of the first expedition into Area X, and yes, we do indeed follow this expedition. While it sounds like it might be similar to Annihilation, it was more similar to Dead Astronauts in that the narrative is colored heavily by Lowry's quirks and seemingly declining mental stability. All in all, we get a clearer picture, not necessarily of HOW Area X came to be, but the extent of the mystery for the ways in which Area X affects the landscape.

As I referenced before, devout fans of VanderMeer are going to like this a lot because it's a style consolidation of many of his works, Annihilation, Dead Astronauts, Hummingbird Salamander. But more discerning fans may have a harder time with this. I personally enjoyed it quite a bit. The variety in the styles of the stories kept it interesting and intriguing. Like much Weird literature, there's a feeling of just barely being able to keep you head above water with regard to following the narrative, a feeling I appreciate but many may not. There's a feeling of sterility in the way some of the shocking things happen in this book, as if it's being observed as a part of a case study rather than a narrative. There isn't much weigh, or importance lent to things like cannibalism or brutal dismemberment, adding to the eerie feeling of the book.

In many ways I do miss the accessibility of Annihilation in being able to tell a simultaneously creepy and coherent story, but Acceptance/Authority should be able to prepare a reader for this experience. If you are a fan of the trilogy, then absolutely give this a shot.

When I was 15, my mother brought home a rabbit for my younger sister who was 5 at the time. I grew up in a small town in Australia whose local economy was built on the sugar cane industry. We lived in the centre of the remains of an ancient super volcano caldera with a sea of 12 ft tall sugar cane fields surrounding us on all sides.
The rabbit my mother brought home was a large albino with blood-red eyes. She found him on the side of the road out in the middle of the sugar cane. My sister adored him, I did not.
For reasons known only to him, he never *did* anything but eat the food we gave him, and occasionally pace around his enclosure or the living room when my sister brought him inside.
I remember him sitting with her, facing the TV, but due to the location of his eyes on his head, and the angle of the couches in the living room, it always looked like he was staring at me.
I developed a habit of staying in my room when she had him inside.

6 months later, my mum brings home a new rabbit - she’s worried the albino one is lonely due to his strange behaviour. He is adorable. My sister names him Junior. He is only 4 months old but he is very friendly and inquisitive. He learns how to ask us for food by nudging our hands and his this beautiful brown-eyed grey and white floppy ear.

Months go by, and I notice a small tear in Junior’s left ear. It’s healed, it kind of looks like the one they give cats when they get desexed. I ask my mum about this. She doesn’t know where it came from. A little while later there is now an entire hole in his ear, another appears days later. A week later I’m feeding the rabbits and I notice a pink tinge to the white parts of Junior’s fur. I inspect him and find numerous scratches and cuts on his back and sides. We take him to the vet. There is nothing medically wrong with him. Another week goes by and this time my mum and I catch the albino rabbit in the act. He has pinned junior down and is gnawing on his ears and neck, drawing blood.

We act immediately, removing the albino from the cage. He resists us scratching us both pretty badly, we are both lucky they don’t get infected. We end up getting him into the car, where my mum drives off deep into the sugar cane, releasing him back where he was found. We decide to tell my sister he just escaped. She is sad for a bit but gets over it.

Why am I telling you all of this in a review for Absolution? I had forgotten all about this awful saga - it’s been 13 years and I haven’t thought about it once, until I got part way through the first of three parts in this unhinged book. Why? You’ll have to read it to find out, and I strongly recommend that you do.

I’m here to say that I am terribly disappointed with Absolution.

I loved Annihilation. I read it during a college course in the peak of covid, and, it just vibed. I’m not going to expound more on how much I loved Annihilation, but I really really did. It’s still in my top ten favorite novels, and likely will be for a long time.

With that said, I ended up DNFing Authority at about the 40% mark. When I saw the synopsis for Absolution, it felt so much like Annihilation that I had hoped this newest book would redeem the sequel that just hadn’t clicked with me. I thought that Jeff VanderMeer delving back into Area X, unspooling a tale about the first expedition would unravel a beautiful, mystifying journey like Annihilation had.

Absolution had just about zero beautiful or mystifying elements.

Told in three parts, the novel started off promising. It did detail a first expedition to the Forgotten Coast. The novel kept with its theme of calling expedition members by their tasks (which I actually like?). However, having it told not from the point of view of one of the expedition members but from an overseer’s (Old Jim’s) point of view, taking away all of the suspense. It felt like a crime detective trying to piece together the events of a scene after the fact. Not necessarily a bad tactic; it gave a new perspective, different questions, at the cost of creating an engaging read. The events aren’t happening to our narrator, so there’s wasn’t the same pressure, anticipation for the next reveal as there was for the biologist in Annihilation.

Then, in the second act, VanderMeer pivots us, pushing us back to see our narrator, Old Jim, as he grapples with his estrangement from his daughter, his confrontations with Central, and his attempts to unravel the workings of Central and the first expedition. I made it through about a quarter of this section before I began to skim. If the stakes felt low in the first section, they were at rock bottom by the time I reached this point. I didn’t pick up Absolution for the backstory of another seemingly pointless character, or even to see more of the inner-workings of Central. Absolution lost me for the exact same reasons that Authority did. They focused too much on Central and corporate machinations rather than Area X, the real heart of Southern Reach.
So, yes, I skimmed the second act. It did have its interesting moments that caused me pause, but not enough to really garner my interest.

And then there’s the third act.

Whew.

The third act was definitely not for me. The first couple of pages contained so much repetitive swearing, that I felt like it was all I was reading. It felt so confusingly disconnecting from anything that had come before it, that I don’t even know what the purpose was. It felt nothing like the two earlier parts, and the furthest thing from the nuance in Annihilation. I gave up. I barely read any of it, and honestly, I don’t feel like I missed anything.

Overall, as I’m sure is obvious, this was so far from the book I’d been hoping for, but maybe should have expected after DNFing Authority. The synopsis of the book really pulled the weight for the novel, presenting it as a mystifying return to Area X, everything that I had hoped for in Authority, but the book itself proved to be anything but. If not for being granted this ARC, I would have DNFed Absolution at 30%, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, that’s more than I feel this book deserved.

I really liked the Southern Reach trilogy when it was "completed" but hadn't followed that up by reading anything else by Jeff VanderMeer since. I was interested to go further in the story but ended up being left cold.

There are three main parts to the book. I read the first part and started the second. The first part of the book takes place before the Southern Reach trilogy (sort of). A guy named Old Jim is reading about a group of biologists that went to what would become Area X to do field research, only to find that things were getting very strange. Old Jim is reading this years after the events described but I felt like I was back in time with the biologists with the eerie sensation that I was seeing into the past but unable to change it. There are creepy rabbits and also an alligator called The Tyrant that number among some of the dangers that the biologists face. But they also have some awareness that their reality is tenuous. This seems to correspond a bit to "Annihilation" with that book's unnamed biologists and the way that the team in that book had to come to grips with an unknowable reality.

The second part of the book seems to correspond a bit to "Authority", the second book in the series. Old Jim is more in the present in this part. He's a spy, some sort of operator, but he's sort of been put out to pasture. A missing daughter gives him a sense of urgency as he tries to parse the past. I just was not in the mood to read another character who continually second guesses everyone and everything in an effort to get behind smokescreens and understand the truth that no one wants him to know. It wore on me and I decided to stop.

But first I checked out the third part of the book in case things changed again. In this part, the narrator has so many F---s to give that he spews dozens of them all over the page, multiple times per sentence, and it seems that most of this part of the book is written in this manner. I have no particular issue with this word, but I got exhausted reading it so f-----g much. I decided that my decision to quit had been validated.

At first, I was almost disappointed as this seemed way too tame, almost boring, compared to the previous 3 volumes in the series. But then it dawned on me that I was about to make the same damned mistake those scientists of the first expedition made: I was underestimating what exactly I was dealing with.

Make no mistake. Every little thing that at first glance might appear too mundane or banal serves a purpose - if only to lure the unsuspecting reader into a false sense of security before dropping the sledgehammer of body horror, psychological terror and utter shock on them.

Seriously, I thought I was prepared because I had read the others but that was what the author had been waiting for, apparently. He's a sly one. And so So SO good!

OK, about the story: Many questions had remained unanswered from the original trilogy, right? Here, we get answers. Well, sorta. Part of the book plays in the first volume's past, part during the original trilogy (various points) and part of it maybe even in the slight future.
We get POVs we had never seen the story from before despite them having been vital to the original trilogy. We get to know the people involved in the creation of "Area X" (kinda). We get the full account of the (in-)famous first expedition (and I can't believe how stupid everyone was in underestimating what was going on, at least the ones that had been complicit)!

We also get new questions and that just has me screaming and pulling my own hair. Though truth be told: the mystery is what makes this so utterly alluring. I think I'd hate to have ALL the answers.

Instead, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed seeing all kinds of weird flora and fauna again, smiled when an expedition's gear started failing (and them still not trying to get out), cackled all the while people descended into madness* - if they weren't eaten or disappeared with only a few spooky traces that is.

(* though I think I enjoyed the absolutely terrifying body horror even more)

Mysterious, weird and lethal as ever, once again wonderfully riveting / disgusting / unsettling and with only one main character: Area X itself.
Love(d) it!

I read this book as a stand-alone not as book four in its series. That being said I was pretty lost. I had no idea on the connections to the last three books so I was missing tons of context and background info. I would definitely read this as part of the series not a stand-alone book

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review!!

I do not even know where to begin but will start with, LONG LIVE THE TYRANT, LONG MAY SHE REIGN. I will give no further explanation. Read the book.

Once again we return to AAX or Area X for short. The novel is broken up into three sections and while each has a similar unsettling beauty they are wildly different. If you are looking for answers to things left in the original trilogy you will be either pleasantly surprised by what's given or extremely upset by twhut is not.

Part 1, Dead Town, is (for lack of better terms) fucked. It is wildly interesting, disturbing, beautiful, and grotesque. It is the start of insane things to come and really plays on Centrals willingness to do anything and everything possible to reach their shadowy means. You shift through the accounts with Old Jim and alongside him become enveloped by the bonkers story being told. There is no way that could have happened right?

Part 2, The False Daughter, is my personal favorite. A psychological thriller following Old Jim as his life and mind seem to unravel. Puppeted by his "old friend" and boss Jack. This sections twists and turns were exciting. The unsettling feeling the deeper into it you got was anxiety inducing. Old Jim and Cass are great characters and their chemistry was perfect. It started pretty straight forward and ended in insanity and brutality. Honestly, I could have a whole novel around this section and would have been happy.

Part 3, The First and the Last, follows Lowry. Who, if you're familiar with the series, you'll know but not at all like this. A drug induced stream of consciousness told you by a real piece of work who in his drugged state can't stop thinking and saying FUCK. It is a lot at first. Like every other word is fuck. No issues with the fucks but makes sentences a bit wonky. It does cool down a bit and the first exped/mish goes by fast and in a blur. Area X and VanderMeer's writing in general is always an exciting challenge but make sure you pay extra close attention here as this is Area X newly born and at its most opaque. Beautiful and haunting visuals, reality distorted even more then I expected, hallucinations that make no sense but also all the sense? Lowry not my favorite character or narrator but think that's kind of the point.

By the end you'll probably feel a little hollow and that's not a bad thing. At least to me. Area X is a phenomenon not known fully to anyone and should (to me) remain a mystery. A cosmic horror of such an abstract nature you can only let it wash over you. You can only ACCEPT it. See what I did? Silly aside, I do feel that way and is that not what we do everyday in life anyway?

Thanks to NetGalley and MCD for the ARC of Absolution. Cannot what to have a physical copy in my collection.

Jeff VanderMeer is the king of weird fiction (or speculative fiction or literary sci fi), and so I was so excited to see that, seemingly out of nowhere, there was another Southern Reach novel-- a fourth book in what was originally billed as a trilogy. To get this out of the way: I do wish that I had reread the original trilogy before reading "Absolution." But I was just too excited to reread three books before getting to this one!

"Absolution" is hard to describe. It's mostly a prequel. The major throughline of the novel is an intelligence officer's work for Central, the shadowy and dangerous agency that features in the original series. This guy is a company man technically looking into a failed scientific mission to the Forgotten Coast (later known as Area X) but there are multiple levels of intrigue and political machinations, completely apart from the ecological and psychic weirdness happening in the area. The other sections of the novels are about the failed scientific mission (intriguing and creepy) and then the first ever mission into Area X (creepy, trippy, but written in a style that I found offputting and sometimes incomprehensible). There were parts where I frankly had no idea what was going on. But I was still enjoying it! This is par for the course for the Southern Reach.

If you liked "Authority," with all the spycraft and doublespeak and shadowy agencies with dubious motives, you'll love "Absolution." There is a strong similarity to "Annihilation" as well, with the time spent in an earlier Area X. Overall, this was an interesting addition to an excellent series.

Everything I wanted it to be and more. Haunting and melodic, this book lulls you into a bizarre nightmare that answers questions you were never brave enough to voice. Reading this book- after ten years of believing that the Southern Reach series was a trilogy- is like getting a free dessert after you've indulged to uncomfortable fullness at a Michelin star restaurant. I was constantly uncomfortable but I savored every minute of it.

The master of New Weird strikes again!Absolution (4th book of The Southern Reach series) is brilliant! It’s unsettling, mysterious and bizarre, it’s wonderfully weird, intense, atmospheric, terrifying and incredibly original.
This book gives so many answers and raises so many questions at the same time. I don’t think there will ever be a conclusion to Area X - it feels just as impenetrable, alien and incomprehensible as ever. And that feels right. There are so many mysteries still to be resolved. I’m hoping for more stories from Area X!
I read all 4 books within a month and having everything so fresh in my mind intensified the experience of reading Absolution. I could follow so many minor threads and details throughout all 4 books, so many little nods to the previous books which I probably would’ve missed otherwise. I loved all 3 ‘chapters’ of Absolution - they were all gripping. Old Jim’s was probably my favourite, followed very closely by Lowry’s. What a mindbender that last story was!!

I love VanderMeer’s works - they’re so fresh, atmospheric, unique and terrifying at the same time. I’ve never read anything like this. I’m a fan of new weird, and I have VanderMeer and Miéville to thank for that!

Absolution will be published next month - I got my hands on an ARC, as I couldn’t wait any longer. Thank you, NetGallery!

I'm a HUGE fan of the Southern Reach trilogy, so I've been anticipating this book since the author tweeted about it in 2020. I even preordered it when the announcement was made!

Unfortunately, I'm about 30% of the way through the book, and I'm really struggling to get hooked. I liked Dead Town (Part 1) enough, but part 2 is taking some time to pick up for me.

If you're a fan of Jeff's writing style outside of the trilogy, if you go into it knowing EXACTLY what it is (you're not getting more answers, really just a little more world building into the history of the people who were researching the area), and you've got a more recent memory of the trilogy you'll likely have better luck than me. So while it's not for me (right now), I can definitely see this finding its audience.

For now, I'm going to take a break and try to come back to it in October. I'll update my review if/when I do!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

This forgotten coast prequel is not strictly necessary. But if, like me, you loved the twisted wierd-fiction spycraft and inscrutible bureaucratic intrigue of Control and Authority just as much as the shock-to-the-system wierdness of Annihilation—then you’re going to want to pick this one up, too.

Absolution is almost a collection of linked novellas—but it really is a novel. It comes together in the end with deliciously incoherent coherence. I found part one, Deadtown, pleasantly creeping; part two, The False Daughter, wildly absorbing. But part three, The First and the Last, is interminable. I couldn’t stand the narrator. Drug-addled stream-of-consciousness is one thing, but did he have to be an asshole to boot? I ended up reading half the stories in Naomi Novik’s delightful new collection while the last chapters of Absolution taunted me—how badly I wanted to know what would happen; how little I wanted to read the sentences that would tell me... But once I forced myself to sit down and finish the thing, exactly those stylistic choices that had been driving me up the wall paid off in a way I wasn’t expecting. Extraordinary to watch prose so tiresome turn sharp and dreaming on a dime.

What lingers: Old Jim, in the village bar, on the forgotten coast, playing Schubert's Winterreise on an old upright piano and trying to hang on to a world slipping away. Any old Winterreise won't do, if you want to capture the feeling of it. I've listened to many, but only one is right for Absolution: Roland Neuwirth's weary folk-singer version in Wiener dialect. Neuwirth captures the half-whispered pain of these songs, the other-worldliness, the winter chill on a summer’s day. That blend of the uncanny and familiar that the German romantics made into all-encompassing Weltanschauung—and that Jeff VanderMeer turns inside out, so you can see the guts splayed out, half-digested contents of stomach, slippery limp nerve stem behind lolling eyeball, ghostly flicker from broken (rabbit) camera.

Unfortunately I was disappointed in this latest surprise book in the southern reach trilogy. This is a novel in 3 parts and the first part looked promising, it had some of the weird spooky elements that made the first book Annihilation so good, but although the author wrote it in a similar style to the first book where the characters remain nameless, it felt a little forced. It also took place before Area X was created.

The second part was very reminiscent of the second book Authority; my personal least favourite in the original trilogy. It was basically more of a spy novella than a scifi story and we followed Old Jim who was mentioned in book 3 but I really had no interest in expanding his character or learning anything about him. This part was very slow paced and when action did happen it was confusing. Area X is still not fully formed in this part

The third part was from the perspective of Lowry who again was a minor character in book 3 Acceptance. This part I though could be very interesting because at least Area X was involved, which is what I wanted to read more about, not the people investigating it. Unfortunately even though some interesting and creepy stuff happens in this part, the style its written in totally ruins it. Lowry says the word fuck at least 10 times per page. Every page. This was distracting and took me right out of the story and made the weird creepy parts way less impactful. I am definitely not against swearing but this was so excessive it felt like it was written by an edgy teenager.

If you loved book 2 and 3 of the trilogy and want more of the top secret government spy stuff then you may enjoy this fourth instalment. I however, did not.

This book is really hard to rate in a way that's helpful for others, because so much depends on whether you read and liked the other Southern Reach books. I don't think it makes sense without the others, for sure. It's essentially in two halves, the first rather like the second Reach book "Authority", which I loved but many did not, and then the second like a furious and vile version of "Annihilation". I'm not sure the first half really hung together, although the sense of unease and institutional distrust work like gangbusters. The second half is explosive and frankly great, although a lot of people will absolutely hate it. I honestly did not know how to rate this - I ended up taking a star because the first half was awfully draggy, but I'd certainly say it's required reading for fans of the previous Southern Reach trilogy.

Absolution was an absolute thrill. The book is split into three novellas that delve into events that happened in the decades before Annihilation with tons of wild thrills and fun moments interspersed along the way. My favorite was the second novella, which felt like a suspenseful, introspective spy thriller with a broken protagonist. It’s got all that weird tension and mystery that VanderMeer does so well.

The structure of the book kind of mirrors the first three books in the series—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance—with each novella sharing a kind of theme with its corresponding novel. the expedition, the one that takes a step back, and the one that goes off the rails. You do get a few answers to some lingering questions and perspectives from the first three books, while setting a new stage. The book keeps you hooked, begging for more, and leaves you with a completely different perspective on the rest of the series.

That said, the third section was a bit of a shock. There are exactly 1,281 uses of "f*ck" in this book, and 1,236 of them are crammed into the last quarter. Every other sentence has multiple interjected "f*cks," and it can really mess with the flow. It’s super jarring, especially coming right after one of the most beautifully written parts of the book. Just a heads up—it’s a lot to take in.

But I’m glad I stuck with it because, honestly, this book has one of the wildest moments in the whole series tucked away in the middle of it—a gut punch that made me stop and question what the hell I just read.

Absolution is a solid entry in the Southern Reach series and my personal favorite of the four. Even though the abrupt shift in the last section threw me off a bit, the story is still beautiful and strange in the best way, and it's a must-read for anyone who’s even remotely interested in the series.

4/5

I loved the Southern Reach trilogy and was very excited to read this ARC. This prequel story really evoked the series, and brought me back to Area X. While it didn't answer all the questions one might hope for, the story was satisfying. My only criticism is that so many sentences were unwieldy. Some examples are this sentence:
"There was a pattern to some of the diagrams, a sort of improvisational quality he could sense, and much of it involved the Tyrant, the way the diagrams suggested jury-rigging, suggested that the Rogue had in some biological way used the cameras to create a symbiosis with the beast, and he didn’t know if he had used the right words in his head , but there came a kind of chill that was realization— that he could not be sure, seeing this, that at some point it had not instead been the Tyrant who became, in a way, not the servant of the Rogue or even willing companion but coconspirator."
And this sentence:
"It had the same high ceilings, here made obvious by the lack of dangling lamps, but despite that his footsteps made no echo, and spread out before him lay a simplicity he had not expected, as if the Rogue had less complexity to him than in Old Jim’s imagination."
And there are many more I could list. Having to take so much time re-reading sentences, breaking them down so as to be able to understand what is being said, took me out of the story. Heavy editing is needed before the final release in order to do justice to the story and improve the reading experience. I would then give the book a 5 star rating.

An incredible return to Area X. Absolutely loved every minute of it and I will be re-reading the series just to re-experience this one.

More of a mirror or accompanying piece than a direct pre- or sequel, we are transported into Area X once more. Especially the operations of Central/Southern Reach get more background, but the major mystery of Area X remains impenetrable
He felt like a caveman encountering the schematics of a spaceship

I truly enjoyed Annihilation, it being one of the books I picked up eagerly when I started reading again as an adult. Absolution had me very exited, aided by its gorgeous cover. In three parts we are returned to respectively 20 years before the barrier around Area X came down, 18 months before and during the first expedition 1 year after the area was sealed off.

The first section, Dead Town consisting of diary entries being commented upon by Old Jim, the main character of the second section, was definitely my favourite. We have deeply unsettling campfire settings, where music is reflected back from the trees to the scientist, and scenes of rabbits (potentially the same that are send into Area X in Authority?) turning up, who eat crabs and have living camera's attached to them. There are movies that change at every viewings which seemingly drive people mad.
Utterly unique in ideas and seriously foreboding, with a spot called Dead Town, this section made me think most of Annihilation. It is interesting that already 20 years prior to the barrier there were strange events in the Forgotten Coast, including uncannily smart alligators, headed by an especially large one called Tyrant and a human(like) apparition dubbed Rogue. Already here there are doubts if the bureaucracy that funded the expedition is not more aware and involved in the strange events: “All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”
Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?
This section of the book felt foreboding and claustrophobic, very well done in my view and you start to understand exactly what is meant with the following sentence: “From that moment” Team Leader 2 recalled “we felt as if we were the experiment”

The second part of the book False Daughter focusses on Old Jim, who is sent to the Forgotten Coast by Central high-up Jack Severance. This section felt more slow-burn spy thriller to me, with Old Jim teaming up reluctantly with Cass someone initially mascaraing like his lost daughter. Initially quite slow, there are clearly elements that don't want any further digging into the area and the Rogue. Old Jim and us are brought into contact with things that seem like mental viruses, triggered by certain song lyrics, or mental landmines, detonated by certain controlling words. There is even a Schubert song that seems particularly deadly. This section was enjoyable, certainly when secret rooms which seemingly endless dimensions in their corners and a facility where people are shoved into cylinders made their appearance. There are also overtones of human hubris, the idea that the power that is starting to manifest in mental programming and temporal impacts can maybe be controlled.

Finally we have The First and the Last, about the first expedition into Area X after the barrier came down. This should have been quite intriguing, if not for my strong dislike of the main character. James Lowry says fuck every two words and is on drugs, which seems a poor combination with entering a potentially hostile alien infected zone. Soon shit hits the fan for this group of 24 "earthbound astronauts", starting off with the protective suits and some people interacting in unexpected manner. Walkie-talkies scream horrors and boxes are destroyed only to reappear. The lighthouse, essential to Acceptance appears differently (if always eerie) to the expedition members, aligning to some dream images characters in part 1 and 2 saw. There are beaches full of human bones, a cut in half destroyer and there are guns that come alive. I think if there narrator to this section would have been different that this would have been my favourite section of the book, now it sometimes steered dangerously close to The files felt like they were written by a bad campfire storyteller.

In the end there is even cannibalism (Like some large scale jelly and jam preserves operation had gone all cannibal cult), but it is heavily implied that everything experienced by the team members is a reflection of simply an unknowable large force interacting with the world. In one of the final scenes Lowry thinks of disturbing a pond with fish and algae, as a god, but decides against it. It seems that unfortunately for the expedition that whatever powers Area X has not abstained from intervention, and that this might just be the start of an expansion of a phenomenon that doesn't just empowers nature in bizarre ways but also influences time. Remnants of the world before Area X seem to have aged by 50 years in one year, while already Old Jim notes that it seems in certain ways like . I was also reminded of Solaris, where we also have a large and unknowable entity trying to interact with humans, inadvertently breaking their minds. Also the eyes appearing on skin and deep revelatory insights conferred with a loss of humanity reminded me of the last episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion or the realm Truth resides in in Full Metal Alchemist, big anime energy that is rare to find in books.

Overall I liked this book, although parts of the 2 and 3 section felt at times like a chore to read. Jeff VanderMeer his writing draws you in, and there are plenty of big ideas, if not clear answers and conclusions, to enjoy here.

Quotes
Yet how could they guard against what could enter the mind?

Empathy slid to expediency

You did not want to be there. You didn’t want to be anywhere, ever again

Made of them nothing but receptacles for further terror.

Some things were best left alone. Some things did not bear further scrutiny.

Could you lose your mind to an unanswerable question or just your soul?

I think you’re evil and you’re going to kill me

Why?
So we can control it or destroy it.

Well, that was terrible and disgusting and worthless

Manifested as a kind of madness subsumed by paperwork

The vast outline of something moving through the deep, of processes that had gotten well beyond contain.

Only knew that he had reached his limit, his capacity, been brought to the edge of something beyond him.

The future colonizing the past

In the corner he’d scrawled “evil advances with good”, but could not fucking remember why.

We all kill what we love and love what we kill, he said

Look for a black mask. Unpredictable and off mission, read the note.
What was this, fucking Zorro?

If they were going to ignore him, he’d be the fucking loudest ghost in the world

Guns coming alive and absorbing their shooters

As if he was a meal now and someone was gorging on him

That Area X would never not happen