Jeff VanderMeer’s fourth Southern Reach novel is not a sequel, but a new story layered over the first three novels. In terms of chronology, all three interrelated parts of Absolution occur before the events of Annihilation (Book #1), but time is a mutable concept in Southern Reach, and I strongly recommend reading in publication order – that is, Absolution after the original trilogy. In fact, if it has been a few years, and if you have the time, you might consider re-reading the trilogy. I made do with my past reviews, some online synopsis, and ebook searches within the earlier books (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance). Additionally, I feel the 2018 film Annihilation alone would not be good preparation.

It is my nature when reading SF to focus on parsing out the world-building and speculative concepts, even above my interest in the characters. Weird fiction, such as the Southern Reach series, is especially challenging in that regard, because one of its hallmarks is to evade conclusive understanding of the nature of its reality. VanderMeer explains nothing of his world directly, rather we view extraordinary and sometimes macabre events through the perspectives of his limited narrators. There are readers who are satisfied with sitting back to enjoy the style of writing without looking for patterns and meanings, and VanderMeer’s style is powerful enough, but I am not one of those readers.

The three parts of Absolution are
1) Dead Town; Twenty Years Before Area X – told from the retrospective perspective of Old Jim, an investigator going through Central’s records of the incident. “All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.” In this part, Old Jim seems mostly rational, as he reviews records and artifacts from the bizarre events of Central’s scientific/psychic investigations and experiments on the Forgotten Coast, and the subsequent cover-up.
2) The False Daughter; Eighteen Months Before Area X – told from the perspective of Old Jim, who we learn is a former Central agent pulled back from the brink of madness and death by a faction within Central for purposes of an unknown goal that includes getting to the bottom of incidents of twenty years ago. His perspective is warped by his own emotional needs, the unknown extent of synthetic personality traits constructed for unknown factional purposes, manipulation by other agents of Central, implanted control words, drug effects, as well as the underlying and hidden foreign/alien actors with unknown motivations.
3) The First and the Last; One Year After the Border Came Down – told from the perspective of James Lowry, a foul-mouthed thug implanted in the First Expedition to the closed realm of Area X by a faction within Central. His secret assignment is to shoot when needed, bring back artifacts, and to take control when expedition command breaks down.

Characters include a number who first appear in the original trilogy, that started with the Twelfth Expedition, albeit earlier versions of them – Old Jim (later known as Ol’ Piano Fingers), James Lowry, Henry Kage and his half-sister Suzanne, Gloria Jenkins (later known as The Psychologist), Jackie Severance, and Allen Whitby.

I would love to discuss the clues to reality, and my theories about them. This novel is the longest in the series so far, maybe too long for its own good, and it gives some explanations (from limited perspectives, repeatedly revising, and maybe contradictorily) of some of the realities of the earlier trilogy. But this is a public review, and discussion of them would be spoilers to the original trilogy. Further, discussion of the implications of those clues would also be spoilers to this novel, and that is the whole suspense for a reader like me. Suffice it to say, the potential answers suggested lead to further mysteries. Will it ever end with a final rational explanation? I doubt it. But it’s a unique journey, and afterwards I found myself looking on events of my own life with new suspicions.

I read an Advance Review Copy of Absolution in an ebook format, which I received from Farrar Straus and Giroux through netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review on social media platforms and on my book review blog. This new title is scheduled for release on 22 October 2024.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

TL;DR. Be prepared to be confused, no one in the book understanding what is going on for most of the run (which honestly tracks with reality), this series is vibes-centric with shorter bursts of action.

I loved the first three books, and I anticipated that because of how much I loved those, I might have too high of an expectation for this one. The book is divided into three distinct parts, where the first one is 20 years prior to Area X border coming down, the second and longest part is 18 months before the border, and the last part is 1 year after the border. The ending can be expected from page 1 if you've read the other three books, but all of these books are the journey and not the destination. Or, I guess, the destination makes sense after the journey you've had.

Seriously rounded up 4 stars. I am torn about it as I much disliked the last POV after enjoying the first two. Because of the nature of Southern reach books, none of the narrators in the series have ever been reliable, but this guy Lowry takes the cake. This was one of the rare examples where in parts I didn't know what was going on, and did not care to find out because I didn't care if our POV character survives. The Hargraves bit was clear from the get go.

DNF at 21%

Annihilation was my first foray into the world of Jeff Vandermeer and I fell head over heels. The weird, atmospheric, naturalism of that book drew me in and I read the whole trilogy. My next was Borne and again with the beautiful, weird naturalism theme and I loved that book along with the short story, A Strange Bird. When I saw Vandermeer was coming out with another book set in the Southern Reach trilogy I jumped on an ARC of it. Maybe this is like some of his other books I haven't read it but I felt like I was reading from a completely different author. Sometimes I'd see glimpses and the first novella had some creepy promise but it felt like a sub par version of his own writing. I just want to go back and re-read Annihilation now to get that feeling I was looking for in this book and striking out on.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

You don’t know what you think you know. Or, rather, what you know is only the mere apparition of something else, something more natural and abundant that dwells on the other side of your meager perception. This book wants you to look at yourself, your ideologies and definitions, and reconsider not just their authenticity and provenance but also their utility. Do they bring you closer to a type of truth, or do they use dividing lines to magnify distinctions?

“He paused only to listen to the silence--to hear that above the sound of his own breathing, it was cut through with the chitter of bats, the chirps of flying squirrels. A natural silence, then, full of unconsidered life.”

This book is, likely, going to be polarizing. If you loved Annihilation but weren’t especially keen on Authority then this book probably won’t do it for you. If you thought the open-ended, soft “answers” at the end of Acceptance weren’t quite enough and want things to be much more neatly tied up and clear, you will leave this book frustrated. If Annihilation is an amorphous, intimate fever dream, Authority a political thriller full of right angles and sharp edges, and Acceptance a frenetic spiral that obscures ideas of destiny and human intentionality, then what is Absolution? The previous three books adopted different literary styles and tones and Absolution is no different, starting with a hands-off, distant kind of analytical analysis, followed by a close third person that is similar to Authority in style, a neurotic political thriller that descends into madness as the Forgotten Coast/Area X infiltrate our experience, and it ends with a section that is a desperate nightmare, not the ethereal dreamscape of Annihilation but instead a frenzied, terrified introspection. It feels like a mobius strip, a perpetual returning, a consolidation of perception so that it expands in all directions until reality constantly cascades upon itself, eschewing temporality for experientiality.

None of that says much of anything about the plot of this story, just how it feels when reading it. The plot isn’t a whole lot different than that of the other three, which is to say find out more about what Area X is. Here we start by analyzing reports from a mission on the Forgotten Coast that was 20 years prior to the formation of Area X, and then the bulk of the novel settles into a story that brings us back to the Forgotten Coast but 18 months before the border falls, overlapping with many of the experiences in the third novel, from a different perspective, and finally the last 30% brings us along on the first expedition, a year after the border appeared. In these three times we do get answers, we get glimpses of things we already knew about or wondered about, some of the connective tissue that helps us see how things are related in probably intractable ways. So, some of our satisfaction is certainly quelled. But there are really just more questions asked, and no answers as to any of the why that are more direct than what Acceptance gives us. But what this novel lacks in definitive answers it makes up for in the experience of reading, which felt like a roller coaster at times. It was sometimes frustrating, sometimes felt like it was not even pretending to care about logic, and it was a constant thrill.

“It was an anthropological nightmare, this festering need to hold on to the foundation of your vision, your prior frame of reference.”

Continuing the exploration of transformation that was so prevalent in the original trilogy, Absolution reminds us of our culpability. Trying to avoid the truth of constant and inevitable change, and learning to embrace that transformation with open minds and hearts instead of ego and domination, is one thing. Here we are reminded that we are part of the ecosystems we find ourselves in, and our actions have effects. We are constant ripples changing the world around us, the experiences of others, and we more often than not rush blindly forward only to get in our own way, create the very problems we are hoping to remedy. There is an irony in the title, because absolution is a type of forgiveness, a freedom from consequences, and here we find that such freedom can only come through an honest reckoning of the harm – and, too, sometimes joy – that we introduce into our environments. Absolution doesn’t come with the recitation of a prayer or a ritual flagellation, but instead in a true baptism, a natural baptism, a submersion in and submission to the multifold ecosystems we find ourselves in constant relationship with, reacting to and acting upon. When we come to the end of our journey and realize it is the beginning again, we realize that our actions and emotions connect us to all things in ways not recursive or controlling but in fact all-embracing and emancipatory, then we can hear the beauty of the songs that are found in the natural silence of the unconsidered.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

These books have a way of really getting into your head, they are all well written with beautiful prose but leaves you feeling uneasy. It’s amazing being able to go back to the world of Area X and to see more of it.

This is a prequel to the events in the Southern Reach Trilogy and is told as three separate sections each consisting of its own story that shows the evolution of Area X. The first section and my favorite is called “Dead Town” and takes place twenty years before Area X, it is about a group of biologists and field experiments before Area X. The second section is “The False Daughter” and takes place 18 months before Area X, it is about Old Jim from the book Acceptance. The third section is “The First and the Last” and takes place one year after the border came down and it is about the first expedition to study Area X.

As always this was an incredibly well written book with an overall feeling of mystery and although there are answers to some of the questions from the Southern Reach Trilogy you are still left with unanswered questions. There is still so much left to learn!

I have this book pre-ordered and am actually going to wait to receive my physical copy of this title!! I am going to do a reread of the Southern Reach Trilogy before I get into this one. Thank you for the approval!!

A fourth book for the Southern Reach trilogy, which now has precisely that much in common with Hitchhiker's. Though I suppose there's also the appalled fascination with bureaucracy and its cul-de-sacs. And there is prey here which, if not actively encouraging its own consumption, certainly doesn't object to it. Hmmm. Really, though, even if we pursue this avenue then the comparison shouldn't be with So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, which I haven't read in many years but remember fondly, but with the dispiriting slog of Mostly Harmless, or maybe even, gods help us, the letting Colfer hack out a sixth.

It starts out well enough. "Once, the story went, there had been biologists on the Forgotten Coast, in numbers so great that the ground shook in the aftermath of their passage." We're twenty years before Area X, at a distance from already frustratingly incomplete and elided records of a field trip which provided some of the first indications that things were going weird. But it's the good sort of frustrating, an artfully unspooled tease. The central motif of biologists as themselves an invasive species is inspired, and the oddities sneaky enough to be unsettling, even if some of them did also leave me with a Buffy earworm. At this stage, for all that the Southern Reach was never my favourite Vandermeer, I was having a good time.

Alas, that first section is also the shortest, and in the second we move up the timeline, and properly meet the person who was reading those reports, Old Jim. A washed-up spy sent into what's still not quite Area X just yet to...well. Partly it's that I don't want to get into spoilers, but also it would be a struggle to explain anyway, because this stretch – and boy, does it stretch – is all about the obfuscations and Russian dolls of espionage, factions at Central manoeuvring opaquely against each other, and I'm sure there is a market for interminable hick le Carre, but I'm not it. Even the psychics in submersibles who could have conferred a little Illuminatus! dazzle didn't do it for me, and before long I'd lost all interest in whether Brutes or Phantoms were ascendant at head office, and simply wished for them all to exit the stage.

Except once they did, and the third section took us on an early, disastrous expedition into Area X proper, it turned out I hadn't known when I was well off. You know how boring, uncreative people will sometimes project and claim that swearing is boring and uncreative? The narration here was almost enough to start me wondering if they had a point after all. We're in the company of Lowry, a macho oaf afflicted/empowered by some sort of chemically induced Tourette's, who is such a deeply trying narrator that even once stuff starts happening that should by rights feel uncanny, I was so bludgeoned by the filter of Lowry that, in his own words, it all "Fell flatter than a topographical map of flatness" (and that, I regret to report, was probably my favourite line in the whole section). I suppose if the reader is meant to feel the sense of attrition that the expeditionaries do, pushing grimly on to no clear end just because, then mission accomplished.

But then, what end could there have been? The blurb talks about "long-awaited answers", but was the Southern Reach ever the sort of story susceptible to that? Maybe it's an appetite that makes more sense if you watched the film; I wouldn't know, though I always suspected it had missed the point. If you're expecting a clear answer for what happened (Florida Man bit a radioactive Mark Fisher book?), then you're going to be as disappointed as the clueless brass hoping the expedition can find an off switch. If you're fine with more of a vibes answer then sure, that's here, but wasn't it in the original books already? And yes, I'm sure Vandermeer could restate it with new variations indefinitely, because it's a fractal sort of thing, but based on this evidence, I really hope he doesn't. By the end, even the Lowry section does claw back to a certain small satisfaction, and the acknowledgements are perversely fun, but my abiding sense is that, like Area X itself, the trilogy would have been better left alone.

(Netgalley ARC)

Absolution is really a prequel to the original Southern Reach trilogy, telling three stories of different time periods before Area X. The first 70% of the book is mainly centered around Old Jim, a member of the mysterious black ops agency known only as Central. In the first section, it tells of him reading the recovered logs and data from a research expedition in the Forgotten Coast nearly 20 years before the Border arrived, Their experiments with alligators and other biological research encountering strange phenomena and a mysterious stranger called the Rogue. How the expedition steadily began to break down before a massive storm and altered local fauna brought about their untimely end. In the next section Old Jim is sent back into the field in a town in the Forgotten Coast not far from where the expedition was, and a psychic research group, who don't fully know they're there at the behest of Central, has set up in a facility not far from the eventually famous lighthouse. The Rogue too may still be living in the area. The final section takes place some years later after Area X has begun its takeover, and follows the first scientific/military expedition into the infected region.
The opening section was arguably the most intriguing and most like the original trilogy, as the slow erosion of the scientific team and increasingly bizarre experiences they had from the early infections of region was the most exciting and engaging story in the book. Old Jim's deploymet into the region expanded on growth of Area X and a deeper look at the Central agency. However, at times it felt repetitive and unnecessarily drawn out, an just when it seemed like it was going to give some much desired answers, it ended in a dull and unsatisfactory manner. The final part SHOULD have been the best, as it detailed the first foray into the full-blown Area X. Unfortunately, it was told around the point of view of Lowry, the most unlikable, detestable, bullshit alpha male goon ever put to paper, and the prose was ridiculously peppered with the word "fuck" every four or five words, making it nigh unreadable. I am astonished that none of VanderMeer's beta readers or editors told him how godawful and unreadable it was, and publisher actually allowed the story to be written that way. I'm generously calling this 3.5*, though the first 70% is a 3.5-4* read, while the last section is 0 stars.

🐇🐊📼 I was very excited to return to Area X, and no surprise here, Jeff VanderMeer did not let me down with Absolution!
There's not a lot to say without giving anything away, but if you have not yet read The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance), do yourself and do so.
This is exactly what I want a prequel book to do, fill in background, give a series more depth, and give me those "ohhh, so THATS why!" moments.... and left me wondering, will we return again?! This book is loaded with surreal pearl clutching gasping moments that kept me on the edge of my seat, turning the pages. Oh, and rabbits.. lots of rabbits.
If you are a fan of environmental, weird speculative, horror, and science fiction, add this to your list!

Thanks to @netgalley @mcdbooks and, of course, @jeff_vandermeer123 for the read!

Did I know, when I got my ARC of Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer's coda/prequel to his Area X trilogy, that I was about to add a new deity to my shrine of household gods? Of course I didn't. Should I have known that was a distinct possibility? Yes, yes, of course.

Listen.


When I was a kid, somebody gave me a rubber alligator that I imaginatively named Allie. I was fascinated by everything about it: the smell of the rubber, the textures of its skin and tail, the weird flexibility of its teeth, and especially its evil, oversized eyes. I used to take it with me into our wading pool of a summer, along with my barbies, knock-off and branded. At first Allie attacked them, of course. But later, when I decided it would be more fun if my barbies were villains instead of whatever they were supposed to be, I decided that he was their pet and ally, chiefly used to destroy tiny toy cities or help them to go on terrifying crime sprees. Allie made them badasses, though it would be years before I would dare to use such a word, that had "ass" in it.

Many, many, many years later, Jeff Vandermeer, who had already written a whole trilogy in which the ecosystem itself has become a kind of villain/punisher figure, or, more accurately, has developed a whole new set of priorities that have nothing to do with humanity at all except in that humanity keeps sending walking and talking raw material into its clutches to play with, brought back these weird early memories of Allie when he wrote the best saurian antagonist since that crocodile ticked and tocked its way through Peter Pan, and he gave this saurian monster the best possible name: Smaug.*

But then, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he, and his army of biologists who first introduce Smaug onto the Forgotten Coast that will be known as Area X in 20 years, immediately rename her The Tyrant. I hate this decision and stomp my ineffectual little foot at it, but this giant mutant alligator of preternatural awareness and uncanny ubiquity is referred to for the rest of Absolution as The Tyrant. Phooey.

But this is my review, dammit, so I'm gonna keep calling her Smaug.

Smaug and a few other gators introduced to the Forgotten Coast, play merry hell with the biologists who bring them almost from the very first. Collectively known as the Cavalry (Central's code word for the series of enormous" packages the biologists hump into the area, sufficiently large and heavy and mysterious to lead the suspicious locals to conclude that they're not alligators -- which the FC already has plenty of -- but bars of gold with which the biologists will buy necessities and bribe suspicious locals), they're allegedly being released to study their migration patterns and to see if any of them make their way back to their original habititats. Which, of course, they don't. Much more fun to drive scientists crazy with anomalous signals from their tracking harnesses, stalk scientists, mysteriously turn up dead yet still be giving off signals that indicate purposeful movement in other locations, etc.

I would read a whole novel of this alone, but of course Vandermeer has other, bigger, weirder ideas. Like mysterious echoes of beautiful piano music that turns out to be the exact same piano music played by one of the latter day suspicious locals of Area X in, I think, Acceptance. You know, when Old Jim plays his hands off that one night in the bar. Except, you know, that's 20 years in these biologists' future.

And the music is the least of their problems.
In these dreams, the meadow "had become some other place," ill-used by "constant battle." A weird green-gold light came from the horizon, framed by the cleft between two mountains. An army of "scientists and psychics" struggled "across a plane of sand and bones toward the light." Grim-looking men and women, "who looked like veterans of some longer conflict..." All three claimed to see figures "stitching their way" through the undergrowth outside of Dead Town, and that these figures wore "old fashioned armor and helmets and some rode upon horses." But these figures had no faces, only the toothed hole of a lamprey's open mouth, endlessly circling a limitless gullet (italics mine)**
This passage is an amalgamation of text from the notebooks of three of the biologists who first bring Smaug to the FC in the first of Absolution's three constituent novellas, "Dead Town," as pieced together by none other than Old Jim, long after Smaug and a mysterious humanoid figure called The Rogue have inflated into legend, yet some time before Old Jim becomes the piano-bashing barkeep of the original trilogy.

Old Jim, it turns out, was indeed more than he seemed in those original three books.

Which, now that I think about it, kind of correspond to the three novellas of Absolution: the first, Annihilation, told from the point of view of the 12th Expedition's Biologist, aka Ghost Bird, as she first encounters Area X, to "Dead Town," relating the story of a team of biologists sent to study the region 20 years before it became Area X; Authority, focusing on the bureaucratic eccentricities of the Southern Reach as experienced by the grandson, Control, of the great Jack Severance of Central fame, to "The False Daughter," which relates Old Jim's maddening and dangerous experiences with that same Jack Severance and his terrible daughter/Control's mother, Jackie, as they come to grips with how weird the FC is/was even before the Border came down and Area X became an undeniable thing; and Acceptance, weaving the two prior storylines together even as the whole weird train disappears into the Cacotopic Stain possibly a whole 'nother galaxy or universe, to "The First and the Last," similarly syncretizing the prior two novellas into an even weirder whole that also manages to make the original trilogy even weirder than it already was, just by context!

Oh, but see all that stuff about "old fashioned armor" and a "plane of sand and bones" and whatnot? Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's goddamned time travel in this witches' brew of a fictional milieu, too. I can't swear on it; I think I need to re-read this whole quartet again, possibly in reverse chronological order, before I commit like that, but I'm pretty sure that both wibbly wobbly and timey wimey are at least factors, if not driving forces, in Area X. Though possibly they've only become so now, as is hinted in bits of dialogue like "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It should be different already."

But lest I make it sound like Jeff Vandermeer has finally disappeared up his own asshole, I must take this moment to assure you that no, he is still very much here with us and still very much in control of what he is doing. This is still our man at the peak of his powers, and he makes sure he knows it by playing to all of his strengths: rapturously lovely nature writing, deeply researched and probably lived redneck anthropology, grotesque body horror, and, of course, wildlife behaving badly. As in rabbits devouring live fiddler crabs badly. To say nothing of the swimming, wallowing, munching, rushing, biting anomaly that is Smaug and her Manfriend.

Look, I could talk about this all day. I could rage on for a few hours about the howling fantods this book gave both me and my best reading buddy, SJ*** with its extended sequences involving house centipedes. I could share all of our slightly disjointed theorizing about who Smaug's Manfriend "really" is (we were both wrong, by the way). I haven't devoted any lines yet to how the character I despised the most in the original trilogy is now my favorite character in the whole cycle. He really loves drugs, you guys. Like a lot. You think Hunter S. Thompson loved drugs but that was a casual fling compared to how much this character regards drugs with the worshipful devotion of a Bacchante of old. And you really want to know who I'm talking about now, don't you?

You've got to read the book your own self to find that out. Which, come on: you probably have it from Netgalley already, too. And probably already agree with me that while Absolution may not be the best Area X book, it is absolutely (heh) the most Area X book.

But I'm still gonna buy this when it's available. On audio. I can't wait to hear how a narrator handles this madness.

And yes, I still think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay is still the retroactive origin point of this whole fictional universe. If that's even a thing. Well, it is now. I've made it one. Area X is Ground Zero of the Kilnification of Earth. If you get it, you get it.

*After the dragon in The Hobbit, natch.

**I'm much too lazy and fatigued from a vaccine hangover as of this writing to check the text right now, but I swear the bit I've italicized is more or less a verbatim description of one of the cacogens in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Possibly even that of my sometime namesake (in that I've copped its name for a gamer tag or social media handle more than once), Ossipago?

***Aka Popqueenie, who buddy read this with me and wrote of Absolution one of the most glorious book reviews of a glorious career of snarky book love. Go read it!

I am thrilled to be reviewing an early release of this book, Jeff VanderMeer’s follow-up to the Southern Reach Trilogy which captivated me 10 years ago (!). Absolution is pitch perfect…the creepiest of the bunch in my opinion. It is a descent into madness on several levels that readers won’t be able to get out of their heads.

Even if it still leaves some questions unanswered, Absolution provides a satisfying look at Area X just before and after the dropping of the “Border”. In the first section, a group of Biologists explores Area X 20 years before its “formation”. This was my favorite of the book’s three sections, recalling the eerie world of Annihilation and featuring those wacky biologists. Old Jim, from Acceptance, was the focus of the second section. We see Old Jim pursuiing a secret mission and dealing with a fake daughter issue (it makes sense in the book…kinda). The last section profiles Expedition One, which was particularly interesting to me, as they were the unfiltered first visitors to Area X. In the only way in which VanderMeer lost me, one member of the “authors” from Expedition One curses like he has out-of-control Tourette’s (more so than usual, I mean), saying some form of the would “fuck” every other word. It was a little hard to read, but I think I get what VanderMeer was going for.

While I can’t say I understood everything I read in Absolution (I’d love to see what a quiz would look like), it provides an informative and fitting end to the Southern Reach series. It is apt that the book is referenced as #4 in the series, rather than #0.5. Even though it is technically a prequel, it reads best as a look back, after Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance have been tackled. The only “miss” here is that all four books to this series have been issued/re-issued with a new cover style. I own the first three in the previous style and it doesn’t look like I can get Absolution in that style. We book lovers like our series to match, so mark me a little disappointed.

A surreal return to Area X that provides some new answers but leans heavily into the abstract.

Annihilation is one of my favorite books of all time. I still can’t look at a lighthouse without feeling existential dread and unease, and so many aspects of the series - especially the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy - have stuck with me. So I was thrilled to hear that a new prequel was coming out, and even more thrilled to be chosen for an ARC. And while I really wanted to rate Absolution highly, I left feeling mostly frustrated and more confused than I was before. Probably a 3.5 star if you're the target audience I talk about later, and a 2 for my own subjective enjoyment score. More on this below.

First up, an important question that I think other ARC reviewers are answering incorrectly: do you need to read, or re-read, the initial trilogy before Absolution? My answer is yes.

- If you’re new to the series, there’s basically no backstory about Area X and you won’t know who any of the referenced characters are. Unless you’re here to read an abstract mind F with no context, you should start with Annihilation.

- If you read the trilogy forever ago, unless you have a photographic memory, you probably won’t remember the minimal events that overlap with the first two stories, nor the fleeting details about Lowry’s expedition that are expanded on in the last third of Absolution. All of the meaty, memorable details from the trilogy (the tower, the crawler, Saul, the Biologist) aren’t in Absolution nor expanded on at all, but you’ll be missing the details that tie this to the trilogy.

I personally re-read the entire Southern Reach trilogy just before reading Absolution. The “plot” made more sense to me the second time around, so I was excited that Absolution would in theory delve more into the details I cared about. For example:

1) When and exactly how did Area X truly start? Since this was meant to be a prequel, I expected to see more of a bridge between the creators and Saul’s timeline.

2) More about the tower’s origin and anything to do with the crawler, outside of what we learned in the trilogy.

Instead, outside of Lowry’s section at the end of the book, the focus is on:

1) A character called Old Jim who was barely mentioned in the original trilogy (outside of “that famous piano scene” in Acceptance). None of the other characters you knew or cared about in the trilogy are here, just other manipulative people working behind the scenes that you’ll hate equally as the book continues.

2) An incident that happens inside of what would become Area X. There’s some creature stuff that’s legitimately creepy, but most of it focuses on weird occurrences and a character called the Rogue. There’s a conflict that is extremely abstract and confusing to follow, and in general I had a hard time following this plotline… especially since none of it relates to the original trilogy.

3) Mind control and how heavily this was used by the powers that be in charge. We knew conditioning was involved in the trilogy, but Absolution heavily focuses on just how much it was. And frankly, this wasn’t compelling for me. I wanted to know more about Area X, not how much worse the people in control were.

4) The Seance and Science Brigade. Arguably the least interesting part of the trilogy and yet their origins and motives were a driving force in this book. Why? In addition to again not really giving answers about Area X, one of the duo from Acceptance was turned into a sadistic cartoon villain for some reason, even though he seemed fine and borderline nice to Saul in Acceptance.

And in general, that sort of cartoon villainery happens more than once in the book - there’s plot points that come out of nowhere that felt forced and ridiculous instead of shocking, because the villainery suddenly jumped from 5 to 11.

The above is the first ~2/3 of the book which most similarly reads like Control’s POV in Authority combined with the internal monologues and abstract elements of Acceptance, rather than the eerie setting of Annihilation. Again, the insights about Area X are few and far between, and instead the story focuses on how bad the bad guys behind the scenes truly are.

Then you get to the last third. I was the most excited about this section as the video tapes of Lowry’s expedition in Authority were arguably the best part of that book, and were unsettling and mostly unexplained. The problem is this section is told from Lowry’s perspective, a character that:

- Is the most unlikeable character of the entire series.

- Is written like a teenage edgelord combined with Beavis and Butthead that thinks about dick jokes and glory holes every 1 second, even though he’s an adult man.

I progressively got more and more angry as I kept reading because it’s nearly impossible to tell what is going on. It’s like being in an acid trip with an unreliable narrator that spews out sexual phrases and the word “fuck” every other word, and maybe one out of 10-50 pages there’s a new tiny nugget about Area X that gets dropped in his word vomit, but you either miss it or have no idea if it’s legitimate or not. I get that’s what Vandermeer was probably going for, but it’s frustrating as a reader who wanted more.

The explanation we’re given about Lowry’s antics is that he’s on an intense drug cocktail that’s given him a verbal tic, and there’s a very minor note about having sisters that bullied him, but unless I missed something, neither of those explains why he’s written like such an edgelord. It’s over the top and I’d argue only the most dedicated Southern Reach fans will be willing to slog through it in the hopes of getting answers.

It felt like Chat GPT was asked to insert the work "fuck" or phrases involving dick jokes, glory holes, or reacharounds and other sexual references every other word, often covering ~70% of each paragraph. I’ve seen other reviewers talk about how eventually they’re able to overlook or ignore this at some point but I’m not sure how that’s possible - it wasn’t for me. And because very rarely there’s a fleeting insight about Area X dropped in there (which may or may not be legitimate due to his unreliable nature), you can’t just skim over it.

Thankfully this dies down barely later on, and I do mean barely, which makes the dialogue more tolerable. But it’s still an incomprehensible acid trip and is deeply unpleasant to read. Vandermeer said something on Twitter iirc about how this was the most vile perspective he’s written, and I can’t help but wonder why this choice was made given how much it gets in the way of enjoying the story.

Reviews talk highly of Absolution’s prose and how it’s a selling point, and I agree - if you’re the type who likes this style. I love Vandermeer’s style and tone in general, but when it veers too heavily into the abstract, it loses me. For example, here’s a typical paragraph from Absolution that illustrates the prose:

"The wave became “like blood”, became “physical” and broke over them, became them, choked and bathed them, “smelling like open wounds and too lost to escape it, but to have it linger in the body, to bind us and even to froth out of our mouths like the sea, to be drowning while on land.” Ahhhhhhh there came the sounds of groveling madness and a texture like mangled dead baby birds, neither skin nor feathers, and also “something smooth and shiny that infiltrated the pores, metallic and sour, and left no trace behind but remained nonetheless, unable to get out."

I get that it’s poetic and written well, but I personally need more substance and less confusion. Annihilation did have passages like this but felt easier to follow. Acceptance had far more abstract prose like this and it was my least favorite part of that book. So it could be I’m just the wrong target audience for Absolution, but if you love the above paragraph, you’ll likely enjoy it a lot more.

So what do you learn about Area X and the original trilogy? Imo very little, but I’ll be delving into Reddit threads once the book is more available as it could be I missed things. We do learn about:

- What the physical Southern Reach building was before Area X happened

- A one liner easter egg about someone Saul cares about

- The origin of the bones in the lighthouse and (most likely) why there were so many journals

- How the initial corridor into Area X was tested

To be clear, these are blips in the overall story and sometimes one liners.

Beyond that, Lowry’s expedition led to even more questions than answers for me, and for me it ended completely ambiguously. Probably what Vandermeer wanted, but I still left feeling frustrated and unfulfilled.

In summary, if you liked the abstract prose of Acceptance and don’t need more answers about Area X, you’ll probably enjoy Absolution more than I did. I hope that Vandermeer eventually makes a sequel instead, or a prequel involving the tower and Saul, which I think is more likely what fans were wanting from this book.

Sincere thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a chance to review this.

TL;DR: Holy mother of fuck, this book was amazing.

~~~

You are 10, and giving the rabbits water before school when you discover one of the does eating a newborn. You run screaming into the house, then successfully block this memory for 35 years, until reading Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution.

You are in the library, reading this very ARC while waiting for your children to finish their activity. Your partner sits next to you, quietly reading a philosophy book. They look up as you cackle loudly at something you've just read, and say "OHHHH, so you do this in public, too?" and you both laugh, but much quieter.

You ask your partner "hey, do you remember that time when we were first dating, when we drove down that dirt road near Alaska's house to get high, make out, and watch the stars on the hood of Velouria?" (your car at the time was named Velouria) They nod and smile, remembering that it was a nice night. Their smile is slowly replaced with horror as they remember the next part of the night. "What the fuck was the deal with those frogs?" they ask. "Where did they even come from, I really thought we would never be able to get out of there." You say "that's exactly how this book makes me feel." They recoil slightly and ask why you'd want to read that. "Because the stargazing and making out was awesome and more than makes up for the creeping dread of suddenly being surrounded by hundreds of frogs." "I can still hear them," they say, shaking their head, "that shit was biblical."

You are listening to a different book while on the treadmill. Half an hour later, you realize you'll have to re-listen to all of it bc you were thinking about Gnitnuah Eht the entire time. You wish you had requested an audio review copy. You are glad you did not request an audio review copy. You know you would have walked your legs right off while listening.

You are 16 and you make the mistake of leaving the windows down on The Flintstone Mobile while at a Summer bonfire at the pond. You are unaware it is a mistake until well after midnight on your way home when every moth in the world pours out of your windows and moonroof. You manage to hold in your screams. When you tell this story the following day, you add "I guess they've replenished their numbers from The Incident last year." No one asks about The Incident. When you think of this story 29 years later, you say to yourself "much like the bunnies" and wonder if the moths from The Incident or that night on the highway were wearing cameras. Would you even want to see that footage? No. No. No. A million fucking times, no.

You are 30 and you move across the country with your family. You wake up one day and feel hurt and betrayed that no one warned you of the existence of house centipedes. You begin wearing shoes inside (though ofc not the SAME shoes you leave the house in, you are not entirely a heathen) after four five six seven eight house centipedes die a horrible death between your toes. Hast thou considered the centipede? Not until now. You sit on your porch, smoking and warily eyeing the sago palms in the planters, which you also find highly concerning. You move before they eject the army of facehuggers that are surely gestating inside them.

You text your mother, asking if she remembers a train derailing when you were a child and bringing home several boxes of grapefruit. "Was that my first pomelo?" you ask. "Probably," she says. "But it was a semi, trains don't carry fruit." That doesn't sound right, but you don't know enough about trains to dispute it. You wonder why you've had a vivid image of a fucked up train in your head associated with giant citrus for more than 30 years.

You only read a few chapters of Absolution at a time. It makes your head feel light and your stomach hurt. You dream of sago palms giving birth to a flood of fast-moving echinoderms and skinks with more than the recommended number of tails.

You whisper "what the fuck" to yourself repeatedly. "what the fuck what the fuck what the fuuuuuuuuck."

Behold the field in which you grow your fucks. It lies barren and empty bc Lowry has stolen them all.

🎶Ba, ba-da-da, ba-ba-ba-da, foreign entity🎶

Your partner is writing a song with a gnitnuah little melody that you will forever associate with this book. You mention this to them, "what the fuck," they say, annoyed at having been reminded of the fucking frogs again. "I had just started to forget!"

Oh look, your fucks have returned.


Police they say/Your mother too/A fish from ocean blue/Above your head tonight

(Your manta ray is all right)


You have never been to Area X.

You have always been in Area X.

When an author revisits a series years later with an additional book it tends to either be really great, or really bad, and while this one mostly lands on the really great side, there's definitely a bit of both.

Let me start by saying that this is very much a must read for fans of the series. With a new POV we get a new viewpoint into the history or Area X and Central's involvement as well as seeing some characters from previous books from a new angle. Absolution manages to recapture some of the magic of Annihilation with that particular feel to Area X, but also builds off of what's been set up with Central and its history (and does it better than Authority by a mile). Even for those disappointed with Authority and Acceptance, I think this book really ends up giving you the book you were looking for there. For me it started a bit slow due to the initial storytelling device, but ended up very much pulling me in with a very compelling character, story, and plenty of background on mysteries as well as plenty more questions.

Unfortunately this book doesn't just contain one POV. After 70% of the book being excellent, we get a new POV for the last 30%. With this POV VanderMeer decides to use the schtick of the character CONSTANTLY using the 'F word' a well as lots of other colorful language. To put it into perspective, there are 1011 uses of some variation of the 'F word' in Absolution, which is already an astonishing in a book under 500 pages, but 962 of them take place in the last 139 pages. Much of it was quite literally unreadable in my opinion, and I ended up finding myself skimming over whole paragraphs repeatedly when it was just full of nonsense with no substance (including the word used as an interruptor in almost every sentence for a while). I found this to be exceedingly obnoxious and this is what brought my score so low for an otherwise excellent book.

Despite this, Absolution (especially the first 70%) was a great read and I think will give fans exactly what they want as a follow up. This isn't going to tie up everything in a bow, that wouldn't fit the series at all, but it does give some fascinating answers and background, as well as ending in an extremely fitting way for the first POV. You'll have more questions for sure, but also I think this will leave fans of the series very satisfied overall.

I will read anything that VanderMeer puts out, the world building cannot be beat.it always leaves me longing for more and with more questions. Every character we meet in each of the 4 books experiences it so differently, it’s always interesting to see more the world through each lens.

An intriguing return to the world of Southern Reach, and ultimately a book whose reach exceeds its grasp. The building dread does not have a satisfying payout.

This was not an easy book, but it was an exciting and satisfying journey. The three different sections both interweave with one another and also each raise new unanswered questions about Area X. I think it's a challenging balance for VanderMeer to return to this world after so long and with so many fan expectations, to dwell on the origin story of Area X, and still leave it feeling mysterious and terrifying. I think Absolution accomplishes that and it was a joy to return to the Southern Reach series.

A worthy addition to the lore of Area X. I didn't know I needed this until I realized it existed, and then u had to have it. A must for any Jeff Vandermeer fan and any fan of bizarre literature.

I LOVED the Area X trilogy as they were being released and was really excited to see Vandermeer stepping back into it to answer those things left unanswered. Does he leave more questions in this? Absolutely, but that's what you want from one of the most inventive sci-fi writers of the current age.

The surprise ! Fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series

Promoted as answers to SR and Area X but I am here to tell you that is not the case.
That is not to say that you won't enjoy more VanderMeer, you will! But I am a kind of black/white sort of person (I do fight it) and I like it best when I understand things completely. You won't get any clear answers here. However, I did, wholeheartedly enjoy the ride!

The 1st SR book scared me so much that I stopped everything I was doing and just read and read. I don't recall that ever happening to me before - not even conscious of what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing. I was very excited for this new novel and it did not disappoint.

Absolution is 3 novellas starting with "Dead Town" which presents a chronology of the biologist working in the field. This is proclaimed to be pre-Area X and it certainly seems to be that way at first as certain animals appear and disappear and of course the Biologists themself begin to vanish.
In "The False Daughter" is about Old Jim and a secret mission and finally, "The First and the Last" about the first expedition to study Area X, pre the women's' team from book 1. It's a great group of stories linking to the past books and providing hints to the creation and reason behind Area X. Clearly VanderMeer writing, a unique staccato building a desolate yet vibrant world.

Area x is still terrifying, unknowable, beautiful and mysterious ! #farrarstraussgiroux #farrar #jeffvandermeer #absoution #southernreachtrilogy