REVIEW: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
Last Updated on October 4, 2024
Absolution is the surprise fourth volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, which began with Annihilation and continued with Authority and Acceptance. The original trilogy was published in rapid succession ten years ago, all three volumes appearing in 2014, the same year that Adrian Collins founded Grimdark Magazine. It is thus a special treat to review this fourth volume of VanderMeer’s erstwhile trilogy in our tenth anniversary issue of Grimdark Magazine.
For the uninitiated, the Southern Reach series is a sci-fi horror centered on a mysterious coastal region known as Area X, where biological evolution has been accelerated in unexpected and terrifying ways, presumably due to extraterrestrial interference. Annihilation introduces us to an all-female team of scientists investigating Area X known only by their occupation: a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor. These four women comprise the twelfth expedition into Area X after the successive failures of all the previous missions. The second novel, Authority, turns its attention away from Area X to focus on the Southern Reach, the shady entity responsible for organizing these expeditions into the horrific unknown. The third book, Acceptance, has a broader scope, shifting among several different perspectives and timelines to provide deeper character studies, including that of the mercurial Lowry, sole survivor of the original expedition into Area X.
Jeff VanderMeer makes a welcome return to Area X with Absolution. This fourth volume of the series is divided into three parts, each leaning heavily into the cosmic horror aspects of the story. The first part of Absolution, called “Dead Town,” can be read as a standalone novella and takes place about twenty years before the formation of Area X. A team of biologists are reintroducing alligators to a region known as the Forgotten Coast. As in Annihilation, the scientists are unnamed, defined only by their professional roles within the team. The biologists take residence at an abandoned village known as Dead Town, their fate becoming inexorably linked to that of the town itself. Meanwhile, the horror elements of the story ramp up with the appearance of carnivorous white rabbits, which give a terrifying twist to classic imagery from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In my mind, I had always considered the Southern Reach trilogy to take place on the American west coast, viz., southern California. Although the location of Area X is still unspecified in Absolution, given the strong Karen Russell-style Swamplandia! vibes of “Dead Town,” I believe the Gulf coast of Florida is the more likely setting.
The second part of Absolution, titled “The False Daughter,” takes place about eighteen months before the formation of Area X and concerns the aftermath of the alligator experiment from “Dead Town.” The horrors from the first story come back to haunt characters in unexpected ways. “The False Daughter” features excellent use of the doppelgänger motif, as in Annihilation, and there is also an event known as the House Centipede Incident, which I will not soon forget.
The third and final part of Absolution, “The First and the Last,” recounts the first formal expedition into Area X eighteen months after its formation. The original expedition team has twenty-four members and is told from the perspective of Lowry, the self-described “hero” of the group who is already well-known to readers of Acceptance. The group is woefully unprepared for the journey into Area X, with a lack of professionalism that belies the gravity of the situation. “The First and the Last” is the most interesting story in Absolution, but also the most confounding due to Lowry’s expletive-ridden narrative style, which seems to be competing for gold medal in highest concentration of f-bombs in a work of fiction. In several places, the oversaturation of obscenities gets in the way of telling a comprehensible story.
Altogether, Absolution is the best entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series since he first introduced the world to Area X in Annihilation. I especially love seeing the many connections between Absolution and the other three books of the series. For readers new to Area X, I recommend reading Annihilation first and then jumping to Absolution. In between, be sure to reserve time for watching the excellent 2018 movie version of Annihilation starring Natalie Portman.
This review is published in Grimdark Magazine #40.
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