Absolution

Southern Reach #4

by Jeff Vandermeer

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.

When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Audiobook, Weird Fiction, Mystery

528 pages, ebook

First published October 22, 2024

About the author

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.

Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apparently people thought this review contained too many quotes and flagged this...
Whoever you are I hope you enjoyed the book a bit more than me.
More a mirror or accompanying piece than a direct pre- or sequel to the Southern Reach trilogy, we are transported into Area X once more. Especially the operations of Central/Southern Reach get more background, but the key 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 specific controlling words. There is even a Schubert song that seems particularly lethal. 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, flowing from the idea that the power that is starting to manifest in mental programming and temporal anomalies 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 and his style of narration. 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 various expedition members, aligning to some dream images characters in part 1 and 2 of the book 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, and potentially humanity, 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 the future is trying to colonise the past.

I was reminded of Solaris, where we also have a large and unknowable entity trying to interact with humans, inadvertently breaking their minds. 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 second and third 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.

[BJ Lillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[John Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of Absolution is published at Grimdark Magazine.

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.

[Lauren · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ 19%

I have been looking forward to this book for quite literally years, since it was announced on Twitter in early 2020. And now, after being lucky enough to get an ARC, I'm DNFing it. Almost unbelievable.

For context, Annihilation is one of my all-time favorite novels; I really disliked Authority (a failed, unsubtle, often boring attempt at corporate espionage noir horror); and found Acceptance to be a muddled, disjointed mess with some nice nature writing and atmosphere (occasionally) but not much else going for it.

And now there's Absolution, three short stories in a trench coat masquerading as book 4 (that sounds sarcastic but it actually doesn't bother me). It has the ugliest cover I've ever seen, and that should have been a hint because it does indeed seem to convey the tone/style of the novel quite well.

I read the entirety of the first story, "Dead Town." It is needlessly disturbing and nonsensical and has no literary value. VanderMeer strips the characters of their names, identities, and personalities: they serve no purpose except to be investigated and move the "plot" along, and most (at least, those who are biologists) are generally discussed in the collective as "the biologists." It's the kind of speculative fiction that dwells too long on the speculative and completely overlooks the fiction. Readers who are drawn to the Southern Reach series because they like the acid trip and trying to figure out "what happened" may find this interesting, but anyone looking for theme, emotion, or meaning will be disappointed.

I read the first chapter of the second (and longest) story, "The False Daughter." The tone is the same as Authority except the main character is falling apart because his adult daughter has unexpectedly gone no contact. While this sounds more promising and character-driven, the execution in the part I read (and I don't know why it would change) is cliched, clumsy, and bloated. No thank you.

Finally—to see if maybe I should jump ahead or even push through the remaining ~400 pages instead of completely DNFing—I read the first paragraph of the final story, "The First and the Last." That paragraph reads:

Just twenty-four fucking hours until they crossed the fucking Border and nothing Lowry didn't know, for fuck's sake, that Jack hadn't told him, and he didn't know anything, fuck. Not for fucking real. The world felt like it was in shackles and the only fucking way to deal with that shit was to become so abso-fucking-lutely free he could claim his existence as an act of fucking defiance.

And just....no. That's repulsive. It's amateur-writer-writes-an-angry-character-for-the-first-time bad. I'm not doing it.

It's difficult to believe that this is the same author who wrote Annihilation, one of the most subtle, introspective works of science fiction I've ever read. Unfortunately after reading/trying many of his other novels, I've come to the conclusion that the brilliance there was simply a happy accident and can't be expected in any of VanderMeer's other work. I will not be reading more from him.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple years ago, I read the Southern Reach trilogy and found this tweet from VanderMeer, and I've been looking forward to it ever since.

I think Absolution is a great read. At times I missed the simplicity of Annihilation, but the difference here highlights how VanderMeer dives even deeper into the genre of new weird than he ever has before, and that's counting previous books that feature mushroom people and a five-story-tall flying bear. There are three sections in Absolution, with the first and third being more experimental than the middle section. Bronson Pinchot's excellent narration of the audiobook made the third section incredibly entertaining to listen to.

Make sure you walk into this book with some readiness to tackle its experimental structure. It's not the easiest read in the world. Still, there's a lot of substance to it without sacrificing any readability. I highly recommend this one. I highly recommend all of his works. VanderMeer is as original of a writer as you could hope for, because really you can't imagine a story like his until he tells it to you.

When he was 20, he read a novel by Angela Carter and described it like this: "[it] blew the back of my head off, rewired my brain: I had never encountered prose like that before, never such passion and boldness on the page." Now VanderMeer has an entire canon of his own prose that does the same for us.

[Zumie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the Southern Reach trilogy - even Authority which I think we can all agree was a bit boring, though I thought Authority's neurotic spirals were entertaining. I've also enjoyed some of other Vandermeer's writing, like The Strange Bird, some short stories, etc. So I'm wondering: What the hell happened. Who greenlit this. Who allowed this crime.

The book starts off with Old Jim analyzing what happened to the first expedition - not to Area X as that doesn't exist yet, but the first expedition to the area that would become Area X, which was already messed up courtesy of various experiments and probably time weirdness CAUSED by future Area X. This is the first 50 pages or so and while it's kind of filled with rhetorical musings and navel-gazing, it is in fact by far the best part of the book. Because after that, it becomes Navel Gazing the novel for a good 250 pages more, and this time almost nothing is happening.

I think this was avoided in say Authority because a good chunk of it is interacting with other characters, where here Old Jim is in his head like 90% of the time and its just. It's the worst kind of slog. Old Jim is not an interesting character in his head. He's some kind of super spy but he does nothing and figures out nothing. He's sad his daughter left and reflects on his life of which we learn little but for his sad dead wife and missing daughter. The best parts are his interactions with Cass, but they are few and far between. HEY WHY COULDN'T THE BOOK BE ABOUT CASS. WHY WAS IT ABOUT THE SAD SOP WHO DOES NOTHING.

Finally 300 pages in Old Jim vanishes and the novel switches to Lowry's POV. I was like, good god I don't remember liking Lowry particularly but maybe he'll be more interesting, now that Area X exists.

It was not.

If you removed the word 'fuck' from this book it would be about 20 pages shorter - and that is just from the last 100 pages mostly.

Nothing happens in this book. Nothing is revealed, it doesn't add to the original trilogy at all, it's just a pile of words. There's some horror scenes but Lowry is so drugged up and nonsensical it's like well whatever man.

I don't think books necessarily need to be stripped down to the essentials - if the prose is good, I love a long book. A book can be an enjoyable way to spend time, some entertainment, time for reflection (after reading). This was none of those thing - just a waste of time. And it sucks because I truly love the Southern Reach and I think some stuff here actually detracts from those. So! Avoid this. You will save yourself many hours and braincells trying to parse value.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, I was almost disappointed as this 4th book in the Southern Reach series seemed way too tame, almost boring. 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. So I donned my best zombie-apocalypse-survival gear and wouldn't you know it? It didn't save much of me.

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. *cackles madly*

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)!

When I closed the book, the first two words that came to mind were "YOU BASTARD!" because while we DID get answers (again: kinda), we also got 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 (fuck the humans). BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Love(d) it!



P.S.: Thank you, Netgalley, for providing me with an ARC so I didn't have to wait any longer. Having received a free copy did in no way influence my opinion.

[The Speculative Shelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crossing the border into Area X again feels like slipping back into a strange, hypnotic dream.

A decade in the making, Absolution is the fourth installment in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach “trilogy.” Thankfully, this isn’t an Indiana Jones 4 situation—Southern Reach purists won’t have to hold their noses and pretend this story doesn’t count as canon. Instead, it complements the original three novels nicely, both in tone and by further expanding the mysteries of the Forgotten Coast without feeling like a tacked-on, cash-grab.

While you won’t find fan service or tidy answers to long-standing questions, you will find a unique story that builds on the lore of Area X in exciting ways. The book is divided into three distinct sections, each offering its own flavor. Your mileage may vary, but for me, Part 1 stood out: spooky, ethereal, and steeped in disquieting mystery, the story unfolds through captivating first-person journal entries. Part 2 is a slower, more meandering spy tale, while Part 3 goes fully off the rails—VanderMeer at his most unhinged, with intense, creative flourishes. The volume knob is turned up to 11 a bit too long for my liking, but others will find this grand VanderMeerian fireworks show well worth the price of admission.

If you’re new to the series, you will find yourself a bit lost starting here. Even so, VanderMeer’s sharp, electric prose makes it a journey worth taking for anyone craving some madcap science fiction fare. Much like the original trilogy, Absolution isn’t for everyone. Not all of it resonated with me, but the highs are well worth the ride, and this installment is a worthy addition to an already iconic series—which we can now safely call the Southern Reach quartet, without reservations.

My thanks to the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

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[C.F. Page · Rating 2 out of 5]

An absolutely disappointing collection of novellas. It starts off with “Dead Town,” which reads like a story treatment, with good-ish (at the very least original) ideas, and seems retrofitted into a novella. There are some highlights, however, such as this passage (my favorite in the book):

“Staring at the scarred and occluded sky, mottled with a deeper darkness that matched the darkness that had leaked into their heads, rain runneling the contours of the face and the body left to burrow deeper into the bones and layers beneath, without any terrible, pointless urge to rise, to rise up in the aftermath of the inexplicable.”

The last story, “The First and the Last,” is almost literally unreadable gobbledygook, and so nonsensically vulgar that it makes me wonder if he did it as an artful prank or a vendetta against his editor, his publisher, me, someone, or something, or a mean priest that paddled him every time he cussed. This is not a hyperbolic statement—in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if this novella just obtained the Guinness World Record for most f-words in the least amount of pages by a bestselling author.

But I do think the second novella, “The False Daughter,” is worth reading—I’d pitch it as Twin Peaks meets Control (video game), in the mind of Hideo Kojima.

I’m still a huge fan of VanderMeer, and I appreciate that he took literary chances—but two of the three stories didn’t land for me.

[Renee Godding · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quote from my original review of This World is Full of Monsters about the categories of Vandermeerean fiction that exist in my mind:

“1. Jeff, you mad genius! 5-stars.
2. Go home Jeff, you’re drunk.
3. Jeff, you need to stop by the ER, because I’m genuinely concerned about your sanity/wellbeing”.

This deranged add-on to the original Southern Reach trilogy (note: my favourite trilogy of all time!!) is fully in the first category.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so conflicted in my anticipation of a series-continuation before. The Southern Reach is my favourite “trilogy” of all time, and I frankly wasn’t sure if I needed a fourth story within this world. I shouldn’t have worried, with this series well within the capable hands of Jeff Vandermeer. This man knows his audience and the strengths of the original series. He knows which information to give, and which to withhold to preserve the ultimate cosmic mystery of Area X in its purest form, and skillfully dances around the many pitfalls of “ruining your story retroactively by adding onto an already finished series”.
Absolution isn’t a direct sequel or prequel to the original trilogy, but more of a companion-piece. Despite that, I do highly recommend you read the books in publication order and don’t start off with this one, as it contains a bunch of references to previously mentioned characters which you’ll miss if you start here. The novel is divided into three parts, which I’ll cover separately below, each seemingly an homage to what came before.

Part 1: Dead Town
We’re taken back in time to 20 years before the boarder came down and Area X became what it is today. A Southern Reach employee Old Jim is tasked with combing through the notes of a group of field biologists researching the local ecosystem. Through their notes and Old Jims commentary on them, we learn that long before “Area X” existed, unsettling strangeness was already afoot in these parts. Uncannily smart alligators with an apparent governing body of their own, camp-ground-music being played backwards in a loop by the swamps, hordes of ghost-rabbits and much more lie in wait…
This part underlines the cosmic horrors of Area X wonderfully. It has always been there, and will always be. Regardless of human interference, indifferent, stoic and ultimately beyond control.
Dead Town was most reminiscent of Annihilation in its claustrophobia and sense of natural dread and I devoured it. Or perhaps, knowing Area X, was I the one being devoured by it…?

Quote:
"By the time Central’s rescue mission reached Dead Town, the rain had stopped, and by that time, too, the rest of the expedition had died of causes both natural and unnatural."

Part 2: False Daughter
Where part 1 was reminiscent of Annihilation, this part has strong Authority vibes. We continue to follow Old Jim, as he’s sent up to the Forgotten Coast by the higher-ups at central to investigate a person (or should we say “phenomenon”) known as The Rogue. During this mission he’s teamed up with his long-lost daughter. Except it’s clear from the start that his woman is NOT his daughter, and simply another Southern Reach employee masquerading as her...
Spy-thriller-vibes, mixed with the corporate dread that we’ve come to love in Authority. Absolute perfection.

Quote:
“What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?”

Part 3: The First and the Last
Here we follow Lowry, a familiar character from Acceptance, as a member of the very first expedition into Area X, just 4 months after the boarder came down. You might be expecting to uncover the trauma’s that made Lowry into the deeply hateable and flawed man we see post-expedition. Yet in typical Vandermeerean style: he subverts that expectation. It’s clear from sentence 1 that Lowry was always the detestable man we saw in Acceptance. That’s also my main critique of this section of the book; although I loved the scenes within Area X, I found this part borderline unreadable due to Lowry’s narrative-voice. Granted; it’s very deliberate by Vandermeer, but Lowry’s internal monologue where “Fuck” is used not as a comma, but more like a spacebar is genuinely off-putting. Yes, it’s effective writing, but I wish the author had tuned it down a bit to make sure it didn’t get in the way of his storytelling.

Quote:
“There was a way in which it was so real and immediate and yet also felt impossible and drawn out. Maybe he could not contain the feverish intensity of it and also the overwhelming beauty of it, how he could be reduced down to his bones by fear and yet also feel so alive.”


I considered knocking off a star for my dislike of part 3, but overall, my love of this series and everything else within Absolution won me over… 5-stars it is, and always will be.
To answer the first question I asked in this review: no, I didn’t need this final addition to the Southern Reach, nor did the Southern Reach itself need it to be completed. Regardless, I feel completely spoiled and blessed with 3 additional stories set within one of my favourite universes and would highly recommend it to any fans of the original.

A final quote I’ll leave you with:
“[…] That Area X would never not happen. There was no off switch, there was no other time in which it faded away or was not activated. But if it colonized the past, then everything would get worse, worse, worse.”


Thank you so, so, so much Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review! All opinions (regardless of their fangirlish-nature) are my own.

[sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

jeff you're crazy for this one

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have to say right up front that this is going to be one of my shortest reviews and it is not favorable. Unfortunately, far from it. It is the lowest rated book that I’ve read this year, and since I am not crazy about criticizing an author’s work, I am going to keep things short and brief.

“Absolution” is promoted as a prequel to Jeff Vandermeer’s very strange and unique Southern Reach trilogy. However, it really is three related novellas that are absolutely disappointing. I enjoyed the previous three books that were very strange, suspenseful, and full of government conspiracies and mysterious X-Files mysteries. That spirit carries into this one, but that is about all that I can say from a positive perspective.

For me, this was an incredibly wordy 437-page book in which nothing really happens of significance. Nothing new is revealed or added to the mythology of Area X. Each of the stories just dragged on with exposition after exposition. The first 60 pages or so, I was literally hurting my head from all of the bouncing around that Vandermeer was doing in his short essay-oriented chapters. I kept hoping and feeling like things were going to pick up, but they never did. Everything was vague, unclear, obtuse, and several times just wasn’t coherent or made enough sense. And then the last 100 pages included the “F” work like 20 – 30 times per page, and in every flipping sentence on several pages. That was way too excessive and distracting.

Overall, a novel should not be this hard and painful to read, leaving your so mired in the minutiae that you completely lost track of why you were reading it in the first place. You just want to move on to something else and are left confused as to whether the editorial team was somehow lost in Area X during their work on this novel…

[Jacs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gie me it, a want it.

update:
It was worth the wait. I enjoyed every bit of it.

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fans of this series and of Jeff Vandermeer in general will not be disappointed! Absolution expounds greatly upon the origins of the Southern Reach series, and I found all of the additional information this book offers fascinating as it reshapes so much of what I thought I understood in the trilogy. The novel is primarily a prequel with the very last section offering a glimpse into the time period nearly current to the trilogy's beginning.

The main character, Jim, is a Company man, basically a "fixer" who has long served the covert organization responsible for monitoring and studying Area X before and after the Shimmer. In section one, when we meet Jim, he is reviewing footage taken by a team of scientists who first discovered the mutations occurring in the area around the lighthouse. Their observations are greatly disturbing to them, and as the scientists' anxiety rises so does the reader's. The tension and suspense in this section feels almost akin to a horror novel's rising action. I was on the edge of my seat just waiting for havoc, and I read this whole section in one sitting.

By continuously viewing and reviewing the scientists' data and their personal journals, Jim eventually also discovers that the Company has been manipulating both the situation there and the people hired to serve there on a much larger scale than he imagined. The way he discusses their camera footage is utterly addictive, and of course given Vandermeer's style, extremely odd yet highly symbolically suggestive. Strange beasts abound. White rabbits appear wearing live cameras. Alligators become familiars. All seems to be in a state of becoming.

Eventually, we learn that Jim has lost his daughter Cass--that she has basically disappeared--and that the Company is using his daughter as a way to manipulate Jim into agreeing to a mission of his own within Area X. One aspect of the area readers will remember from the trilogy is that the damage there produces doubling genetically, so it's more than a bit interesting when the Company decides to pair Jim up with a partner who is called Cass and looks exactly like his daughter but isn't. When the two of them enter the region to find and eliminate a rogue agent, their mission turns out to be far more complicated than either of them could have dreamed. This second section of the book is told through Jim's eyes and is basically an account of his own bizarre experiences during the mission. The word and idea of "the mission" takes on the weight of a motif actually, as it alone is a construct which evolves like the region itself. As complex as it might sound, section two reads fluidly. Mr. Vandermeer's writing is fairly straight forward during this section, especially compared with the last section which is as weird and wonderful as ever.

It's important to note that it is absolutely NOT necessary to have read the Southern Reach trilogy before reading this book, but you do want to have at least a working summary of what went on in these books. The area is basically infected by an alien biological agent which causes genetic mutations. Eventually, after an indeterminate amount of time (maybe around 20 years or so) the Shimmer went up and began to spread out from a lighthouse centrally located in the heart of the area. This is the story of the scientists who were first sent in like guinea pigs to explore the happenings just before the Shimmer began. It is also the story of the Company's fixer Jim and his partner Cass who were sent in to see if they could discover what became of the few survivors and who, if anyone, was responsible for all of the chaos. The Company is clearly looking for a scapegoat, but what Jim and Cass discover there is nothing so reductive yet endlessly more dangerous and fascinating.

I personally love Jeff Vandermeer's style "new weird." It's one of the few innovations in literature of our day, and while, yes, it might take a bit of adjustment on the reader's part, what could be more worth it than witnessing such a creative birth while it's actually happening. I often wonder what it would have been like to have been a reader alive when Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Samual Beckett were pioneering stream of consciousness writing to imitate the shell shocked society of their day. Jeff Vandermeer's style might be a self-professed "new weird" one, but it's perfectly organically apt for our current climate in more ways than one. And I urge everyone who truly loves to read to experience the brilliant flavor of addiction it offers.

[Stacy (Gotham City Librarian) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You did not want to be there. You didn’t want to be anywhere, ever again.” (*Quote from early copy of the book.)

"Annihilation" is tied with "American Psycho" as my current favorite book, except that "Annihilation" is the one that I feel comfortable recommending to people that I barely know. The Southern Reach Trilogy is a masterpiece of environmental fiction infused with cosmic horror, and Jeff VanderMeer is a brilliant author. He makes it look effortless even though we all know it isn't. When I found out there was going to be a fourth installment in this series I was SO excited, and almost immediately I saw it pop up on Netgalley and requested it. I couldn't believe I managed to get the approval. (Maybe it was just the luck of the timing.) And look at that cover! I was so eager to return to Area X and all of its horrors. I'm not going to spoil anything big for you because that's not my style, but I will say that for the most part I was very happy with this book. It wasn't quite the satisfying conclusion I was hoping for, but the experience was thrilling.

Here’s the thing. The novel is divided into three sections and here's how I rate each of those individually: 
Book 1: 5 stars. Everything I wanted, absolutely incredible.
Book 2: 4 stars. A bit confusing, but still pretty damn good.
Book 3: 2.5 stars rounded up to 3. Tough to understand in places, but with a couple of wild moments that made up for that.

20 years before Area X, we finally get to find out what happened to the first group of Biologists that studied the land. The different sections of this book jump around in time a bit, but without question Book 1 was my favorite. It had horrifying natural anomalies that were so satisfying. (How does VanderMeer come up with this stuff?!) He can make you feel fright in ways you had never considered before. You'll be afraid of nature, afraid of your own body. Strange combinations of both at once. There was a scene in Book 2 involving Centipedes that absolutely made my blood run cold. (But it didn't just involve Centipedes, it was also psychological. I can't wait for more people to experience it and be messed up like I was.) VanderMeer is so good at writing from the perspective of a person losing their mind in real time.

This book alternates between satisfying horror and beautiful prose. You'll be admiring the scenery one second and then completely unnerved the next. And I love the themes. The cruelty of nature, the cruelty of humanity, the fragile beauty of both. It’s sad, it’s disturbing, it’s beautiful. This is a great addition to the series. Haunting and disturbing imagery, gorgeous language. Characters that feel like you know them off the page. A sense of deja vu that you can’t put your finger on. (And perhaps you don't want to.)

I liked the main characters in this one. "Old Jim," while a bit standoffish from the reader, had a sort of sentimental quality to him that made him intriguing and both the visual and auditory imagery of the piano was really cool to think about. Cass was very likable as well and I would read an entire book that was just about her. Dare I say, though, that I was personally more invested in the environmental setpieces overall than the people populating them. (I've been a big fan of that lighthouse since the beginning.)

I highly recommend reading at LEAST “Annihilation” before reading this one, though it would probably be best to read the full trilogy first. VanderMeer calls back to previous installments without shining a spotlight directly on the references. Sidenote: I recently played the game “Control” and Central in this book series reminds me a lot of the Federal Bureau of Control. It's always fun for me when one thing I love makes me think about another thing that I love, and then the two sort of blend together.

At around the halfway point things began to get extra complicated and he lost me just a little bit. I really had to focus on what was going on. Then eventually I got to a point where I had no idea what I was reading, honestly, and I couldn’t follow it at all for several chapters. (Definitely a "Me" problem.) The prose was still lovely, though! 

But then came the last 70% or so, told from the perspective of a character that’s supposed to be kind of obnoxious and also on very strong drugs. So every other word is “fuck,” (literally) which doesn’t bother me in real life but it’s a pain in the ass when I’m trying to read and follow a character’s thoughts. After the smooth and poetic language of the novel up to this point I felt like I was following up a high quality meal with a bag of licorice. It was SO confusing. (Luckily this narrative style didn't finish out the ending.) Honestly, I got some answers to my question by reading other people's reviews. Sometimes I can rely on other readers to explain things much better than I can! (And I appreciate that.)

VanderMeer remains one of my favorite authors. Even when I hit a few snags near the end, he still brought me back and amazed me with his ability to horrify and craft a gorgeous image. I plan to revisit the first three books soon. There were so many vivid and beautiful (and horrifying) moments throughout this novel and I will remember parts of this book forever. (They are burned into my brain, like the glowing words on the wall of the sunken staircase.)

Thank you so much to Netgalley and to the Publisher for allowing me to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review! All opinions are my own. I feel honored to be among the first readers for this one.

TW: Animal harm (graphic), Cannibalism 

[Paul Kraff · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 69%. I loved the original southern reach trilogy. I even have a signed copy. But this was a pale follow up. The first story about a character named Old Jim is fine but fairly dull and lacking in the weirdness of the original books. And when it finally got weird it was nonsensical and obtuse.

But the real problem starts with the section called The First and The Last. We move onto a different character and story and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every third word was “fuck”. This went on for 40+ plus pages and it made it impossible to follow any semblance of a plot. I don’t know what Vandameer was thinking but this was terrible. I couldn’t keep reading it simply because I didn’t know what I was reading. I wanted to like this book I really did. I followed Jeff’s updates and ordered it soon as it was available. My day is ruined and my disappointment is immeasurable.

[Willow Heath]

Returning to the weird world of The Southern Reach a decade after the trilogy's original publication was a bold move, but it turns out to have been a worthwhile one. Absolution is a novel divided into three parts, and it behaves as a prequel, a sequel, and a companion piece to that original trilogy. It doesn't feel tacked-on, however, but more a simple continuation of the world's narrative, as well as the story of its primary characters.

If I were to rank these books, which feels a little pointless since they each exist in their own style and tone, I would probably say that this is the most impactful novel of the series after its first entry, Annihilation. And I say this to drive home how impressive this is as a return to that world!

[Claudia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried. I tried so hard to read it. I tried for a few months but eventually I had given up. As much as I loved the original trilogy, this one was an overstretch: way too long, with too many unnecessary details, and nothing to keep me going.
I'm really sorry that I did not like it; I wanted to because I missed this universe. Unfortunately, I called it a DNF at 60%.


>>> ARC received thanks to 4th Estate and William Collin s via NetGalley <<<

[Yahaira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck

The chokehold this book had me in
RTC

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck

[Mel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book failed on pretty much every front. The characters were flat and honestly didn't inspire any depth of feeling, the editing was so poor it's like the editor ran it through AI and took a nap, there was so little plot...and what plot there was it was like...okay?? How does this enrich this world in any way? This book did absolutely nothing with respect to adding to the original trilogy, just brought up some familiar faces and threw them away just as fast. What about the cell phone? Why did the book stop right before Lowry returns mostly dead to "our world"? Was that beyond the grasp of an author who used the word fuck every fucking sentence to get across what a fucking meat head egotistical badass of a fucker Lowry was after spending 400 pages inside two dudes heads with nothing happening?

Honestly I've been chasing the dragon since Annihilation hoping Jeff would come up with something good again. But honestly, I'm pretty much put off from ever reading the author again after this book. I genuinely can't believe this grift is what comes out of ten years of thinking about a deeply fascinating world you created.

[Brooke (B for Books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This starts out very strong with the promise of weird alligators and the return of the creepy rabbits, and even answering some intrigue about the biologist(s). [edit: This was almost entirely a masterpiece for me, I just can't really get by what even happened in the second half as everything begins to breakdown including sanity, perception of reality, even the very words on the page. It creates this sense of decay very fitting to the series arc, but took a little away from my enjoyment.] I can see how VanderMeer appeals to a wide audience beyond just sci fi, but also into realms from poets to scientists. Here's some highlights that to me encapsulate the essence of the series. These passages are within the first 20% of the book, to give you an idea of the pacing.

"It felt irrationally as if the wildlife had rejected us--had rejected our methodologies, and refused any longer to be sampled or catalogued, or subjected to even the least intrusive experiments. It felt as if the entire reason for the expedition had abandoned us and thus we had no rudder, no anchor, no reason to be. That we did not belong here."

"They shifted from collection and cataloging to analysis and sporadic forays into experimentation. A kind of gaze turned inward, bringing with it some other quality, hard to define. 'The red-tinged eye of the lighthouse shining out distant at dusk seems both comforting and utterly unfamiliar.'"

"Over time the biologists came to feel that something was not quite right with their expedition. Even Team Leader 1's obsession with "inefficiencies" and "better ways of being productive" felt like a tell. That there was influence or coercion , invisible both to the naked eye and to their instruments. The recording of their experiments in notebooks were driven into the paper with a sharpness that sometimes left holes from the pencil lead.
It was the natural order of things, Old Jim knew, that the biologists may have had suspicions left unvoiced long before this point. Because once voiced they might take the form of accusations or irrational fearfulness."

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dead Town
Twenty years before Area X
“Yet once they halted in their relentless cataloguing, recording, reporting…wasn't there so much to give them pause…. ‘the null effect— to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time.’”
The biologists sent by Central arrives at the Forgotten Coast. As the scientific team continues their cataloging and collecting, strange things begin to happen. Four alligators, referred to as the Calvary, are seen. Rabbits are spotted, some with cameras and some eating crabs. Then a mysterious figure appears. The stranger…was it Rogue? He brings destruction, a shower of words, blood, and flames. Finally the heavy rains subsides and the sounds of a distant battle was heard. And all along Old Jim reviews the maps, the transcripts, and the surveillance tapes.
“…the Rogue ran forward and kept running forward, knives emanating from his mouth and blood and light spreading out from him on all sides.”
“His eyes were as a flame of fire…and he had a name written, that no man knew….And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood….And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations….”
-Revelations

The False Daughter
Eighteen Months Before Area X
“The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now.”
Old Jim’s daughter, Cass, has disappeared and then his boss, Jack Severance, signs him up for a new mission, find and kill Rouge. Rouge, the one seen leading an alligator? He heads back to the Forgotten Coast with a fake daughter as his assistant. He reviews the files and interviews members from the old scientific team. Old Jim begins to suspect that Central has decided to terminate not merely his contract but his life.
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
-Revelations

The First and the Last
One Year After the Border Came Down
A team of twenty-three enters Area X. One was charged with finding and extracting Old Jim. Get him, or whatever he has become.
“‘The light?’
‘The opening at the other end. And because they'd put a small, primitive camera on the chicken and the chicken went through the hole- they knew it was possible for a person to go through.’…
‘And what happened to the chicken?’
He didn't know why, but he felt very invested….He could imagine the chicken drawn by the light….head for the light, chicken. You can do it….
‘But…the chicken’….
‘Oh, unrecognizable. That's the really great, interesting part— it didn't resemble a chicken at all any more, but at least the camera was intact….’
That's when Lowry did leave the table….no way had the chicken been the first expedition….
What had the chicken…looked like in the end?”

[Frank R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t know why I expected that maybe this one would be better than the last two terrible books but I gave it a try…

The first part held so much promise and I enjoyed the movement of the plot as Old Jim’s covert ops took shape in the soon-to-be Area X.

As I reached the middle of the book, however, I started to lose the plot and get completely mired in minutiae. It. Was. So. Boring….and uninteresting. VanderMeer’s attention to detail is commendable but ultimately horrible. I’ve read the diaries of schizophrenic patients that look so near to this that I think any psychiatrist reading this book has a basis for a diagnosis.

When I got to the third part, where nearly every word is the F-bomb, I realized that either the author is in fact schizophrenic or he has used his celebrity to play a gigantic joke on all of his readers. This isn’t good spec fiction but utter nonsense and garbage.

[Paromita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit:
On a reread, I liked "Dead Town" the most. The second novella/part "The False Daughter" started great but felt long-drawn-out as I read on. The profanity in the third part "The First And Last" annoyed me and felt unnecessary. However, it was still a compelling read. Overall, I liked Absolution but I'm not sure whether it was strictly necessary. Having reread the first three books recently, my feeling is that everything after Annihilation is "additional material" - pleasant to read but what was conveyed in that first book was complete and standing on it's own, perfection.

Original review:

In Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer returns to the world of the Southern Reach trilogy after more than a decade. The first volume Annihilation, is one of my all-time favourites and so I approached this new volume with a mix of enthusiasm and slight trepidation. And it was a very interesting read.

The main allure of Area X and the Southern Reach trilogy to me has been the sense of mystery - the fact that the more we try to find out, the more questions we end up with, much like our relationship with nature in its many manifestations. This powerful theme is carried by Jeff Vandermeer's beautiful, evocative and atmospheric writing.

Absolution is once again an extremely well-written book, Vandermeerian in every way. Timeline wise, it is a prequel to the events of the Southern Reach trilogy and consists of three novellas, vignettes if you will, of how Area X evolved. However, it does not give away any definite answers, consistent with the theming of unknowability.

The first section "Dead Town" discusses the field experiments of a group of biologists pre-Area X (or is it? Read to find out and decide for yourself!) and the eerie happenings that defy scientific explanation. It is very different from Annihilation where the central protagonist, a biologist, remains an excellent character for me, but also has some descriptions which rekindled memories of that exceptional book.

The second section "The False Daughter" is about Old Jim (remember him from Acceptance?) working on a covert mission while simultaneously dealing with personal challenges. Until inevitably, things start to go awry, the professional and the personal coalesce as does reality and illusion (or is it?) in an indistinguishable whole. This was the most fascinating of the three sections for me and had an excellent conclusion.

The third section "The First and the Last" is about the first expedition to study Area X. In the Southern Reach trilogy, we had some hints about the fates of previous expeditions and here we get to see the team members venturing into this unknown frontier, without the benefit of previous data. The excessive profanity from one member of the expedition, while possibly consistent with character, was very jarring to me but otherwise I liked reading about their investigations and drawing parallels to the later expeditions, such as the one in Annihilation.

Absolution, much like the Southern Reach trilogy, is greater than the sum of its three parts for me. It serves as an intriguing prequel which gives insight into how Area X might have come to be while leaving plenty of room for theories and mystery. Area X remains fundamentally unknown to me and this I accept, as I did at the end of the aptly titled third volume of the Southern Reach trilogy.

A very good Vandermeerian title, recommended, but perhaps not as the best entry point to his work or the world of Area X. I recommend reading the Southern Reach trilogy first to get the most out of Absolution. That being said, if one is curious about Southern Reach, this could be an interesting book to sample Vandermeer's writing, worldcrafting and theming and then go back to the Southern Reach trilogy and read all the books.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

[Justine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Ok this is a hard one. 4 stars for the first 2/3, which is written from the perspective of a long time Central operative named Old Jim, taking place before the Area X border comes down. 2 stars for the last 1/3, written from the perspective of Lowry, a member of the first expedition into Area X after the border comes down.

I liked Old Jim’s story. It was interesting, mysterious, confusing in a good way, and had all of what I think of as the trademark weirdness Vandermeer is known for. Even the most disjointed and real/unreal competing events form a cohesive swirl of story that can be followed.

The last 1/3 from Lowry’s perspective was just an unpleasant read for me. We know Area X messes with minds and bodies at a fundamental level, and what was so amazing in Annihilation was bearing witness to that slow but inexorable and unpredictable deconstruction of self on a disciplined and clear mind. In Absolution Lowry has such a jumbled mind to begin with that it’s hard to read from his perspective at the outset let alone once he starts succumbing to Area X. The result is a tiring miasma of words and events that create an often unpleasant salad difficult to extract story from.

Obviously this is just my opinion, and I will say that regardless of my dislike of last 1/3 of the book, overall I’m glad I read this and I enjoyed the new pieces Vandermeer has added to the unknowable mystery that is Area X.

Days passed in that state. Or minutes. Or “nothing nothing nothing.”

How the wrongness made them clutch their heads but they could not get the wrongness out. How the sounds built and vibrated and spun and unspooled and in all ways made of them taut twine and elastic stretched to its utmost. To feel attenuated and so thick all at once. To be abomination and unable to cast off the shame of that.

Their heads were filled with wild things and evil things. Their heads were filled with nails and pus. Their heads were filled. They would never remember the words the Rogue used. They said the words sounded “familiar.” They had heard the words before, but not in that combination. They had heard the words but not in the same context or intonation or the same kind of light or darkness or they could not recall what was different, why it was different and yet the same, no they could not, please stop asking the question. “Please stop asking. Please stop asking.” Please. Stop.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published October 22, 2024.

Surprise! Welcome to the fourth book in the Southern Reach trilogy. Yes, the one that no one asked for, I guess. But maybe everyone wanted to know how Area X began and this book….will not really tell you that. Sorry.

I read the three Southern Reach books years ago, when they first came out, and one after the other. I didn’t reread now, and maybe I would have enjoyed this more if I had, but that was way more time and effort than I was willing to put in…I liked the books, especially the first one, but they are not all time favorites, and I never saw the movie adaptation (and didn’t really want to.)

So, here in ABSOLUTION, there are three different stories. The first two involve an operative from Central called Old Jim. In the first he is reviewing information and documents from a mission that took place twenty years before Area X “went active,” if that’s a good way of putting it. In the second, it’s eighteen months before, and Old Jim is actually there.

In the third section, the action shifts to a military man named Lowry, and it is now one year since the border came down (I have no recollection of the time frame in the three earlier books.) Old Jim definitely comes up, in passing.

I enjoyed the first two sections, less so section three, but, again, I think I’m so far separated from the original three volumes I can’t really be a fair judge as to what this book adds, if anything, to the narrative as it existed before this was published. It’s all prequel, so I guess it’s just backstory. Perfect for fans, but not a good jumping off point. So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish?

[Chloe]

A FOURTH BOOK IN THE SERIES??? WHEN WAS THIS ANNOUNCED?

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Further complicates an unresolved picture, in three novellas. Really all of this, since Annihilation, has just been a circling motion in attempt to get back to that initial impact, all that concentrated mystery and urgency. Here, first, a report of the moment things began to deteriorate, earlier than I recall being mentioned. But filtered through time and intermediary characters it's altogether too distanced to really sink in. It's information, though useful information when you start to attach it to other parts of the series, more than storytelling. This sets up the more immediate second part, with characters that matter more, that we can get closer to, and a slow-building nightmare energy. A parallel progression to some of what we knew before, but granted internal coherency and momentum, not just a reference to other elements. Really the core of the experience here. And fittingly makes up the bulk of this new volume. Much is left unanswered but in a way that works to build fruitful webs of unknowing. And last, a moment we've all been waiting for, the most direct attempt to recapture that initial power of Annihilation, filtered through our perhaps least reliable narrator of three unreliable narrators, at turns tourettic and semantically corrupted in a Pontypoolian manner, sometimes borderline word salad, which answers everything and nothing and is unclear even in how it relates to the rest while being directly related to the rest. What exactly did we expect or want from this? It's not a bad approximation.

Well I suppose I now have to re-read the inital trilogy, don't I? I'm sure there are so many more fragmentary connections to tantalize (and annoy?) me once I remember more.

[Kyle]

I want this book.
I want it terribly.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The late director David Lynch was known for his surrealist horror films, which perfectly emulated the feeling of a nightmare. Objects and people inexplicably took on menacing and horrifying aspect far beyond their normal characteristics. In his brilliant 1986 film "Blue Velvet", a man in a yellow suit becomes a harbinger of doom throughout the film, while the imagery of worms squirming in dirt represents the ugliness lurking beneath the surface of suburbia.

Jeff VanderMeer, in his novel "Absolution" (the fourth book in his Southern Reach trilogy, although it is, technically, a prequel and could be read as a separate novel), attempts to do in novel form what Lynch did in film. His weird imagery---in this case, "weird" is not only a descriptor but a genre category---drives the novel and its apocalyptic vision into unbridled territory.

"Absolution" is set before the events of VanderMeer's novel "Annihilation", which introduced us to the anomalous and paranormal Area X. There is no way of knowing how long ago it takes place, as the sense of time in these novels is always a bit ambiguous: it could be 3 months ago or 75 years ago.

A sense of place is also iffy. While it's never actually stated, Area X is based loosely on the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, a wildly diverse section of relatively untouched land along Florida's Forgotten Coast, south of Tallahassee.

None of this is very relevant, however, as the novel's setting exists in a kind of Twilight Zone dimension where the laws of physics and the laws of nature don't necessarily apply. Anyone and everyone who enters is affected in big or small ways.

The novel is in two parts. The first follows a character called Old Jim, a wizened special agent with a government agency whose latest mission is to investigate anomalous activity in what would later be termed Area X. A group of scientists are befuddled by inexplicable activity,including carnivorous white rabbits with organic "cameras" growing out of their necks. This, it tuns out, is the least weird thing that they will encounter.

The second follows an unlikable character named Lowry, who is one of 25 scientists on the first official expedition into Area X. He is the only one with a healthy dose of fatalistic pessimism.

Don't go into VanderMeer's novel expecting a traditional narrative. There is no beginning, middle, or end. There is really very little of what one would call a rational logic to the story, as things happen and then other things happen. There is cause and effect, but not always in an obvious order. Sometimes the effect happens before the cause. It shouldn't be that way, but in Area X, anything is possible.

"Absolution" is a beautiful mind-fuck that, in its own weird way, examines the loneliness and self-destructiveness of humanity and how we create our own nightmares.