Absolution (Southern Reach #4)

by Jeff VanderMeer

For Ann “There shall be a fire that knows your name.”

“It felt, irrationally,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “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.”

So that next morning—the operation overseen by two people who were romantically involved, who may or may not have viewed unsettling footage the night before—the ten biologists with training on the flamethrowers donned their gear, including protective garments and the tanks, so they looked like sad fumigators fighting some futile war against the landscape.

This book is written like it is narrated by a hack-ey medium 🔮

On the seat between them lay their treasure: The red bobber attached to the tracker, from some long-dead alligator subjected to a pointless experiment during an expedition come to ruin.

So maybe the forts were the ass-end of the spaceships, and the rest had detached and fucked off back into the sky to their home planet, because they sure as fuck had seemed like aliens. Spreading disease and death and a stupid fucking language that Lowry still hadn’t completely learned.

You fucking sugar count. You fire dick twhut flying cocksucker. You cock cocksucker sucking cock with another cock you goddamn piece of shit. Fuckbuddy long-dick penis shitter. Drown in an outhouse you fuckland fucklord reach-around meat-beating county old hallucination. Get your claws off me fucking dark lord, dark fucking whisp get you gone and off of me. You fucking low-carb crisp of a fucking fuck. You mind’s eye sphincter. You asshole-licking lying treasonous sons of blinches lying in the long grass with your fucking dicks in your hands. Fuckside fuckling fuck-a-mole fuckshot fucksicle fuck fuck.