Area X: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance (Southern Reach #1-3)

by Jeff VanderMeer

It was only later that I realized the psychologist had tried to bind me with a hypnotic suggestion meant for me and me alone.

Lots of hypnosis, to get past the border, to get past her caution--and discover themselves again burdened?

Inevitably my focus netted from my parents useless lectures of worry over my chronic introversion, as if by doing so they could convince me they were still in charge.

A mixture of worry and desire to control.

tight-lipped descendants of fisherfolk. Their disappearance might have seemed to some a simple intensifying of a process begun generations before.

Innsmouth?

Surely some trigger had driven her to confront me, or perhaps living alone in her own head overnight in this place had been enough. Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken.

There, in the depths of the Tower, I could not begin to understand what I was looking at and even now I have to work hard to pull it together from fragments. It is difficult to tell what blanks my mind might be filling in just to remove the weight of so many unknowns.

Again, getting some Lovecraftian unknowable horror from this novel.

I also have replaced the lighthouse keeper’s photograph in its frame and put it back on the wall of the landing. I have added a second circle around his face because I could not help myself.

A second circle? Like The Crawler's footstep? Why can she not help herself from this?

tiny seismic

"Tiny seismic," is odd and seems oxymoronic--though I guess not necessarily so.

Opposite the entrance lay another door, situated in a gap between bookcases, but this had been blocked by more piles of file folders and cardboard boxes and he’d been told it opened onto the wall—detritus of an inelegant remodeling.

Another door that cannot be entered, like what the biologist saw at the bottom of the Tower? Also, a known dead-end that's blocked by rotting data

Native American mother, her white father

Is every character a "hybrid" of ethnicities? Biologist, psychologist, Control...

the last of the rabbits rebel so utterly against being herded that they turned on the herders and fought, leaping to bite and scratch … would have seen the white of the shields stained red, the researchers so surprised that they mostly broke ranks

"Just a harmless little bunny!"

the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations—and thus their analogies and metaphors—out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone’s minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

“There is some agreement among us now, reduced though we may be, that to analyze certain things, an object must allow itself to be analyzed, must agree to it. Even if this is just simply by way of some response, some reaction.”

“Just stabilize and do your job. Paralysis is not a cogent option, either. You will get good sleep tonight.”

Hypnotic suggestion

Feedback made Control take the phone away from his ear.

Voice and the walkie-talkie hallucinations from the 1st expedition

That placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake, a trap. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late.

Now that he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it.

Not happy to see the "unsee" cliché.

He would behave like a ghost that knew if it made contact with anyone or anything its touch would slide through and that creature would then know that it existed in a state of purgatory.

Vandermeer sure likes having his characters think of themelves as ghosts.

“Jump,” said a voice in his head. Control jumped.

Hypnotic suggestion?

Interlopers trying to make sense of things, trying to “analyze and survey” as Suzanne had put it, turned people off because it trivialized the tragedies to come.

“El Topoff,” riffing on a strange film Grace once saw with her girlfriend.

Jodorowsky

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time, as if he didn’t trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.

Poetic, but irresolute

She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings—a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

It had many, many glowing eyes that were also like flowers or sea anemones spread open, the blossoming of many eyes—normal, parietal, and simple—all across its body, a living constellation ripped from the night sky.

Borne.