It’s been a decade since Jeff VanderMeer published his speculative fiction-horror fantasy Southern Reach trilogy, consisting of Annihilation – upon which the 2018 film of the same name is loosely based – Authority and Acceptance.
Put out in rapid succession, they were a thrilling, terrifying, melancholic and grim-dark trio, sharing aspects of HP Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space, JG Ballard’s many apocalypses and Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, with a lavish helping of espionage, Kafkaesque bureaucratic intrigue, romantic sublimity and hallucinogenic surrealism.
The books, which were all international bestsellers and award winners, concerned the anomalous Area X, a remote, swampy “Forgotten Coast” somewhere in the United States which one day, without warning, was suddenly cut off by a nearly impenetrable, invisible forcefield. Is it an isolated anomaly or malignant, metastasising threat? Within the zone, biology and evolution behave in bizarrely chaotic ways and even time seems not to follow the usual laws.
The Southern Reach is a top-secret US government agency established to keep Area X hidden from the public and the novels tell the stories of the teams sent in to investigate it. The Forgotten Coast is simultaneously Edenic and Hellish, populated with hybrid mutated monstrosities and an all-pervading force that seeks to mould flesh into something else or create perfect simulacra to breach the outer world.
Now, the author surprises us with a new addition to the series in the form of the independent prequel-cum-companion book, Absolution. The story opens decades before Area X has properly formed, when a scientific expedition studying alligators encounters a vicious bunch of carnivorous bunnies with cameras mounted on their backs. The scientists are driven out of their minds and attacked by a powerful supernatural being.
From there we are treated to a lot more background to the origins and operations of Southern Reach, and the first ill-fated team of special investigators sent to the Forgotten Coast.
A core character is Old Jim, a local bar owner and washed-up spy who can barely remember his real name, who was once sent to investigate the doings of a group of occultists operating in the lighthouse, a prominent landmark in the books. He discovers a long and duplicitous web of red herrings and government meddling in eldritch forces.
The new novel’s structure is much like Area X itself, a collection of linked but seemingly independent narratives that initially lulls you into a false sense of the mundane before an order (of a sort) emerges from the incoherence and blows you away. If you are hoping for the mystery at the heart of Area X to finally be revealed, though, you will be disappointed.
I went into Absolution with cautiously lowered expectations. How many times have we known the bitterness of a cynical cash-grab tagged jadedly on to a lucrative series with none of the energy? Absolution gets around that by compressing the tension into shorter component tales, keeping it fresh with tension and VanderMeer’s poetic, muscular prose. It delivers in spades.
On one level, the Southern Reach novels are a compelling, disturbing, deranging, haunting, bleak, enigmatic, weird fantasy of considerable art. On another, they are existentialist eco-horror, or even a survival guide as the world slips from the Anthropocene – the age of human impact on the world – to the Chthulucene, a term that has been coined for the new cultural and ecological balance to be struck in a broken world where humanity is no longer calling the shots.
Absolution is a worthy and welcome contribution to the Southern Reach lore.
