Jeff VanderMeer's "Absolution" is a dark mirror to the Southern Reach Trilogy

A decade ago, author Jeff VanderMeer released Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, a sort of weird alien first-contact series where the only thing scarier than pristine nature was the cold, unfeeling bureaucracy of military intelligence organizations. The books were critically acclaimed—particularly the first installment, Annihilation, which was later (loosely) adapted into an Alex Garland film starring Natalie Portman. The series as a whole was both immensely haunting, as well as immensely satisfying, despite the chilling ambiguity and unresolved mysteries left lingering by the of Acceptance.

Now, Vandermeer has returned to the world of Area X with a new book called Absolution, which illuminates some of the history of the region before the events of the Southern Reach Trilogy. It's tempting to call it a prequel, but that's not entirely accurate; it's more of a dark mirror, a sublimely uncanny reflection of the world you thought you knew (not unlike the strange doppelgängers that inhabit Area X).

Absolution is broken into three sections, each of which feels like a distorted echo of a corresponding book from the original trilogy. This isn't to say that you necessarily need the knowledge of the original series in order to understand what's going on. (One might even argue that having that knowledge still won't help you understand what's happening.) But the promise of connections to a thing you've already read is one of the major narrative lures that pull you through this story.

A brand new reader, for example, may struggle with the first section, Dead Town, in which an intelligence operative (who has only a brief though brutally memorable cameo in Acceptance) sorts through a bunch of files pertaining to a weird incident that occurred in the region that comes to be known as Area X. As in Annihilation, most of the characters here have stripped of their names and identities, being referred to only by their functional job titles, and all you can do is watch in horror as these unwitting researchers stumble into a surreal situation that slows drives them mad. This section is freaky as hell—and while some readers may struggle with the apparent emotional hollowness at the center of it, that clinical, unfeeling perspective largely adds to the horror.

That intelligence operative takes more of an active role with personal stakes in the next section, The False Daughter—which, like Authority, is a slow-burn espionage noir in which a spy discovers that he's actually at the center of a psyop being run by his family and superiors. This was probably my favorite part of the book, as I genuinely felt for poor Old Jim, a sad lonely spy with a heart of gold whose entire livelihood depends on being a completely heartless bastard. One might even say that Old Jim's heart is sort of the heart of the entire book.

(The False Daughter also shares a sort of Roshomon relationship with parts of Acceptance, the third book in the Southern Reach trilogy. It doesn't illuminate anything new about that part of the story, per se, but it has a sort of sympathetic resonance with those events that amplify the horror and make clear who the real villain had been all along.)

Finally, there's The First and Last, which follows the infamous First Expedition into Area X, from the point of view of its only surviving member—who also happens to be the worst person you've ever met. Some readers may struggle with the fact that Lowry is a wretched sack of toxic masculinity who only wants to fuck and take drugs that make him compulsively say "fuck" a lot. Some readers may find this off-putting, and the first few pages, in particular, are complicated to get through—not necessarily because of the cursing but because of the way the words interrupt the sentences. I was easily able to shut them out and push through it, and the prose soon got easier to sift through. However, I'd also argue that there is some uniquely brilliant artistry to this:

Image: Thom Dunn

The First and Last echoes Acceptance in its atemporal nature (and, in a way, in the themes of acceptance). But unlike that book, which follows three different perspectives at three different times, this section is more linear. To say any more would veer too far into spoilers than I'd like to go with this review. Suffice to say, Lowry is a Trumpian POS, and though you certainly never like him as a character, his role in the story is an important one (in part because of his inherent awfulness), and that ugliness helps to illuminate the bigger picture of the Southern Reach Saga as whole.

Taken on its own, Absolution tells the story of an intelligence agency that goes into a situation and makes it worse by treating everything as a potentially hostile threat that must be analyzed from every angle. In many ways, it reminded me of the leaked documents from Tiger Swan during the Standing Rock pipeline battle, where every casual human interaction was categorized and tagged as some potential threat assessment, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein the private security military contractors are forced to up their security protocols in order to address the imagined hostility they saw in people singing songs together. That's a bleak story on its own, but at least in this case, the conclusion is tragically poetic.

Considered in the context of the larger Southern Reach / Area X saga, Absolution doesn't so much answer any questions as much as it reiterates what you already knew: some extraterrestrial life crashed on Earth, either trying to hide, communicate or colonize, and the meddling of a bunch of paranoid military intelligence operatives inserted themselves into the situation and made it worse, which in turn justified more paranoid military intelligence operations. That's all right there in the original trilogy; Absolution mostly reminds you which species was really the invasive one.

Also, like the rest of the Area X books, Absolution sufficiently freaked me out and had plenty of moments that will continue to haunt me for a long, long time to come.

Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel [Jeff VanderMeer / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux]