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About 10 years ago I checked Jeff Van­der­meer’s nov­el Anni­hi­la­tion out of my local library. It was a short, weird sto­ry about the twelfth^[1]Well, depend­ing how you count, as it turns out. expe­di­tion into a deeply weird place called Area X.

Area X is a sec­tion of Flori­da, the For­got­ten Coast, where some­thing has changed. Life­forms are mod­i­fied, some­times merged, some­times whol­ly remade; ghosts and dop­pel­gängers appear, both in Area X and back in the nor­mal world; time seems to move in dif­fer­ent ways once you’ve crossed the bor­der. There’s a tow­er that descends into the ground^[2]Where lies the stran­gling fruit… and a light­house that I’m not sure any­one wants to go near. Anni­hi­la­tion was a dream­like expe­ri­ence, with the caveat that night­mares are also dreams.

Hav­ing read the first book, I read the sequels too: Author­i­ty is the sto­ry of a man code-named Con­trol, who is sent from Cen­tral to the South­ern Reach—the shad­owy gov­ern­ment enti­ty that super­vis­es explo­rations of Area X—to try to get the place back under, well, con­trol. It’s a spy thriller with a soupçon of body hor­ror and weird, in its own way, as Anni­hi­la­tion. The third book, Accep­tance, merges and extends the first two: Con­trol is now inside Area X, with some­one who might or might not be the biol­o­gist whose POV dom­i­nat­ed Anni­hi­la­tion, while oth­er chap­ters give us some insight into the for­ma­tion of Area X.

Now, ten years lat­er, Van­der­meer has writ­ten a fourth nov­el in the series, a pre­quel and cap­stone: Abso­lu­tion. And it’s good.

It’s essen­tial­ly three novel­las, inter­wo­ven togeth­er^[3]Not unlike Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cer­berus.. The first one is an explo­ration of the For­got­ten Coast, twen­ty years before Area X formed, fil­tered through a one-time Cen­tral oper­a­tive named Old Jim as he reads decades-old reports. Part two, eigh­teen months before the bor­der comes down, has Old Jim in the field, now with a young part­ner pos­ing as his estranged daugh­ter, work­ing as a dive-bar man­ag­er and dig­ging deep­er into the inter­lock­ing weird­ness­es hap­pen­ing on the For­got­ten Coast. The third sec­tion is the sto­ry of the very first^[4]Well, apart from the chick­en. expe­di­tion to Area X, from the point of view of Lowry, who even­tu­al­ly becomes the direc­tor of the South­ern Reach.

Abso­lu­tion is a wild ride through a bur­geon­ing apoc­a­lypse, and it car­ries the same sense of dread I got from the extant tril­o­gy: This will not end well. There are numer­ous call­backs to the first three books, and while some mys­ter­ies might end up resolved, plen­ty more ques­tion are raised than are answered. A great many ques­tions may well be unanswerable.

If you’re look­ing for every­thing to be neat­ly tied up at the end, this isn’t the book for you, isn’t the series for you. If you’re look­ing for a spy thriller, an exis­ten­tial threat to the human race, a bunch of body hor­ror, and a stun­ning num­ber of F‑bombs^[5]There were more fucks in the table of con­tents than in some nov­els., you’ll prob­a­bly enjoy this one. (You’ll prob­a­bly want to read the first three books first, though.)

I look for­ward to re-read­ing the whole saga in a few years.