Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer: Review by Ian Mond

Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD 978-0-37461-659-6, $30.00, 464pp, hc) October 2024.

While I try not to pick favourites, I have been looking forward to this month’s column (and not just because October is my birth month). Jeff VanderMeer, Laura van den Berg, and Jesse Ball are three authors who have made an art form of the weird, and, as you already know, I love my fiction seasoned with a generous dose of weirdness. Thankfully, they have not let me down. I can see all three of these novels featuring on my year’s best list come December.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, comprising Annihilation, Authority, and Accep­tance, is, as far as I’m concerned, a masterpiece of modern genre, right up there with N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. There are passages and set pieces from all three novels, especially the second book, Authority, that have stuck with me for a de­cade, including the moment when John “Control” Rodriguez watches a video consisting of 150 frag­ments of surviving footage from one of the Area X expeditions. I’ve read some grim, nasty, confronting horror fiction, but that one scene shredded me (it makes all the creepypasta in the world seem tame and twee). In the ten years since Southern Reach, VanderMeer has written several cracking and dis­comfiting novels, all of which, like the magnificent Dead Astronauts, have drawn on his appreciation of the bizarre. Or, to put it another way, VanderMeer has more than satiated my desire for the strange without having to return to Area X. His decision, then, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the tril­ogy with a fourth novel (very Douglas Adams of him) came as a surprise (at least to me). Not in a bad way. Over the last decade, I’ve come to trust VanderMeer’s artistic decisions. Still, I was curious to see what approach he would take and whether he could somehow elevate the trilogy without robbing Area X of its ambiguity and mystery. And I can say, with a rictus grin and a persistent tic in the left eye, that I wasn’t disappointed. Absolution is as tricksy, creepy, and horrific as anything that appeared in the earlier novels, and just like John Rodriguez viewing the video, there are moments in this novel that will leave an indelible impression.

I’m going to dance around the plot. Partly to avoid spoilers but mostly because, much like the multiple failed expeditions to Area X, I want you to enter this novel wholly unprepared. I will say that Absolution is a prequel; the action takes place well before the events of Annihilation, in fact, two decades before the formation of Area X. The familiar faces it does feature – and I won’t say who – are individuals who play minor (though in hindsight pivotal) roles in the trilogy. One of those familiar faces narrates the final third of the novel with a mouth so foul he’d make Ian McShane in Deadwood look well-mannered. But if Absolu­tion has a hero, it’s Old Jim (not his real name), a washed-up spy (John Le Carré style) who is sent by Jack Severance, the “spymaster” at Central (the black book Government agency that will later oversee the Southern Reach) to the Forgotten Coast (the future site of Area X) to track down an “exis­tential threat.” Let’s leave things there. Let’s not say too much about the alligator called the Tyrant, or the infestation of ghostly white rabbits who “with bloodshot red eyes” calmly crunch on fiddler crabs, or Cass, Old Jim’s fake daughter, or the stranger branded the Rogue, speaking a language that can shatter the mind.

What’s particularly remarkable about Absolu­tion is that while it’s more than a hundred pages longer than any of the three books in the trilogy, VanderMeer somehow sustains an atmosphere of cosmic dread. It’s a skill that recalls the work of Thomas Ligotti, who, at a shorter length, could make each sentence, each word, feel like an icy cold breath against the nape of the neck. VanderMeer might not be as intense as Ligotti (very few are), but from the outset of Absolution, as Old Jim reads the journals of the biologists who never returned from the Forgotten Coast, there is this immediate sense of the uncanny and weird, only amplified by our foreknowledge that the Forgotten Coast will be the future site of Area X. VanderMeer’s careful choice of words, his description of the biologists as shaking the ground “in the aftermath of their pas­sage. Eager men and women who without warning bestrode the terrain like conquerors,” and who “clad in their yellow gloves, carried out a series of ever more arcane rituals,” establishes the novel’s tone, an evocative, spine-tingling blend of the mythic and the mystical, of secrets and conspiracies.

At its heart, the Southern Reach trilogy, now a quartet, is about the arrogance of those in power; the belief that any force, no matter how alien, can be controlled or harnessed by throwing money and resources (dispensable people) at the problem. But the series also juxtaposes our humanity against a form of life inimical to our existence. In Absolu­tion, it’s those moments, whether it’s the bond between Old Jim and his “daughter” Cass – whose presence is a cheeky play on the doppelgängers and copies that heavily feature in the trilogy – or the tender scenes between Old Jim and Gloria, or the painful glimpse of messages on the community board at the Village Bar of those who have disap­peared since the barrier between Area X and our world came down, that act as a subtle but powerful contrast against the novel’s visceral and bizarre set-pieces. I don’t believe that VanderMeer adds these splashes of humanity to give us a sense of hope, to make us believe à la Star Trek that we will conquer our base desires with compassion and love. No, I think those scenes are there to show us that our flaws and strengths, the very things that make us human, will be swept away by Area X, leaving no trace they were ever present. And it’s this knowledge, this final punch in the gut, only reinforced by the climax of Absolution, that makes the novel so damn terrifying, and, as I hoped, adds another layer of existential horror to the remarkable Southern Reach trilogy.

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This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.

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