“There is a crevice in the black sea with a light pouring out. The stranger lives there, peering up at us. Something lives with him close, something beyond understanding. When his eyes open, so too do the eyes of others.”

“The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now. The idea frightened him when it came to him as he woke during the night in the kitchen, sometimes sitting on the chair, with his head full of the rabbit cameras, alligators, and a fading image of a burning candle. An empty vessel.”

Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X trilogy – comprising Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance – utterly transformed the speculative fiction landscape upon their 2014 publication. The series, about the mysterious Area X which has sprung up as the result of an unknowable alien manifestation on the Florida coast and the Southern Reach, the labyrinthine bureaucracy set up to try and understand it, was both an instant classic of the modern Weird that demonstrated how the genre could grapple with ideas like climate change and the Anthropocene and a surprise hit, becoming a bestseller and turning VanderMeer from a name familiar to the cognoscenti of the New Weird and speculative fiction to a household name. VanderMeer has gone on to write a number of wonderful, experimental and deeply strange novels, as well as continue in his role as a curator and thinker of the genre in his and his partner Ann’s anthologies. Now, ten years after the original publication of the trilogy that made his name, VanderMeer returns to Area X with a surprise fourth volume Absolution (2024). Any fears that another book might spoil the mystery of Area X or dilute the impact of the originals can be safely put to rest. Absolution is a sequel worthy of its predecessors, a work that slyly acts as prequel and sequel, drawing us back into Area X and giving us some uncomfortable answers and more questions. 

Absolution is split into three sections, mirroring the original three Area X novels. ‘Dead Town’, the first section, is set twenty years before Area X, and tells the story of an expedition of biologists sent to the Forgotten Coast which will later become Area X, whose actions shape how Area X will form in the future. The second section, ‘The False Daughter’, is set eighteen months before Area X, relates how Old Jim, a Control operative whose life fell apart when his daughter left him, is sent to the Forgotten Coast to follow up on the mysteries of the biologists’ expedition almost two decades ago, and becomes embroiled in both Control’s paranoid schemes and the burgeoning weirdness of what will become Area X. The third section, ‘The First And The Last’, tells the story of the ill-fated first expedition into Area X whose terrible fate will set up much of the mystery the expedition in Annihilation will be sent to investigate. Along the way we find out more about some key characters from the original trilogy, including Lowry, the sole survivor of the first expedition, and Whitby, a mysterious scientist who knows more about Area X than he lets on, and the Séance and Science Brigade, the amateur psychics organization that investigates the strange goings on in and around Area X. 

Absolution feels like a generous gift to all the fans of the Area X books, allowing us to return to VanderMeer’s strange and surreal world once more whilst providing more of the uncanny and the weird that made the originals so compelling. In an echo of the themes of Annihilation, the biologists’ expedition to the Forgotten Coast in the first section find themselves confronted by something outside of the remit of their sciences to understand, culminating in a beautifully VanderMeer-ian section in which they are annihilated by forces beyond their comprehension in prose of almost religious fervour. It’s worth the entrance fee alone. Old Jim in the second section has a similar journey to Control in Authority – he’s another secret agent character who eventually has his identity rewritten by forces beyond his control, but his relationship with both his estranged daughter and his co-agent who comes to the Forgotten Coast to work with him humanize him, making him one of VanderMeer’s most sympathetic and well-drawn characters. And the final section relating the doomed expedition has all the lyrical surrealness of Acceptance, but Lowry and his companions are unable to achieve any level of acceptance or coexistence with Area X, and are drawn into an encounter that will ultimately destroy them as it reveals how little their technologies and theories are suited to grasp the unknowable. 

Along the way, VanderMeer engages in some of his most disturbing and imaginative deployments of the uncanny. There is some utterly sublime body horror, not least involving the skin suits that the first expedition has to wear in order to enter Area X in the first place. There is some excellent dissolving of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, particularly involving the character of the Rogue, a mysterious figure responsible for the destruction of the biologists’ expedition who still stalks the Forgotten Coast at the time of Old Jim’s visit, and the Tyrant, an experimentally altered giant crocodile that he has a symbiotic relationship with. And would it even be Area X without some deeply disconcerting rabbits? 

Absolution allows VanderMeer to return to some of his favourite themes and motifs, but with ten years of extra writing and life experience. The end result is some of his most strikingly beautiful and disturbing writing yet. Absolution, as it should, leaves us with more questions than answers, but crucially they are new questions, and like the previous three books it’s an extra twist of the kaleidoscope that gives readers yet another perspective on Area X, no more comforting or knowable than the others but equally as beautiful and compelling. It’s a treat for fans of the Weird and aficionados of Area X, and a timely reminder of VanderMeer’s extraordinary talents. 

Absolution is available now. You can order your copy on Bookshop.org