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Jeff VanderMeer Returns to the Uncanny World of Area X
The author’s Southern Reach trilogy, which began with “Annihilation” in 2014, now has a fourth installment, a prequel.
ABSOLUTION, by Jeff VanderMeer
In a 1943 essay, the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “There is an untranslatable English epithet, ‘uncanny,’ to denote supernatural horror.” Instead of further defining it, Borges offered a few vivid illustrations.
One image, from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, is “a southern sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.” Another is from G.K. Chesterton, who “imagines that at the western borders of the world there is perhaps a tree that is more or less than a tree; and that at the eastern borders, there is something, perhaps a tower, whose very shape is wicked.”
According to Borges, one of the earliest literary examples of the uncanny is William Beckford’s 1786 novel “Vathek,” in which a caliph descends an underground staircase to “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.” In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel “Annihilation,” the characters go down a similar set of steps in the woods, entering a tunnel — which the narrator sees as a tower — that seems somehow alive: “The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat … and they were not made of stone but of living tissue.”
“Annihilation,” which was later adapted into a joyless but very effective horror movie, is the first volume of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. All the installments — including the sequels “Authority” and “Acceptance”— were published 10 years ago as a continuous narrative, which has now been extended by a fourth novel, “Absolution.”
Like its predecessors, “Absolution” centers on Area X, an unidentified coastal region surrounded by an invisible barrier. Those who venture inside find an exhaustive checklist of uncanny phenomena, including geometry that is “neither circular nor square”; apparently man-made objects that turn out to be eerily organic; and that classic standby of weird fiction, the doppelgänger.
In the previous books, VanderMeer describes a horrific succession of failed attempts by scientists — who “had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny” — to understand the anomaly, which by the end is expanding beyond its borders. “Absolution” is a prequel that resolves some questions while raising countless others. For most of its length, it focuses on Old Jim, a peripheral figure in the original trilogy who seems to be the proprietor of the local bar. In fact, he’s an undercover operative for the intelligence agency that later evolves into the Southern Reach, the organization tasked with exploring Area X.
