Review: A Sci-Fi Exploration of a Shadowy Government

The deeply weird Southern Reach Series reminds us that human institutions can turn people into something unrecognizable.

Science fiction novelist Jeff VanderMeer returns readers to Area X for a gruesome romp in Absolution, the fourth book in his deeply weird Southern Reach Series.

Area X is an abandoned stretch of the Southeastern U.S. coast surrounded by an invisible alien border. Expeditions sent through the border encounter unnatural phenomena and sanity-shattering anomalies. Most never return.

Absolution explores the origins of Area X and the ill-fated first expeditions. VanderMeer gives Southern Reach fans plenty of its trademark dread and otherworldly horror. There's a giant mutant alligator named The Tyrant, just for starters.

Most of the novel follows Old Jim, a washed-up spy who is pulled out of retirement to investigate a "foreign entity" in the months before the border crashes down. Old Jim's doomed mission reveals much, not only about Area X but also the shadowy and malevolent government agency researching it.

The first book in the series introduced the concept of an alien environment that digests those who enter it and turns them into something unrecognizable. The thread that VanderMeer teases out in Absolution with the story of Old Jim, a counterpoint to all his uncanny bogeys, is that human institutions can do the same.