Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels burrow into your brain

To fully give yourself over to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all published within a few months of each other in 2014, and Absolution, published a decade later in October 2024—you need to let go. “If someone or something is trying to jam information inside your head using words you understand but a meaning you don’t, it’s not even that it’s not on a bandwidth you can receive, it’s much worse,” linguist Jessica Hsyu says to Control, the protagonist in Authority, the second book in the series. “Like, if the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your ear over and over again…” Hsyu trails off, leaving the thought unfinished, its implications hanging.

With the Southern Reach series, VanderMeer is trying to communicate something wholly alien—a message that uses words we understand but whose collective meaning remains obscured, or perhaps fluid; transitional or transformational, even. There are explanations available to those who are open enough to receive them, but they’re not obvious, and they’re more felt and understood than directly communicated. Something from far away driving a signal into your brain, and you’ve got to be on the right (wrong, so very, very wrong) wavelength to even receive it. A sliver of alien material, fallen to Earth, unknowingly encased in a Fresnel lens inside one lighthouse and then another, until someone, or something, or some idea, cracks it, and then it consumes you, slowly and quickly and wholly and completely and fractionally and maybe not at all.

The series’ first book, Annihilation, is told from the perspective of a biologist on the 12th expedition into a geographical and environmental anomaly known as Area X. Roughly 30 years ago, something happened, some cataclysmic Event caused a sort of shimmery wall to come down, sealing off Area X from the surrounding environment, and the Southern Reach has been sending expeditions in to explore the area ever since. Authority, the second book, explores the Southern Reach in the aftermath of the 12th expedition. Acceptance, the final book of the original trilogy, jumps between the perspectives of Saul Evans, the lighthouse keeper along the Forgotten Coast (now known as Area X) in the days leading up to the Event; Gloria, the former director of the Southern Reach, in the time between the last 11th expedition and the beginning of the 12th, when she joined the exploration team as their psychologist; and Control and Ghost Bird, a sort-of clone of the 12th expedition’s biologist, as they go back to Area X after the events of Authority.

Absolution seemed to come out of nowhere 10 years later, though VanderMeer had been talking about a follow-up novella as early as December 2014, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to die-hard fans that he eventually returned to Area X. Like Acceptance, this novel is also told from different perspectives in different times, but the narratives are grouped together into three different sections, rather than being intertwined throughout the whole book. In the first section, Dead Town, set 20 years before the appearance of Area X, a team of biologists arrives on the Forgotten Coast, conducting mysterious experiments and experiencing inexplicable phenomena. In the second section, The False Daughter, set 18 months before Area X, we spend time with a Central agent named Old Jim who gets tangled up in the Forgotten Coast. And in the last section, The First And The Last, we follow Lowry, the only surviving member of the first expedition, as he explores Area X one year after the border appears.

I recently read all four of these books for the first time, perhaps too quickly, in the span of about half a month, with the intention of writing a critical analysis of them. At times, I lost myself in the words, found myself several pages from where I last remembered the narrative, with no recollection of what happened in between, only a vague sense that I had internalized something I couldn’t quite articulate. Re-reading the pages lost to my memory gaps only made me more confused, but in each of these instances, I soldiered on anyway, thinking that perhaps this was an experience essential to allowing the narrative to take hold—part of the books’ terroir, if you will, though that word feels like something Area X reclaimed. Something we've lost access to, something whose original form exists only in a memory and whose current form, if it even has one, hovers just beyond the limits of our understanding.

The 10th-anniversary editions of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance have new introductions, each written by a different author, each addressing different thematic elements of the series. The introductions are strikingly different, both in terms of their syntax and what they choose to emphasize. Annihilation’s introduction, written by Karen Joy Fowler, puts forth a theory about why the book feels like it speaks directly to the current moment, even though VanderMeer wrote it long before he could possibly know what this moment would look or feel like, and why it “is likely to remain a book fitted exactly to the current moment for decades of moments to come.” It is, she explains, because Annihilation is a narrative about how we live with uncertainty. How we continue to wake up, day after day, when we don’t know what’s going on in the world around us, when everything feels out of our control, when we have a constant sense of unease about our environment. It maps well onto the interpretation of the series as a climate crisis metaphor that was a popular narrative when the first three books were released a decade ago. 

It also, N.K. Jemisin argues in the introduction of Authority, maps well onto a reading of the Southern Reach series as post-colonial fiction, and the pervasive alarm that sounded in the lead-up to Trump’s election in 2016 and continued to wail, at increasing volume, throughout his first presidency, and which has grown even more urgent and insistent in the lead-up to his next term as president that will begin in 2025. The questions the series raises are not just questions of how humans survive climate crises, but of how humans survive being colonized.

In their introduction to Acceptance, Helen Macdonald writes about how the series dismantles “the fiction of separation between human and nature.” Macdonald read the first three books during a research trip to a former naval base off the coast of Hawaii, and writes about how their physical environment melded with the fictional, became something new and impossible to untangle. Acceptance, according to Macdonald, is an object and an emissary, a book about a transformation that also has the power to transform.

The Southern Reach series both begs for and actively resists close reading—it’s obvious, from the disparate introductions of each of the first three entries, that we all have a shared language we use to talk about these works of fiction, an agreed-upon understanding of their basic form. Their meaning, however, changes with the method of delivery. Maybe the knife creates an opening in one reader’s ear; perhaps, for another, it enters under the fingernails. 

I think I’m still too close to the series to be able to tell you where it entered my bloodstream, the precise location of the entry wound and the extent of the damage/enlightenment it wrought. I can’t give you an objective assessment of these books; I can only offer you an explanation of how they hit me when I read them, my environment affecting my perception, the soil and the climate imparting something intangible but so obviously present into the wine. I can only tell you that, to me, the lack of anything resembling a resolution felt right in its wrongness. I didn’t find absolution in VanderMeer’s words, or acceptance or annihilation or authority. Instead, I found a world that I still can’t quite shake, that’s dug into my subconscious in a way I never expected. It’s impossible to quantify in the binary of good to bad—it just exists, in a way that fictional worlds shouldn’t, a living thing that’s also inert, an object with a soul.