Starred review from August 5, 2024
Nebula winner VanderMeer adds an eerie and evocative coda to his Southern Reach horror-fantasy trilogy with this prequel, set two decades prior and illuminating a fatal expedition into what would come to be known as Area X off the southeast coast of a bureaucracy-crippled country. In three discrete narratives told through multiple perspectives, VanderMeer explores the failure of human intelligence to deal with incomprehensible alienness. The first section chronicles the well-funded but doomed scientific expedition into the Forgotten Coast through former spy Old Jim’s reading of a long-lost Seance & Science Brigade diary. The second traces Old Jim’s tormented attempts to carry out a mind-controlled black op for “Jack,” his sinister former partner and now handler. The third and by far the most opaque section follows Lowry, a soldier, through a tragic drugged trip across the Border on orders from Jack, now revealed as a rogue Control agent. Drawing heavily on bioresearch and scientific extrapolations, this foray into the human cost of bureaucratic paranoia and the abandonment of logic to “hope, prayers, and blessings” provokes, mystifies, and challenges readers in turn. VanderMeer’s horrifying declaration of the impossibility of knowing the other is a knockout.