Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy turns 10 this year, and, by pure happenstance, I just finished rereading1 the whole trilogy. The first time I read this trilogy (a day or so before I saw the 2018 Alex Garland adaptation of the first book) I felt that I had read something of Significant Importance. I decided to reread it because that first time was about two weeks before I blew up my life in consequence of a Mental Breakdown, and so I’ve been curious, in the years since, as to whether the books are actually Significantly Important or whether my recollection of them was burnished because of the Significantly Important things that were happening in my own life at the time. I’m not sure I have a clear answer to that, yet, but here are some scattered thoughts about Southern Reach. Some spoilers lie in wait for you here, but it’s a hard trilogy to properly spoil, so don’t worry about it too much.
—
Three books, all published in 2014: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. All three center around the existence of a mysterious patch of Floridian2 coast that was transformed, via some strange event, into a pristine, bizarre, and dangerous patch dubbed “Area X” by the shadowy government organization (the Southern Reach) that studies it. Modern technology doesn’t work there; anything or anyone who passes through its border without going through precisely the right spot vanishes into the mist; many who do go through precisely the right spot either never return or return substantially changed.
Annihilation charts the progress of an expedition (purportedly the twelfth) into Area X. It is narrated by “the biologist,” an odd and prickly woman who finds herself physically and psychically transformed by the terrible phenomena contained within the place. Authority is about John Rodriguez, usually called “Control,” the newest director of the Southern Reach, as he tries to make sense of that organization, Area X itself, and his own peculiar familial connection to both the Area and the organization. Acceptance deals with the aftermath of Authority, as Control and several others make their own way through Area X, as well as the backstories of the previous director and a lighthouse keeper who was present when Area X first came into being.
As already mentioned, Annihilation was loosely adapted by Alex Garland into a movie in 2018. The movie is very good but is also only loosely connected to the book; other than the same general premise, it’s really its own thing. Garland claimed not to have even read the second and third books, and although a few lines make me think that at least someone on the writing staff had, it’s certainly true that you couldn’t make those books into movies that are sequels to Film!Annihilation as it exists. VanderMeer’s ambivalence about the movie has made for a great deal of exciting Twitter reading over the six years since; he seems to oscillate between loving parts of it and being very frustrated with some of the changes it made. Regardless, I’m not talking much about the movie today, however much I like it; the trilogy is a fundamentally different project.
—
I came away the first time with a sense that the books were deeply flawed but also that VanderMeer had created something like holy ground in Area X. I feel similarly now; if I ever go to St. Marks Wildlife Refuge I will have to fight the urge to take off my shoes and genuflect before its lighthouse. There is something wonderful about its structure: first, in Annihilation, we go into Area X with the biologist and encounter everything for the first time; then, in Authority, we analyze everything the biologist did and gain more understanding of why the Southern Reach outfitted that expedition the way it did, and then, in Acceptance, we go back into Area X and see what has happened to some of the characters we met in the first two. This means that when, in Acceptance, we go again to the tower or the lighthouse or learn the origin of the mysterious cellphone that Control found in Authority, we feel as though we are returning to hallowed ground or finally getting important missing pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle. The biologist’s return on-camera in Acceptance, forever changed in terrifying and eldritch and beautiful ways, is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read in a recent novel.
—
The place’s official designation, “Area X,” is indicative of the bureaucratic Soutehrn Reach’s desolate imagination. In the movie they call it the “Shimmer,” the exact sort of quasi-poetic Proper Noun you’d expect to find in a modern fantasy story; but in the original, it’s just Area X. It’s an area, and we don’t know anything else about it; everything about it save for its approximate dimensions is a variable waiting to be filled in. As an official designation it has some value, since what we do know about Area X is that it is, in fact, variable; it changes both itself and those who enter it in unpredictable and inconsistent ways. But as a method of talking about the Area it is antiseptic, stultifying, mathematical. None of the characters ever call it anything else. At first I thought it was a cop-out, a silly name, something out of a ‘90s comic book. The second time I realized that is all correct, but should be properly imputed to the bureaucracy’s lack of imagination, not VanderMeer’s.
—
The audiobooks are wildly uneven. Bronson Pinchot narrates the second and much of the third, and he’s a wonderful fit, his low, laconic and somewhat disinterested voice a perfect fit for VanderMeer’s prose. Audible says Pinchot has narrated at least part of 417 audiobooks; I’ve only listened to one other, his reading of Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet, but he’s very good at reading books. Xe Sands, who reads parts of the third, also does a wonderful job with the second-person narration relating to the previous director.
Unfortunately, Carolyn McCormick, who narrates all of the first-person narration from the biologist (that is, all of Annihilation and a short but important portion of Acceptance) struck me as false. She has the hardest job, in fairness: the biologist is the best character in the series, but she is also cold, clinical, antisocial, weird, and just generally not terribly likeable; it’s a tall order for any narrator. But McCormick’s narration is the wrong mix of flat and sharp; she overhits many of the most important sentences, but her delivery is otherwise too monotonous; also, in Acceptance, sloppy editing makes it clear that much of her reading is spliced together from multiple takes, which is hardly her fault but nevertheless diminishes the enjoyability of the performance. Her reading is also entirely too fast, which is certainly a problem I also have3 when reading things out loud, but the director should have told her to slow down anyway.
—
The second book, Authority, makes a lot of sense as an idea: whereas the first book was an expedition into Area X, the second book is an expedition into the Southern Reach itself; a psychological expedition into the nature of bureaucracy and into the minds of the people who have banged their heads against the ineffability of Area X for years or decades at a time. Yet the final result just doesn’t quite work. There are very good things in Authority (Control’s encounter with Whitby in the attic is one of the more unsettling things I’ve read; the moment when everything finally Hits the Fan is appropriately startling and climactic) but the bulk of the book is just a slog to get through. VanderMeer has correctly identified that a deep character study of this place would be worth doing, but he doesn’t quite have the chops to pull it off.
This is because most of VanderMeer’s characters are never terribly interesting. They are essentially stock characters: Control the failson; Lowry the asshole; Whitby the weirdo scientist; Grace the mean lady at the DMV; Saul the recluse with an Interesting Past. VanderMeer lacks subtlety in his characterization, and his best idea for how to teach us about a character is to give us an extended flashback about their family life4 growing up, which I submit is actually not the best way to understand a character. Shirley Jackson could give us a better understanding of a character in three sentences than VanderMeer can in an entire novel. It’s never fair to compare a writer to Shirley Jackson, of course, but I’m doing it anyway.
—
How do you write about the ineffable? Lovecraft (a major influence on Southern Reach) both perfected it and screwed it up all the time. One wants, in writing Weird Fiction, to sometimes have one’s characters encounter something truly incomprehensible; this is an important human emotion, and one of the great strengths of Weird Fiction is the way it can force you to come to terms with the ineffable, the sublime, the terrifying. Yet this is a feeling that is frequently better handled in short stories, where one can leave a reader confused and awestruck after maybe 20 pages and then move on without that reader feeling like you have just pulled a fast one on them. Southern Reach is not really very long— my copy of the whole trilogy doesn’t quite break 600 pages—but it’s still much longer than a short story.
David Tompkins, writing about the trilogy, borrows from Timothy Morton when he says that Area X is a “hyperobject,” by which he means an event or system or process that is “too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on.” He references black holes, global warming, the half-life of uranium, etc., as examples of what he means. Area X is defined by nothing more than its indefinability; it is inexplicable, vast, and defeats all of the Southern Reach’s finest scientists for some three decades. They quibble about linguistic nomenclature; they obsessively catalog the things they retrieve from it; they concoct precisely designed and doomed expeditions to defeat it; they are no closer to understanding it than when they started.
Only the biologist possibly makes any headway, and that is because she seeks less to master it and more to co-exist with it. We may not be satisfied with her methods, however, which consist of both dispassionate study and a terrible masochistic willingness to hurt herself if doing so prevents Area X from changing her.
Does VanderMeer succeed in his attempt to describe this hyperobject? No, he doesn’t; his attempts to Lovecraftianly obscure what is going on are frequently frustrating and insufficient. And yet yes, he does, because at the end of all of it; at the end of all the too-long descriptions of the Crawler and the shimmering somethings flying in the sky, one is nevertheless left feeling that he has captured some eldritch Truth. Area X does not exist yet it is far realer than most real places.
—
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness…
So begin the words written on the walls of the “tower” that appears in the very first lines of the trilogy: “The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.” The “tower” is not a tower at all, but rather a deep spiral staircase digging deep5 into the ground; some call it a “tunnel,” the Southern Reach officially calls it the “topographical anomaly,” yet the biologist can’t help but think of it as a “tower,” the top of which is approximately at ground level. These words are the “arc words” of the trilogy, and appear again and again throughout the text. The full text is never reproduced in the trilogy, but by the end of it we’ve seen a lot of it; a paragraph comprised of many run-on sentences all written in a Biblical cadence that never quite makes sense but feels, deliberately, as though it might be the key to the whole trilogy.
What it actually is (I think) is another element of the “terroir” of Area X. “Terroir” is a winemaking term that refers to the total natural environment in which a particular varietal is grown; it includes the soil, the climate, the topography, and anything else that might be conceivably relevant to the way a given wine tastes the way it does. One Southern Reach scientist, Whitby, becomes obsessed with the idea of “terroir” as a way of explaining Area X, and therefore starts trying to chart out every single detail of the area as it appeared before Area X came into existence.
A former preacher named Saul was at the epicenter of Area X at its creation. His mind and body formed the basis for one of the strangest and most dangerous creatures haunting Area X, and he is writing the arc words on the walls of the tower. He was, apparently, a successful and somewhat brimstoney preacher before he quit and runned off to be a lighthouse keeper in the middle of nowhere; the “strangling fruit” sermon is thus deeply intertwined with Saul’s whole deal. Saul’s backstory forms an essential part of the terroir that gave rise to Area X.
“Where lies the strangling fruit” eludes clear interpretation, but it is a masterwork of elliptical, Biblical nonsense. The trilogy as a whole frustrates me immensely; I am also seized with the desire to tattoo some significant portion of the sermon onto my body.
—
The best parts, however, have less to do with the strange, fungal, palimpsestic growths of the tower or the “brightness” that is changing the biologist or the pile of derelict journals in the lighthouse. The best parts are when VanderMeer stops what he is doing to describe the behavior of a single otter or heron, living a mostly normal life in the shadow of this inexplicable Force. The movie has a number of beautiful and terrifying images (the bear may be the best movie monster of the last ten years) yet its psychedelic creatures kind of miss the point: yes, Area X has its share of impossible creatures, yet most of its flora and fauna are ordinary creatures that could have lived in the Area before its creation. The strangest and most ineffable thing Area X does is revert itself to pre-human conditions; it not only removes the human-caused toxins and radiation, it allows the non-human animals within to live lives free from human interference. Eldritch monsters and alien doppelgangers are strange, but the existence of a single river dolphin, undisturbed by boats and pollution, might be stranger still.
—
I am going to pause the paid subscriptions here for at least a few months; I am finding that this Substack, though I am generally proud of my output here, is proving a block to my attempts to write other things, largely because I am consumed by guilt every time I miss an update, given that some people are paying me. (This does not, alas, necessarily motivate me to never miss an update. No one ever said human beings make sense). Perhaps I will resume them some day once I am less preposterous; perhaps not. Regardless, I do not intend to stop posting to this site, but I no longer make any promises as to the frequency of these updates, so I’m not going to charge anyone. If you desperately want to give me money, message me and I promise we can figure something out.
Well, technically I listened to it via audiobook; the first time I read paper copies. Well, technically, the first time I read the first book in ebook format, as that is how it was given to me by a friend, and I later read the second two books in paper format. I have now come clean as to the precise ways I experienced these books the first time and the different way I experienced them this time; my heart is much lighter now that I have unburdened myself in this fashion.
Probably Floridian; the books themselves keep the place’s exact location vague, but VanderMeer has made it clear that he was heavily inspired by the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, located south of Tallahassee, so it’s fair to assume that’s where Area X is. It might be in Alabama, I guess.
Almost every judge I have ever appeared in front of has instructed me to slow down, with varying degrees of magnanimity; I am the bane of court reporters in at least two different states.
There is something almost pathological about the way many contemporary writers think the best way for us to understand a character is to tell us about their banal adolescent traumas. Yet often what is most interesting about a character is not necessarily why they are the way that they are, but instead watching them bounce off of other interesting characters. Particularly when it comes to villains, I find that I am not terribly excited to learn that they are jerks because their mothers didn’t give them enough lollipops growing up.
Loved this! It’s funny, you note the influence of Lovecraft here, which is correct, yet Vandermeer has frequently said that he doesn’t care for Lovecraft, and doesn’t consider his work influential on his own. I do think that Lovecraft espouses a kind of nihilism that Vandermeer; as you note, Vandermeer takes genuine joy & awe in the natural world, which Lovecraft never would.
Oh yeah. They are very different writers and I know JVD doesn’t like him very much, but there’s a ton of Lovecraft in Annihilation, in particular, even if it may come to him filtered through others.