Series Review: Southern Reach Trilogy

Annihilation: Authority: Acceptance

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Expectations are a tricky thing. The expectations I had for Annihilation after watching the film was that it was going to be a weird and trippy ride. It was, but I was surprised when the book dove into Lovecraft territory. I would love more surprise Lovecraftian influences in my life. My media-consuming life, that is. Not my real life, thank you. The harder the turn into Lovecraftian influence, the better. The PlayStation game Bloodborne may be quite the perfect example of that, but before I derail this entire review into a different subject matter, I best get back on track.

Annihilation

My original thoughts on this book still stand. Highly recommend. Even if you only read the first book in the trilogy, I suggest you give Annihilation a try. It’s a good stand-alone book with no need to go further into the series if you do not want to commit to three books.

Now, after having read Annihilation, I had this expectation that I should be ready for more of the same, right? Well, I was wrong yet again.

Authority

There’s a new director of Southern Reach, the agency tasked with investigating Area X, and he’s left with not much to go on. In fact, the old director has seemly left an even larger mess of puzzles for him to sort through, on top of having to deal with family troubles, losing his sanity, and the worst nightmare of all; bureaucracy.

I have two words that best describe this book for me, and that’s “wasted potential,” but perhaps that’s entirely on me and my expectations. The previous director, who we find out was posing as the psychologist in the first book, had become obsessed with Area X, and the new director- who goes by the name Control- discovers her obsession. The deeper Control travels down the rabbit hole of notes, photos, and evidence of Area X, the more Area X seems to be reaching out to him, leaving him wondering if he’s just being paranoid or if something really is watching him, and if perhaps reality isn’t as solidly under his feet as he thinks. Could Area X be leaking through the boundary and infecting the world beyond?

As stated earlier, both setting and perspective shift for Authority. You are given a point of view inside the government agency responsible for sending expeditions into Area X. This drastic change in scenery is a fun novelty at first, seeing the man behind the curtain, so to speak. But eventually the novelty wears off and what you’re left with is a mystery where the questions are endless and the answers are pointless.

“But that sounds pretty Lovecraftian to me,” you say. Why would I be against that in this book here, but thrilled by it in the first book? Expectations. We were given a new perspective. We were given tools and clues to help solve a mystery. We were given an underdog character to root for. It all came to nothing. There’s an even larger problem with this book that came up in retrospect after finishing the third book Acceptance, but I’ll get to that.

I still felt like Authority was a good book, and I’m even willing to admit it could be better for others who didn’t share my hopes of what Authority was doing with its plot of Area X having an effect on a person’s psyche outside of the boundaries, in a similar fashion to how things unraveled in the book House of Leaves written by Mark Z. Danielewski (and is a book you should check out if you like horror in general.)

I have trouble deciding if I would suggest this book or not. Authority leaves you with an open-ending that begs you to read the third book, and if I had not read Acceptance, I would tell you to read both Annihilation and Authority in preparation for Acceptance’s release. Unfortunately, I’m not very happy with how the third book played out. So, if you don’t mind a big cliffhanger, give Authority a read. It’s interesting enough on its own merits that I don’t mind suggesting it to you.

So that leaves us with…

Acceptance:

Spoiler-free review: I did not like the final book in the Southern Reach trilogy, and unlike Authority, I didn’t find many redeeming qualities. Book two, Authority, spent a lot of time setting things up for book three, and book three largely existed as a prequel for the book one, and not in a way that answers any of the questions you actually had. Not having answers isn’t a bad thing in of itself, but the subject matter that Acceptance did cover, what answers it did have, had no impact on the overall story. And worse, in my eyes, is that it didn’t have any impact on the rest of Acceptance’s story, which consisted of two different sections; “the past” and “the present.” Neither the past nor the present touched upon each other in any way. It was as if the parts in the past were backstories the author wrote for the sake of getting to know his characters better and help with world-building, while the present dealt with the events that occurred after Authority, and he just jammed the two things together.

For more specific reasons why I didn’t like it, we have to go into spoilers, which I will do so now.

Acceptance follows four different viewpoints through three different points in time. We have the earliest point in time which follows Saul, who in the present is the Crawler, the main eldritch abomination in Annihilation, but in the past was a lighthouse keeper. The next chronological viewpoint is the last director, who was pretending to be the psychologist in Annihilation, and her viewpoint starts with her becoming the director of Southern Reach and leads into her untimely end in Annihilation. And then we have the last two people who share the same present timeline and are traveling together, those two being Control and Ghost Bird, who is the copy version of the biologist from Annihilation. They both went back into Area X at the end of Authority, and Acceptance follows them as they go looking for answers.

I find it easiest to compare both Saul/Crawler and Director/Psychologist to Anakin/Darth Vader, but not in the way that started out innocent and became twisted versions of themselves. Both of their stories in this book are prequels. Prequels that add nothing to the original material, which in this case is Annihilation. Both of these characters take up a large majority of Acceptance and they do nothing to further the plot of the other two characters, or the trilogy itself, and they also don’t change anything upon a second reading of Annihilation. I’m not sure why these two POVs exist in this book. I feel like a novella, a book 2.5, would have served them better, as well as letting Control and Ghost Bird get more page time and development.

I’m also unsure why Control gets a POV here, or really why he’s even in the book at all, given the character doesn’t accomplish anything or add anything to the book. My only guess was that the author didn’t want to unceremoniously kill off the character at the start of the book, or was just using him to advance the plot while still keeping Ghost Bird’s thoughts a secret when he wanted the character to be vague and mysterious. That is what soured me on Authority the most. The waste of Control’s character.

So for Acceptance… Would I suggest it? If you really, really, really want to get as many answers as possible, then yes, read it. You’ve already made it this far, and the third book isn’t all that long. The Ghost Bird/Control sections keep the plot moving, and it does bring the story to a satisfactory close, I just wish it hadn’t used up so many pages on answers I hadn’t even been asking the questions to.