Of men and women already so broken by the past that they appear collectively blind (or willfully ignorant) to the rot spreading around them - until a moment comes that shatters the entire world with a whip-crack suddenness you never see coming - because, like the characters at the heart of Authority, you have become inured to the terrible things happening all around you. What it is about is the building of dread - the slow accretion of things going just a little bit wrong-er than they should. Lovecraft into the room as a script doctor in the first season, the Southern Reach trilogy is what they would've come up with.Īuthority ostensibly follows the new Director of the Southern Reach through his first days on the job and the interrogation of the Biologist - the sole 'survivor' of the expedition described in book one. If the guys who wrote 'Lost' had brought H.P. If there's a creepy lighthouse or an anomalous hole in the ground (both of which are present in Area X), we have to go and take a look for ourselves. To leave this strange anomaly that has popped up on the East Coast of the United States unexplored and unknown. That they are going in - entering through a weird door, into an evolving disaster of undefinable dimensions - because the only other option is to not go. There is the sense, right from the start, that they are a kind of sacrifice. In Annihilation, book one in the trilogy, a team of explorers enters the mysterious Area X. To make any of this make any kind of sense, because Southern Reach is not the kind of series where you can just drop in at book two or three and have any idea what's happening. But before I can do that, I have to talk about the first two books. We have to backtrack a little here, right at the start.Īcceptance, book three in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, is hitting the shelves soon, and I want very badly to talk about it.

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Area X by Jeff VanderMeer