Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Ten years ago, Jeff Vandermeer published a whole trilogy in a year. That's always a dangerous, gutsy move, but I think it worked for him: both artistically and commercially, popping him up from a well-regarded quirky slipstream writer working mostly in the genre-fiction world into a solid position in the wider literary universe. Better yet: I don't think he changed the way he wrote or his subjects - he just got better publishing support and the kind of appreciative quotes that subtly imply this is not genre fiction, because it's good.

(Those quotes are always half bullshit - they were when Kingsley Amis made fun of them in the 1960s, and still are now - but they do their job, and I guess that makes them useful, even if they rely on a kind of reader who is paradoxically both fond of literary invention and skill and unable to see quality anywhere but a narrow plot of "good" fiction.)

The trilogy was called "The Southern Reach." The first book was Annihilation and this second one is Authority. (I'll get to the third book Acceptance eventually. It took me four years to get to #1 and six more for #2, so don't hold your breath.)

The whole series is about Area X: a coastal region in the Southern US - facing south, probably in the Florida panhandle - that had a transformational paranormal event thirty years ago. (The books take place in an unspecified time, probably slightly in the future from when they were published, but it's deliberately vague. Area X could have formed in the 1980s, or 2020.) A impenetrable - well, utterly destructive, as far as anyone can tell, which is nearly the same thing - border came down, except for one access point. Everything made by humanity inside Area X - except for one lighthouse - disappeared or was destroyed. Strange organic life has been growing there. There are other, weirder, less definable changes as well. Explorers into Area X come back transformed, if at all.

The Southern Reach is the organization - it rolls up to "Central," probably some acronymed agency we have heard of - that monitors and investigates and sends expeditions into Area X. They are themselves secret, as is Area X: the general population thinks there was some kind of ecological disaster, and everyone has been kept away from the region.

Southern Reach is also the name of their headquarters building, not far from the border of Area X.

Vandermeer doesn't write trilogies like most people do. Before this, he - to quote myself - "wrote three books about the city of Ambergris... the collection City of Saints and Madmen, the metafictional novel Shriek: An Afterword, and the detective story Finch." Similarly, Annihilation was a novel built from the journals kept by one woman on an expedition - called just "the biologist" there.

Authority is a third-person novel focused on "Control" - a career intelligence professional (OK, call him a spy if you want) named John Rodriguez, who has been sent to take over as Director of the Southern Reach and to investigate what happened to the Twelfth Expedition - the one chronicled in Annihilation.

Three of the four women of the Twelfth Expedition came back, appearing in random places far from Area X, without clear memories of their time there or their lives before the expedition. The one who didn't return, "the psychologist," was the previous Director of Southern Reach.

This book is partly about the conversations Control has with the biologist - he has not read her journals, the ones that formed Annihilation, and she can't tell him much of anything about what happened to her - partly about his troubles taking control of Southern Reach, where the assistant director, Grace Stevenson, is deeply loyal to the missing previous director and quietly blocks nearly everything he does, and partly about how he sifts through what the previous director left behind and what the rest of the scientific staff of Southern Reach can tell him.

Control learns that the most recent expedition was officially the Twelfth, but each numbered expedition was a series - the Eleventh had multiple iterations, and the total number of forays into Area X is well over thirty. And that Area X is not necessarily stable. And that, even thirty years later, the Southern Reach doesn't really know the first thing about Area X or the phenomenon or entity that created it.

He learns many things, plenty of them horrific, over the course of the novel, and loses control of Southern Reach in more than one way by the end. Like so many Vandermeer stories, it has creepy biological manifestations and a tone at most one or two clicks away from horror. It ends with a leap that I assume leads into the third book: it ends reasonably well for the middle of a trilogy, but it clearly is middle.

This is a creepy, unsettling novel, about something mostly unknown that just might be poised to destroy all of humanity and the entire biosphere of our planet - or maybe to do something even stranger, and potentially worse, than that. And Vandermeer does creepy and unsettling better than nearly anyone else: this is excellent in every way.