LOVED IT!! An incredible follow up to Annihilation. Brilliantly written and plotted, engrossing, dark and tense - I found myself holding my breath throughout several parts of this novel. I'm raving about this trilogy to anyone who will listen. I can't wait to read the final installment - September can't come soon enough!

The second book in the Southern Reach Trilogy takes a different approach to the first with a new main character. Following the disaster that was the expedition in Annihilation, John Rodriguez, or Control, has been appointed head of the government agency (which turns out to be almost as weird and creepy as Area X itself) and told by the mysterious Voice to do some digging. But he comes up against a lot of secrets and resistance from those working there, especially the uncooperative assistant director Grace. Slowly, we are given some disturbing and shocking answers to the questions raised in the first book. The biologist appears in this book but she has been changed, like many before her, by her experiences in Area X. Questions are answered in this part but much is left unsaid so I can't wait for the final part. This is a gripping, sci-fi book filled with conspiracies, paranoia, horror and mystery. VanderMeer ramps up the tension and suspense leading the reader to a shocking cliffhanger. Full of twists and turns this is a must read!

Annihilation had a pretty cover. It was gold and covered in fine spores that drifted across the page invitingly, so I picked it up not knowing what to expect. (Although people say not to trust a book by its cover, I’ve not been burned yet, touch wood.) It started off with a simple premise: a small team of specialists are sent to a strange contaminated area in order to figure out what was going on. It soon descended into weirder and weirder territory, as the team started coming across oddly human creatures, arcane scribblings and a whole host of other Lovecraftian visions. It crept up on me and stayed with me for a good long time after I had finished reading it. I won’t spoil Annihilation in this review, but I think before you progress any further you should pick the book up and then come back as it’ll make (somewhat) more sense. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here. If you are pressed for time, or just want a quick overview, head to my review for the previous book here. All caught up? Good. It’s hard to talk about a sequel without chatting about the first novel, even if the two books are so radically different in tone and scope. Authority takes place directly after the events of Annihilation, but instead of being back inside Area X, we instead spend our time at the Southern Reach itself, a base just on the outskirts of the containment zone where research is conducted and operatives trained. We also meet a new POV character known by his somewhat mocking childhood nickname of Control. Sent to weed out the corruption and fix the mistakes of the insular and failing Southern Reach program, Control finds himself fighting a Kafkaesque system of hierarchy and stubborn employees, all while trying to solve the mysteries of Area X. The previous director appears to have been breaking all sorts of rules and hoarding strange things, all while becoming singularly obsessed with the area. Wading his way through incomprehensible documents, sickening footage and the strange scrawled writing and sketches drawn on the walls of the base, he becomes convinced that the returned biologist is the key to the secret of Area X. If Annihilation was the biologist heading down a literal tunnel in a strange and hostile world, Authority has Control venturing down a figurative one, into a maze of bureaucracy and obfuscated motives in search of the truth. While all the characters in Annihilation were known only by their roles and the truth hidden, here we are giving an awful lot of information both about the previous explorations and Control’s own past and motivations. Annihilation took place entirely within Area X, trapping the crew and us deep within the unearthly world from the outset. Authority, however keeps us at a detached distance, with video footage and dry reports to normalise the phenomena - at least until the otherworldly starts making inroads into the Southern Reach itself, encroaching on this sterile landscape. While it answers some of the questions posed by the first book, it throws open a whole lot more. Control is an engaging character, and you feel for him as the area starts to affect him and his superior, a disembodied authority figure known only as the Voice increasingly manipulates him. Who is the Voice, and why has Control been sent to this forsaken zone? At one point a character muses about terroir, a wine term denoting a sense of place, and how the special aspects of a location all create a unique bottle. And that’s what this book is: a fine vintage that is the sum if all its disparate parts to drink slowly and appreciate. It’s a slow mover that delicately layers on the dread until even the walls are steeped in it. And with only a few months to go until its release, I can’t wait to uncork the third and final book in the trilogy, Acceptance.

If like me, the first instalment in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy left you with a tonne of questions, you’ll be glad to know that Authority answers some of them. But of course they’re the best kind of answers… the kind that lead to more questions! ‘Authority’ picks up a few months after the disastrous events of ‘Annihilation.’ It shifts focus from Area X and The Biologist and this time follows the man known as “Control” who has been brought in to question the survivors of Area X’s twelfth expedition. VanderMeer’s brand of horror is becoming somewhat of a trademark as far as I’m concerned. Dread mounts throughout the pages here and every frightening detail is concealed by a shadow so thick, you wont even see it coming. It’s subtle but you wont even feel it picking away at you until it leaves you at your most vulnerable. Authority does not only work as a fantastic sequel, but also as a new beginning. Jeff VanderMeer is leading his readers towards something big for the third and final part of this series. The beauty is not having any idea what that may be.

The first thing that struck me was the contrast to Annihilation, and to be honest it threw me a bit and it took a while for my brain to get back up to speed. Annihilation (the first in the trilogy) had seemed to me a beautifully formed piece all on its own and I loved the way it had immersed me in the landscape of Area X through that strikingly vivid and surreal description. I suppose I’d been eager to leap straight back into that world, so at first the second book seemed almost drab in comparison. I’d empathised with the environment and the biologist in book one, her observations on the landscape and balance between objective analysis and delighted immersion. Vandermeer takes us on a completely different journey in Authority where the environment is the (relative) normality of Southern Reach, the organisation and hierarchy. But as I read on it occurred to me that the books are not all that dissimilar. If Annihilation shone with the living, gleaming terroir of Area X, then Authority sets down the opposing terroir of Southern Reach: the dysfunctional resistance so bogged down in reports and dusty files, internal intrigue and bureaucracy that you can’t help but question whether it achieves anything useful. But, as in Annihilation, the descriptions lay down a fertile mulch of information, glimpses and hints, secrets revealed just enough to leave you hungry for more. There’s an almost purposefully mundane office-y feel to many passages interspersed with a strangeness that keeps you on edge as though Area X is seeping in around the edges of the pages. Despite my slow start, by the last third of the book I was hooked and sailing through the pages, relishing the challenge of it. September and Acceptance seem much too far away!