The Southern Reach Trilogy (the individual books are Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) is an engaging and intriguing piece of horror fantasy, somewhere between traditional Southern Gothic and HP Lovecraft. Each books is pretty short–the whole trilogy is about 800 small-size pages.
Area X appeared a few decades ago: an area on the Southern coast of the USA that is populated by fantastic creatures, holds no industrial pollution, and seems to repel all attempts at understanding. Tasked with exploring it is our hero, John Rodriguez. He initially focuses on two twin structures: one a lighthouse that dominates the coastline of Area X, the other a spiral staircase that winds into the ground nearby.
What makes this more than a standard procedural is the depth of commitment to the setting and the skill with which Jeff Vandermeer pulls that off. These are books of swamps and mosses, of spores and fungus, of luminescence and slow rot, and that is where the magic lies. The narrative is almost always creepy, sometimes spectacularly so, and there are images–a glowing fungus that writes fantastic scripture on the wall of a stairwell, a figure sitting at the nexus of glowing webs, a molding midden-pile of notebooks sitting beneath a trapdoor–that will stay with you long after you finish.
It’s a good read, and if that kind of horror is your thing, you’ll like it even more.
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The total commitment to tone and setting. Vandermeer never strays, and the ability to maintain that throughout the trilogy is impressive: it’s the same thing that Lovecraft–or Poe–is able to do, and something with which I struggle.