Beelzebub's library

Authority is less engaging than Annihilation, but it has a better story.             Annihilation has a simple concept that provokes the imagination. Authority, perhaps by virtue of being a sequel, has the obligation of having a harder to explain the premise.             John Rodriguez, or Control, is the new director of Southern Reach, the organization which is in charge of monitoring and explaining Area X. The organization has decayed significantly since Area X popped into existence, setting the stage for an interesting setting along with posing some very cogent questions in this day and age. How do you solve a problem that no seems to care about? Should you even try?             Like Annihilation, this book brings up questions about climate change and humanity vs Nature and our own role in society and the role of...

Novel: Supernatural, Horror, Mystery. Contains violence and disturbing imagery.  This review contains minor spoilers.  I finished this book a while ago, I have just been so busy with my practice writing that I haven’t gotten around to this review. The book is about a secret government operation called Southern Reach who has been sending teams of researchers into a closed off stretch of Florida designated as Area X. It is one-third a mystery, one-third a cosmic horror story, and one-third a mind-blown-makes-no-sense-but-is-cool-anyway type story. The narrator is one of the researchers, who becomes more and more unreliable as the situation degrades.  This helps the atmosphere a lot. First things first, I should mention that I have actually met the author of the Southern Reach trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer. I took several presentations in which he taught about writing. So with that out of the way, if I’m not particularly hard on him at certain points, it...