Will VanderMeer rally for a grand slam finale? Stay tuned: The last volume is scheduled for September.
After the chills and thrills of Annihilation, published in February 2014, this second volume in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy—a science fiction/horror hybrid—is an altogether quieter affair.
It had to be once VanderMeer decided to change the venue from Area X to the Southern Reach HQ. Area X is a spooky no man’s land controlled by an unknown entity (aliens?); 1,500 people have died there since its emergence 30 years ago. The Southern Reach is the secret government agency monitoring it, so we get office politics. Its last director, leader of the expedition described in Annihilation, is missing, presumed dead. This volume is narrated by the newly installed acting director, John Rodriguez, who wants to be called Control. That’s ironic, for unlike le Carré’s same-named pooh-bah, this Control’s authority is tenuous. He owes the job to his mother, a powerful figure at Central, and the assistant director, Grace, is determined to undermine him. Moreover, after three decades of failing to solve the riddle of Area X, Southern Reach is a backwater and morale is low; Control’s mission is to shake things up. First he must get a handle on Area X. He interviews the biologist, a survivor of the last expedition and protagonist of Annihilation, but draws a blank. She is stubbornly tight-lipped. He visits the border, bathed in a strange light, and watches video from the doomed first expedition. He reports to the Voice, a person in Central whose gender is disguised by technology. There are some minor frissons, as when Control discovers an unhinged scientist creating a nightmarish mural, but these are slim pickings compared to the horrors of Annihilation (an essential introduction). Nor does he measure up to the biologist in complexity. His background (Honduran sculptor father, multiple postings, multiple girlfriends) seems cobbled together, and the espionage elements, lackluster. Toward the end, there will be a spectacular development, a late reward after all the shadowboxing.
Will VanderMeer rally for a grand slam finale? Stay tuned: The last volume is scheduled for September.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-10410-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A celebration of fantasy that melds modern ideology with classic tropes. More of these dragons, please.
After 1,000 years of peace, whispers that “the Nameless One will return” ignite the spark that sets the world order aflame.
No, the Nameless One is not a new nickname for Voldemort. Here, evil takes the shape of fire-breathing dragons—beasts that feed off chaos and imbalance—set on destroying humankind. The leader of these creatures, the Nameless One, has been trapped in the Abyss for ages after having been severely wounded by the sword Ascalon wielded by Galian Berethnet. These events brought about the current order: Virtudom, the kingdom set up by Berethnet, is a pious society that considers all dragons evil. In the East, dragons are worshiped as gods—but not the fire-breathing type. These dragons channel the power of water and are said to be born of stars. They forge a connection with humans by taking riders. In the South, an entirely different way of thinking exists. There, a society of female mages called the Priory worships the Mother. They don’t believe that the Berethnet line, continued by generations of queens, is the sacred key to keeping the Nameless One at bay. This means he could return—and soon. “Do you not see? It is a cycle.” The one thing uniting all corners of the world is fear. Representatives of each belief system—Queen Sabran the Ninth of Virtudom, hopeful dragon rider Tané of the East, and Ead Duryan, mage of the Priory from the South—are linked by the common goal of keeping the Nameless One trapped at any cost. This world of female warriors and leaders feels natural, and while there is a “chosen one” aspect to the tale, it’s far from the main point. Shannon’s depth of imagination and worldbuilding are impressive, as this 800-pager is filled not only with legend, but also with satisfying twists that turn legend on its head. Shannon isn’t new to this game of complex storytelling. Her Bone Season novels (The Song Rising, 2017, etc.) navigate a multilayered society of clairvoyants. Here, Shannon chooses a more traditional view of magic, where light fights against dark, earth against sky, and fire against water. Through these classic pairings, an entirely fresh and addicting tale is born. Shannon may favor detailed explication over keeping a steady pace, but the epic converging of plotlines at the end is enough to forgive.
A celebration of fantasy that melds modern ideology with classic tropes. More of these dragons, please.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-029-8
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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