Whoa-oh, we’re halfway there… I can’t rhyme anything with there, even as a slant, that’s reading related. Eyre? But I didn’t read any Eyre. I guess could, but Eyre deserves to be read more than for just a joke that by this time next month, we’ll be more than half-way through my reading goal.
I only finished one book and DNF’d another. But hey, I’m still ahead of schedule.
Southern Reach II: Authority
A friend told me to pick this book some time after reading Annihilation, since while it concerns itself with the mysterious Area X and the Southern Reach, it does so in a much different way. She wasn’t wrong, but maybe me waiting three years was since I completely forgot what happened in Annihilation.
Authority explores the kind of organization what would send repeated doomed expeditions into a nightmarish, psychologically traumatizing & body horror bonanza area like Area X, while also expositing its origins and setting up the third part. It does all three well, but it doesn’t really mean it comes together well.
The book is slow. It isn’t an unfair criticism of Annihilation to say that little happens in it either, which isn’t a problem since VanderMeer’s style doesn’t necessitate action or active characters all too much. The third act reveal is the natural ending of the book, but for some reason it involves a fishing trip by the main character–John Rodriguez, aka Control (everyone thinks Control is a bad moniker & they’re not wrong)–as he seeks out the Biologist, who like the Anthropologist and the Surveyor, all returned from Area X.
And don’t worry, the Anthropologist & Surveyor are transferred to Central for further observation and we never hear from them again. Much like Annihilation, threads are left hanging loose. We don’t always know what’s an important plot point, or just something weird happening for weirdness sake. Each individual unresolution may seem intriguing, but as they pile up it paints a picture of lazy tedium set upon by VanderMeer, so making them second-hand serves at telling a wider story about people who are broken or traumatized by that which defies definition & explanation.
When we’re stuck with Control digging through the previous Director’s notes, staring at the wall hidden behind a door scrawled with the Crawler’s writing. When Control is sleep deprived & slamming drinks at a bar on a Sunday morning and thinking the rabble across the street are government spies. When Control is utterly traumatized from watching the horror highlight reel of the first expedition. When Control gets his hair pet by the office weirdo Whitby, it’s hilarious and uncomfortable in the same way. When Control is losing control in the biologist’s interrogations. These are the parts of the books I loved the most, because they weren’t as awkward as VanderMeer’s attempts at shoehorning a greater plot it into it.
DNF’d: Horrorstör
What caught my interest in this book were twofold. The concept, a horror story set in an Ikea knockoff, and the execution featuring a book with these lovely pages of just the right weight, a beautiful typeface, product designs and descriptions. It was an attempt to hybrid a furniture catalogue in with a narrative, but the narrative and the way it was told was still linear.
And it’s not to say it couldn’t work. But it didn’t here. I didn’t hate it. There was little to hate in this book, but there was also little to love. It’s all high concept, high production, but Hendrix doesn’t have the skill to pull it off. It’s the kind of cheap horror film with a high budget, simultaneously too self-aware of its own camp but also playing itself too straight to have fun with it. It was the DVD of Cabin in the Woods that I returned late, never having watched it because it’s all gimmick helmed by an averageness that didn’t justify the polish, the shine, the hype.