In a 1943 essay, the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “There is an untranslatable English epithet, ‘uncanny,’ to denote supernatural horror.” Instead of further defining it, Borges offered a few vivid illustrations.
One image, from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, is “a southern sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.” Another is from G.K. Chesterton, who “imagines that at the western borders of the world there is perhaps a tree that is more or less than a tree; and that at the eastern borders, there is something, perhaps a tower, whose very shape is wicked.”
According to Borges, one of the earliest literary examples of the uncanny is William Beckford’s 1786 novel “Vathek,” in which a caliph descends an underground staircase to “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.” In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel “Annihilation,” the characters go down a similar set of steps in the woods, entering a tunnel — which the narrator sees as a tower — that seems somehow alive: “The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat … and they were not made of stone but of living tissue.”
“Annihilation,” which was later adapted into a joyless but very effective horror movie, is the first volume of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. All the installments — including the sequels “Authority” and “Acceptance” — were published 10 years ago as a continuous narrative, which has now been extended by a fourth novel, “Absolution.”
Like its predecessors, “Absolution” centers on Area X, an unidentified coastal region surrounded by an invisible barrier. Those who venture inside find an exhaustive checklist of uncanny phenomena, including geometry that is “neither circular nor square”; apparently man-made objects that turn out to be eerily organic; and that classic standby of weird fiction, the doppelgänger.
In the previous books, VanderMeer describes a horrific succession of failed attempts by scientists — who “had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny” — to understand the anomaly, which by the end is expanding beyond its borders. “Absolution” is a prequel that resolves some questions while raising countless others. For most of its length, it focuses on Old Jim, a peripheral figure in the original trilogy who seems to be the proprietor of the local bar. In fact, he’s an undercover operative for the intelligence agency that later evolves into the Southern Reach, the organization tasked with exploring Area X.
The opening sections feature some of VanderMeer’s best writing, with a compelling relationship between Old Jim and his investigative partner, Cass, who is initially assigned to him because she resembles his estranged daughter. As they uncover sinister events in the period before the barrier appears, the novel delivers the sort of conventional but satisfying scenes — the kind where one character threatens another with a gun — that the series once avoided, along with eerie images like this: “A large white rabbit with bloodshot red eyes calmly ate a fiddler crab, crunching on the carapace, gulping it down, and starting on another.”
VanderMeer, a noted Borges fan, dwells on the mundane details of Old Jim’s everyday life, aware that the power of the uncanny — like its German equivalent unheimlich, or “not from home” — lies in its uneasy contrast with the ordinary. Because he writes best in an eloquent but narrow range, however, VanderMeer has trouble shifting between registers, with even his supposedly hardheaded scientists filling their journals with implausible flights of poetry: “There came the distant sounds of conflict, but always at some vast remove.” The most unsettling works of the uncanny, like Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves,” are more expansive in tone, producing a deeper sense of displacement as reality shades into a nightmare.
As readers of H.P. Lovecraft know well, such stories teeter constantly on the verge of the ridiculous. VanderMeer is usually careful not to risk it, which makes the conclusion of “Absolution” truly inexplicable. Old Jim’s story is followed by 100 interminable pages from the perspective of James Lowry, the sole survivor of the first expedition into Area X. VanderMeer clearly despises him, and his attempt to write in Lowry’s profane but punishingly monotonous voice destroys any lingering reverberations from the rest of the novel. Admirers of the earlier books can safely skip all but the last three chapters of this section.
And yet VanderMeer still deserves to be mentioned alongside Poe, Chesterton and Borges’s other exemplars of the unheimlich, whose confrontation with the uncanny is central to the mission of speculative fiction. Faced with the unnamable, we fall back on reason, language and other tools that Old Jim dismisses as useless: “The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.”
This struggle can seem especially relevant at times of social dislocation. As one character reflects in “Acceptance,” “the world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult.” When these words appeared in 2014, VanderMeer was ahead of the curve. Now, like the rest of us, he has to work hard to keep up.
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