Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love the feeling of reading something and at the end being utterly confused, slightly euphoric, like the experience of reading it was all one long hallucination. If you also like that feeling, Jeff VanderMeer might be for you!
(For context, I devoured the original Southern Reach trilogy and really enjoyed it, so I embraced this prequel with the widest-open of minds. That trilogy ends with a thousand questions left unanswered.)
Here’s your briefing: There are no answers here. No key to unlock the final door. Instead, something better. An infinite row of new doors, many of them half submerged in a beach of bones and too weather-worn to ever be opened. But the images, the feel, the slippery disorientation, the refusal to be defined, the dark humor peppered throughout… something about an incomprehensible creation like this is medicine for living in a time like this one.
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