Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)
Registered by GoryDetails of Nashua, New Hampshire USA on 11/14/2014
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
I enjoyed Annihilation, the first volume of this trilogy, and got this good-condition softcover of the third volume from an online seller. (See also the second volume, Authority.)
After two books'-worth of increasing mystery, weirdness, and eldritch horror, I wasn't sure just what kind of payoff there could be to justify it all - but I was pleasantly surprised to find at least some answers to many of the questions raised by previous events. Oh, plenty is left ambiguous, and perhaps it's better that way, but a lot of the pieces have come together in this book - which darts between current events involving Control (the new director of Southern Reach), the previous director (lost in Area X on the 12th expedition), and the botanist (aka "Ghost Bird"), also lost on that expedition, and flashbacks showing life in Area X before it *was* Area X. We meet the lighthouse keeper from the photograph, a man named Saul, who enjoys his life tending the lighthouse and spending the occasional evening with his lover Charlie; then he meets a team of investigators-of-the-supernatural, who are VERY interested in the old lighthouse that his has replaced. And it seems that it's their intervention that may have kicked off all the events of the story, even if the seed of the strangeness appeared long, long before that...
I enjoyed seeing the past and future events weaving together, and seeing how the characters coped with the increasingly bizarre changes that crept upon them.
Very atmospheric, very strange!
[There's a TV Tropes page for the Southern Reach trilogy, of which this is the final book.]
After two books'-worth of increasing mystery, weirdness, and eldritch horror, I wasn't sure just what kind of payoff there could be to justify it all - but I was pleasantly surprised to find at least some answers to many of the questions raised by previous events. Oh, plenty is left ambiguous, and perhaps it's better that way, but a lot of the pieces have come together in this book - which darts between current events involving Control (the new director of Southern Reach), the previous director (lost in Area X on the 12th expedition), and the botanist (aka "Ghost Bird"), also lost on that expedition, and flashbacks showing life in Area X before it *was* Area X. We meet the lighthouse keeper from the photograph, a man named Saul, who enjoys his life tending the lighthouse and spending the occasional evening with his lover Charlie; then he meets a team of investigators-of-the-supernatural, who are VERY interested in the old lighthouse that his has replaced. And it seems that it's their intervention that may have kicked off all the events of the story, even if the seed of the strangeness appeared long, long before that...
I enjoyed seeing the past and future events weaving together, and seeing how the characters coped with the increasingly bizarre changes that crept upon them.
Very atmospheric, very strange!
[There's a TV Tropes page for the Southern Reach trilogy, of which this is the final book.]
Journal Entry 2 by GoryDetails at Commercial St. (See Notes For Details) in Manchester, New Hampshire USA on Wednesday, December 10, 2014