ROBBIE ARNOTT'S PAGE: LIMBERLOST; and THE RAIN HERON—don't miss out on a major talent

LIMBERLOST
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.

His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.

Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water.

As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron{review below}, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dual timelines of Ned's life: the summer he was seventeen, at the end of WWII, as he works himself ragged to earn the money to buy a small boat; and the rueful musings of his old-man self, on that passage: "He suddenly felt very old. Felt the distance between his youth and what he was now. He flexed his wrists, touched his face, wondered if the troubled boy of that summer would recognize the man he'd become."

We all wonder that, Ned; no one moreso than a man whose life spread before him and then happened to him. Summer of that seventeenth year starts in his childhood memories with the appearance out of nowhere of a whale at the mouth of the river nearby. This whale is wreaking havoc, destroying boats and lives, all very dramatic thus certain to appeal to an adolescent and fire his dreams of boat ownership and its promise of escape, of freedom. That is always the illusion, isn't it. Young men urgently need to escape from their lives. Not so much of course, that Ned takes on the care and healing of an injured quoll, a cat-sized marsupial that didn't make it unscathed around Tasmania' settler-colonial farms (in Ned's case, an apple orchard called Limberlost). Ned's squeamish discomfort with killing even the verminous introduced rabbits hes hunting to provide pelts for slouch hats, Aussie soldiers' signature headgear means he commits to returning the quoll to health and its natural home.

Unlike the other stories from Author Arnott, this one has no tint of magical realism. It's a strong historical story, one that moves us into the waning years of an Australian colonial reality that was consciously reshaped beginning in the 1970s. That reshaping, which redressed in small ways moving towards larger ones the horrors that the settler colonials unleashed on Aboriginal Australians and the fauna of the continent, has its other face examined here. Ned has spent his entire existence working, the land that supports human life has received his best and tenderest care; now he must confront the way that looks to his own children: "He realized his recollections might not be as clear as he'd assumed. It was a horrible sensation, feeling that the facts of his life had blurred. He wondered if his past was slipping away?"

As it must, Ned. As it will away from us all.

The beauty of Author Arnott's prose makes this a read to savor for me; its focus on a man in his terminal decline to oblivion rethinking his life appeals to me in its deep familiarity.

I've reworked this review from its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab. I've added links to definitions.

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THE RAIN HERON
ROBBIE ARNOTT
FSG Originals (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting.

But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.

The Rain Heron is the dizzying, dazzling new novel from the author of Flames.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "So much was ruined, either slowly or in red instants, and nothing was getting better and nobody was doing enough about it. And through the quiet carnage of the world I kept moving." A fascinating story made up of absences, of clothing not worn, of things not happening, of eyes unseeing. A novel centering absences sounds...unsatisfying. I can only advise you to trust Author Arnott, read the story, and see if my rating holds true for you, as well.

“A farmer lived, but not well. If she planted grain, it would not sprout If she grew rice, it would rot. If she tried to raise livestock, they would gasp and choke and die before they’d seen a second dawn (or they were stillborn, often taking their mothers, which the farmer had usually bought with the last of her coins and hope, with them). Success and happiness were foreign to her, and she had forgotten what it was like to go to bed unhungry. All she had was her hunger and her farm—and her farm, as far as she could tell, wanted her to starve.”

When an author creates a mythos for a place that has one well-known to most readers of English-language prose, we call it a retelling. What, then, is the word for Author Arnott's mythmaking for this exceedingly ancient land that Europeans don't know the mythos of, whose history is older than ours by many millennia, and yet it settles onto the mindspace of the people now there seamlessly? "When I first saw the bird burst into its high grotto, when I watched its dance of wet light, I was mesmerised by it. Then it took my eye, and that feeling was replaced by terror, and with the terror came extraordinary pain, as I felt the icicle of its beak pierce the jellied rim of my eyeball."

I don't really know but that's where we are.

“Paddling nearer, they saw that it was the unlucky farmer, dead or unconscious, her body draped over the branches like a nightgown hung out to dry. But more curious than this was what they saw next: a huge heron, the colour of rain, suddenly emerging from the flood in a fast, steep flight, leaving not even a ripple on the water beneath it. With a languid flap of its wings it came to rest in the crown of the oak, standing over the unlucky farmer, as if on guard.

The teenagers brought their boat to a stop. This water-risen heron was unlike any other they’d seen before—any other heron, any other living creature. Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird. Its body was pierced by strands of dusky light, and the tree was clearly visible directly behind its sharp, moist beak.

A ghost, one claimed. A mirage, said another. But before they could get closer the heron hunched its neck, flapped its wings and leapt into the sky. A thick spray of water fell from its wings, far more water than could have been resting on its feathers. Then it disappeared into the remnants of the storm.

Absences and spaces and takings-away and lacks...all make this near-future dystopian in an unflashy, unbombastic unnervingly real way. It could be that, as the 2025 US regime unleashes its evil agenda on the world, this feels too on-the-nose in the way that validates its rightness and essential truth-telling.

Why do they want it?
Who?
The generals or whoever’s in charge.
Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.

Nowhere in the text are there quotation marks or suchlike civilizing indicators. It's an effective technique for a post-apocalyptic story made of takings-away and spaces where things once were or might have been. Its message is "do more with less, things are not what they were, get used to providing things you're used to getting."

The Rain Heron does not come on demand.

I've reposted this review its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab.

VIA ÁPIA, an English-language debut that really puts the reader in the minds of the young men it follows, by Brazil's Bright Young Thing

VIA ÁPIA
GEOVANI MARTINS (tr. Julia Sanches)
FSG Originals (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of Brazil’s most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio’s largest favela.

Brothers Washington and Wesley work part-time at a restaurant as servers for kids’ birthday parties. After helping their mom out with the household expenses, they spend the extra cash on a bit of fun whenever possible, and get high on that good quality weed when it’s available. Douglas, Murilo, and Biel split an apartment, sharing everything from their joints to their chores, just a quick bus ride from the beach on Via Ápia, the main entry point and commercial avenue of the favela Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro.

The lives of these five young people are far from the ease and leisure that many associate with one of Brazil’s most photogenic, well-known cities. Still, they manage, and life on the morro, the hill, is good.

All of this gets upturned when, in November 2011, the UPP, Brazil’s militarized police unit, occupies Rocinha as part of the "pacification" efforts and the so-called war on drugs, in anticipation of the World Cup, the Olympics, and an influx of global tourism in Rio. Via Ápia is divided into three parts: the expectant anxiousness of waiting for the UPP invasion; the chaos born from their installation on the hill; and their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.

Told in short bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the year and a half of the protagonists’ lives, Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of violence and unrest. Just like the boomboom-kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and the resolute friendships of his characters blare through Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state’s only remedies to social problems. The favela retorts: Life, life is the answer.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A story as loud and resonant as its prose, as terrible as its grim political roots, and as clear-sighted as the view from its birthplace on a Rio hillside.

People in Brazil contend with a political and social system that is far more brutal on a day-to-day basis than any non-Red State one in the US. Their policing exceeds even ours in militarized ruthlessness. This story highlights the consequences of that abusive system.

Quite a lot of this story, in its relentlessly young-male focus, deals with casual sex and drug use and the anomie of being made to feel useless and worthless. Why should I care about anything you do if no one else cares about me? The inevitable solipsism of the young is foregrounded, and shown in the light of a normal response to a deeply dysfunctional system. It is a story told in conversational tones, in direct and engaging images that we can immediately relate to.

What that offers in immediacy it reduces in specificity. I'm never quite sure who's "speaking" to me. A lot of that is down to my old-man impatience with Youth, I'm quite sure:

"You ever worked a party for someone famous?" Talia asked once they'd finished discussing their favorite bailes and pagodes.

"Oh yeah, loads. Tons of actors and soccer players throw parties here...One time I worked this gig for Luciano Huck and Angélica's kids. It was wild. There were so many celebrities, the place looked like the season finale of a telenovela or something. The managers were all twitchy cause everything had to be perfect and shit, but it was pretty low-key in the end."

Keeping in mind the main PoV characters are brothers working together, and you might see the issue. I'm pretty impressed with the seamlessness of the translation as it moves between points of English not having a word, and using an English word in place of the Brazilian one. In that example, "soccer player" subs in for "futebolista," "bailes and pagodes" doesn't need an explicit translation because they're cultural touchstones we know we don't share, but "telenovela" is now well-enough known in US English that it needs no translation yet still carries an explicit idea.

So it's a deft presentation of a Brazilian-language story. It might not be a perfect read for me, in the sense that it is not aimed at me. I'm here to tell you, though, that anyone who'd like to comprehend how young men could choose to support an appalling, cruel, and evil system in US politics should read this story. It shows us how it feels to be the young men in question. It points out our blindness to the consequences of privilege unexamined and ill-considered. Every time I can tempt someone into this kind of reading, it increases the chances of all of us finding empathy for and commonality with those being Othered.

I call that a big win all the way around.

THE JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS PAGE: I DON'T EXPECT ANYONE TO BELIEVE ME; QUESADILLAS; INVASION OF THE SPIRIT PEOPLE

INVASION OF THE SPIRIT PEOPLE
JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS (tr. Rosalind Harvey)
And Other Stories
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Juan Pablo Villalobos’s fifth novel adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity.

In an unnamed city, colonised by an unnamed world power, an immigrant named Gastón makes his living selling exotic vegetables to eateries around the city. He has a dog called Kitten, who’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a good friend called Max, who’s in a deep depression after being forced to close his restaurant. Meanwhile, Max’s son, Pol, a scientist away on a scientific expedition into the Arctic, can offer little support.

Faced with these dispiriting problems, Gastón begins a quest, or rather three: he must search for someone to put his dog to sleep humanely; he must find a space in which to open a new restaurant with Max; and he must look into the truth behind the news being sent back by Pol: that human life may be the by-product of an ancient alien attempt at colonisation . . . and that those aliens might intend to make a return visit.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Alien invasion! Gastón's shared son, Pol, is freaking right out (wouldn't we all!) as he tries to get through Max, his depressed father's, fog to...to what? Gastón, his other father, isn't quite sure what to do about Max's decline into dissociation from his failing business and crumbling participation with the world. But is Gastón sure he believes Pol? Aliens from space made us humans what we are?

Add to the stress of trying to prop up Max, comprehend the influx of aliens from Earth (...or are they...?) and what that means for his and Max's attempts to survive as feeders of the people via growing and cooking food, his quest to find someone he trusts to give Kitten (his aging, ill dog) a good death. This is entirely a story of the humanity of all people, regardless of where they come from or how they define themselves.

A casual reader might see the Asian stereotyping, with mentions of slanting eyes etc etc as endorsing this world-view. I don't think that is accurate, or fair. It seems to me that every step of the story's progress is made in the harsh light of Judgment. No one here, from Gastón (whose exploits we're following closely, as the third-person narrator advises us early on) on down, is spared an unflattering shadow.

As is the norm for Author Villalobos, there is stuff to shock and offend those prone to such histrionics. Avoid the read, then, if you're not prepared to look closely at your own responses to the events unfolding here. I myownself think it's another, less raucous but more reflective, take-down of the structures and maintainers of Power as it's used in the twenty-first century end-stage capitalist world.

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QUESADILLAS
JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS (tr. Rosalind Harvey)
FSG Originals
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s the eighties in Lagos de Moreno—a town where there are more cows than people, and more priests than cows—and a poor family struggles to overcome the bizarre dangers of living in Mexico. The father, a high school civics teacher, insists on practicing and teaching the art of the insult, while the mother prepares hundreds of quesadillas to serve to their numerous progeny: Aristotle, Orestes, Archilochus, Callimachus, Electra, Castor, and Pollux. Confined to their home, the family bears witness to the revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and their umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of son Orestes’s adventures and his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life and the tyranny of his older brother.

Both profoundly moving and wildly funny, Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Quesadillas is a satiric masterpiece, chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, religious pilgrims, alien spacecraft, psychedelic watermelons, and many, many “your mama” insults.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I do not think there is another author alive who can make such a painfully, angrily critical book about inequality so damned funny. Foul-mouthed Oreste blasts your wimpy Norteño eyes with some deeply "offensive" cursing, swearing, and blasphemy.

I, of course, loved it.

You need to be warned, though, lest you fall into one of those performative swoons that are so absurd and typical of the US readers. Lots and lots and lots of pearl-clutching fun to be had, of course, howling about your delicate sensibilities! But you can't claim to be blindsided. I'm telling you clearly, now, before you pick it up, that this teenager's mouth is not going to sound good to you.

To me, it was a welcome return to honest, gut-deep youthful outrage at the hideous, genuinely offensive to proper sensibility calibration, social crimes and thefts. Nothing in this flensingly honest shout of outrage should shock you more than the cruelty, the sheer shocking indifference, of the economic elites.

I encourage the easily-offended pearl-clutching fools to read it because it will offend them. They need offending.

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I DON'T EXPECT ANYONE TO BELIEVE ME
JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS (tr. Daniel Hahn)
And Other Stories
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The author of Down the Rabbit Hole delivers a hilarious and prize-winning tale of immigrants, students and gangsters in Barcelona

“I don’t expect anyone to believe me,” warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship, when he’s kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin – a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as “Projects” and to others as “dickhead” – who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To bring Laia, a Mexican student in Barcelona and the daughter of a corrupt politician, to fall in love with him. He accepts, albeit unwillingly, and albeit after the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature.

Part campus novel, part gangster thriller, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is Villalobos at his best, exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile. This hugely entertaining novel, the winner of Spain’s prestigious Herralde Prize, makes light work of difficult subjects – immigration, corruption, family loyalty and love – in a story where the bad guys aren’t as expected…and nor is anyone else.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I did not know how I was going to review this latest satirical, bitter-as-bile delight from Juan Pablo Villalobos. Now I not only don't have to review it, I wouldn't dare. Robert Rea of estimable literary magazine The Southwest Review has already done everything I wanted to do, only he did it better. You can't see me, but I am vibrating with a Day-Glo orange jealous ragey hatred after reading that...that....

If you liked THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolaño (here unsubtly parodied and lovingly honored), or any of Villalobos's previous books (QUESADILLAS {review above} or DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE for example), you should rush to the Kindle and download this gem or get the paperbook from your favorite bookery. Wherever you source it, y'all literary readers will most likely never feel a moment's regret that you read it.

ACCEPTANCE gets more stars than its prequels

ACCEPTANCE
JEFF VANDERMEER (Southern Reach Trilogy, #3)
FSG Originals
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five, mostly for the ending

The Publisher Says: It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing it--the Southern Reach--has collapsed on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking. If they fail, the outer world is in peril.

Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X--what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X--and who may have been corrupted by it?

In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound--or terrifying.

My Review: It's a frustrating thing to wait for a book, a series, an idea to cohere. When it fails to happen, the result is usually a sense of letdown at the very least, and not infrequently outrage and betrayal. And here I am rating this incoherent (in the nice and accurate sense) final volume as the best of the lot.

Wonders will never cease.

The Big Reveal of this series doesn't need to be coherent (again used in the nice and accurate sense). It is big enough, titanic in fact, that any attempt to fit it into a pleasantly proportioned package would merely be absurd. This is a rare case of a resolution needing enough room to encompass the beginning all over again, since there is no conceivable way the results of Area X's existence for the reasons it exists will stop reverberating in each and every iteration of each and every possible future that flows from it.

Was that vague enough for you? See, there's nothing I can be specific about except at the certainty of spoilering every development in each book. That being the modern era's Worst Imaginable Sin, I'm avoiding the lynch mobs that roam freely over the internet. Let me give you a clue that won't be a clue unless you've read the series: The parable that seemed tantalizingly just beyond reach is here full-blown at last. What Area X represents in all its strangeness and its inscrutability can't be made any clearer than it is in the book, even though as you're turning the last few pages you're going to have a raft more questions than you started the book with. And that's a good thing.

Philosophically VanderMeer's point, well one of his points anyway, could not possibly be more timely than it is right now on the cusp of the Arctic's final descent into deglaciation. A piece of the planet is in reality changing before our (appalled) gaze into something that isn't quite set yet. The reasons aren't mysterious, in the case of the Arctic, but the consequences are equally bizarre, unpredictable, random. The planet isn't going to remain the same. The consequences for some, even many, individuals are going to be as condign as they are in the book. The authorities are as nugatory in the face of out planetary changes as they are in the book. The public is as...oblivious? unconcerned? flip?...as is the shadowy, gesturally indicated public of the book.

This series of books isn't a Rubik's cube of a story. It's a Seurat painting of lore. Enjoy that? This is a series for you. What befuddles me is how Alex Garland, the director, plans to make any kind of coherent film out of Annihilation alone. Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh will show us, one supposes, when the film is released in 2017. Please dear goddesses, please don't let it be a hugely overlong, incoherent mess like 2012's Cloud Atlas.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, what it looks like inside a narcoterrorist leader's world

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS (tr. Rosalind Harvey)
FSG Originals
$12.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: “A brief and majestic debut.” —Matías Néspolo,El Mundo

Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines, and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants, and the odd corrupt politician or two. Long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award, Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child’s wish.


My Review: First, I must get this off my chest: THIS IS NOT A NOVEL. At ~35,000 words, it could be called a novella, a work of 15,000 to 40,000 words (definitions vary on this point, but ALL definitions include 30,000-40,000 words in them and this is that length) that features fewer conflicts than a full novel and more complex ones than a short story. I don't think it's a novella because it's a first-person story and features only one fully developed character, Tochtli (“Rabbit” in Nahuatl, relax we'll get there). It's a récit , a form of narrative that has a simple through line, is told from one PoV and quite often in first-person present and past, and offers little in the way of contextualization, of “world-building,” as it's all in the narrator's PoV. I hate the publisher and the trade folk yip-yapping NOVELNOVELNOVEL about a 70-page (generous margins, several blank pages in the text) so as to get over the reading public's aversion to “lesser” forms. How about we review the piece as it is, and urge the reading public to read it without misleading them? Someone buying a novel expects that it will do what novels do, really explore one or two conflicts with results and resultant changes in characters' lives. Not happenin' here.

Well, okay, I'm all shouted out now.

Terrific story, this one of a drug king's kid and the many oddities paranoia and isolation have allowed to blossom in him. The names, all taken from Mexico's major native tongue of Nahuatl (the Aztecs spoke it), are all of animals...the narrator's name means Rabbit, his father's name means Rattlesnake, his tutor's name means Deer, and on. They're all like gang nicknames, playing on the culture of nicknames that describe some major thing about a person. Rattlesnake? How can you not perceive a drug lord as a cold-blooded, dangerous, venomous critter? Rabbit? Scared, small, needs to be hidden away—suits our narrator's life to a T.

Translator Rosalind Harvey has done a marvelous, if British, job of rendering a precocious kid's usages and crotchets into spottily adult language. I haven't read the original Spanish, so I don't know how faithfully she's reproduced Villalobos's original, but I suspect quite well. The language has that certain “feel” that good translations do, a kind of smoothness and polished gleam that speak of quality made from quality. That Tochtli is an odd kid is to be expected, that he uses (frequently!) words he's just learning is to be expected, and since those words...sordid, pathetic, devastating...are a little above his actual grasp, the author's use of them in the kid's mouth makes several very trenchant points.

Yolcaut (Rattlesnake) watched the news with me and when it was over he said some enigmatic things to me, First he said:
“Ah, they suicided her.”
And then, when he'd stopped laughing:
“Think the worst and you'll be right.”
Sometimes Yolcaut speaks in enigmatic and mysterious sentences. When he does that it's pointless to ask him what he means, because he never tells me. He wants me to solve the enigma.
Before I went to sleep I looked up the word prestige in the dictionary. I learned that prestige is about people having a good idea about you, and thinking you're the best. In that case you have prestige. Pathetic.

It's all part of building the reader's awareness of the twisted, strange, uncomfortably exaggerated natural parental protection of our kids. Other details include Tochtli's always painful stomach cramps that the doctor can't find a cause for, Tochtli's obsessive passions for things like being a Japanese samurai who's mute and therefore enigmatic (!), his endless list-making. The kid would've been strange no matter what, but Yolcaut (Nahuatl has no dipthongs, so say each letter as if it were a Spanish vowel or a Basque consonant) being what and who he is has made the problems giant-sized.

It's a disquieting little thing, and it's quite darkly amusing, and it's—Praise the Muses!—it's original. It's balm for a weary-of-~meh~ reader's soul. You'll love it, or you'll hate it, but you won't walk away wondering what it was that you just read.

AUTHORITY, Jeff Vandermeer's second Southern Reach novel, slips a little

AUTHORITY
JEFF VANDERMEER Southern Reach #2
FSG Originals
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X--a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization--has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

John Rodrigues (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.

My Review: We're not in Area X anymore, Toto, and therein the problem. Control, our PoV character, is hastily tossed together to provide a camera platform for the bureaucratic machinations and clandestine-agency wars.

It's so frustrating to read a good book that's encased in a less-good book. Like those canned hams from the 1960s, the meat is tasty but who put this weird spoodge all over it?

After much hither-and-thithering, not to mention an amazingly large amount of dithering for an executive, Control runs away from (almost) everything...and the ending makes up for most of the beginning. But really, editor, couldn't a few of those go-nowhere side trips have been pruned? (eg, Whitby's art project, Cheney's existence) It takes such a boatload of attention to track them.

I think the slightly different angle on the same basic story as Annihilation is simply not a strong enough framework to bear the expectations raised by it. The very fact that the main character is known to all and sundry as "Control" is perhaps the single most telling tiny clue: it feels as if Vandermeer wasn't terribly interested in him or in this angle on Area X. Still and all, the sheer...audacity, bravura, something in that family...of the series can't be denied or ignored. Thus a half-star higher rating than I felt the novel qua novel earned.

ANNIHILATION, first of three Southern Reach novels, gets a full four stars

ANNIHILATION
JEFF VANDERMEER Southern Reach #1
FSG Originals
$13.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.

UPDATE DECEMBER 2016 The 2017 film via indie filmmaker Alex Garland looks really intriguing.

My Review: Winner of the 2015 Nebula Award for science fiction novels and the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for horror novels, this novel earns accolade after award heaped on top of praise for a good reason: It is eerie, atmospheric setting plus glimpsed monsters plus the recrudescence of the inner evil in all humans. And it's very well written.

We're well into this short book before something truly scary happens; before that, it was all spooky suggestions. The first truly scary thing was the discovery of one woman's mutilated, fungus-laden corpse...an intense impact!

One thing I must note about Mr. Vandermeer's work is that he seems inordinately interested in fungi and molds. **shudder** The shroom-o-phobic members of the audience are warned. Everyone else, I recommend the book with mild reservations, but only mild ones, about the SF-resistant ladies. I myownself would say try 50pp, for what that's worth.