Absolution

Don't get my wrong. If Vandermeer writes it, I'm going to read it. But I don't know quite what to make of this one. I loved the beginning, the middle was okay, and the last third was a slog. I think @sophist_monster's theory is that Absolution mirrors the Southern Reach Trilogy, which would track nicely since I love Annihilation, like Authority, and can take or leave Acceptance.

I will say that the book's blending of so-called technology with so-called nature (cameras that are seemingly organic, that change and morph as soon as they are examined, and that are eventually "shucked like oysters") is fantastic and vintage Vandermeer.

The book also does interesting things with time - time has always been weird in Area X, but it seems to take center stage in this book:

"Amid all this sea wrack, the excesses and mundanity, the heavy fog of the moment, what none of them - him, the locals at the Village Bar, the biologists - could divine Correctly was Time.

Not so much the passage of time, with which the locals were well familiar, as the way in which past, present, and future collapsed into each other. The mind became confused by the intermingled layers and whether the portents were ill or benign. Because so much on that coast, humid and hot and closed off, decayed spring to life decayed sprang to life. The eye, misled, did not know what was truly and forever dead. The eye did not know where to focus, could not tell what might next be resurrected." (33)

Even in a book that I wasn't gripped by, I can count on Vandermeer to keep me going with passages like that.