Southern Reach Trilogy 3 Books Collection Set By Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) Paperback

I really enjoyed these. Well written, good characterisation, strange and super creepy. Excellent.

This just didn't live up to the hype. The film led me to this trilogy and I was excited: this is exactly the sort of thing I like. I wasn't disappointed but I was underwhelmed. It reads like a (successful) submission for a PhD in Creative Writing. All the vague hints and references to similar early and weirder stories - Roadside Picnic, Solaris, The Colour out of Space, The Willows, His Master's Voice, Borges, House of Leaves, J.G. Ballard, amongst others- are like a series of leitmotifs running through the trilogy. However, doing this draws comparisons with these and the trilogy always fails to match these. The themes of: failure of communication, weird ecology, the inability of humans to think outside human concepts, alien minds, xenology - are just not very well done. The list of research at the end shows that these areas were of interest but quite quirkily selected. This is a piece of entertainment not a polemic so it doesn't need to have them but it certainly seems like it has taken a more simplistic approach than the complexities of its predecessors.The shifting of narrators, all unreliable and all limited, is interesting and JV uses that to good effect in spreading questions and answers across these narrators. This is certainly one of the strong points of the writing (second person is used effectively). However, after a while these shifts seemed to serve the purpose of deferring closure rather than driving story forwards. A subtle but significant difference and one that makes the books more superficial than they first appear.I wanted to love this trilogy and I don't. I like it but it could have been so much more. I suspect that JV wrote this as a sort of magpie homage to books and writers that fascinated him but the trilogy is less than the sum of its parts.