Description
“Some of VanderMeer’s best writing…deserves to be mentioned alongside Poe, Chesterton and Borges’s other exemplars of the unheimlich, whose confrontation with the uncanny is central to the mission of speculative fiction.”
―Alec Nevala-Lee, The New York Times Book Review
“Againt all odds, Absolution is. . . just as good as the first three novels. It works for the same reason the others did. It manages, once again, to find that rare balance between revealing (the task of the novel) and revealing too much (the danger horror must avoid). Even when it threatens to settle down into the established pattern of its predecessors, it veers, in its final third, into something entirely more alien and alienating. . . Absolution could have dragged the series’ many monsters and mysteries into a clarifying light. Instead, it sticks to the shadows, just where the best horror belongs.”
―Jess Keiser, The Washington Post
“Absolution is the latest and last installment in the lush, eerie series covering an unknown biological phenomenon known as Area X. . . Absolution marks the conclusion of a weird and wonderful journey involving an assortment of biological abnormalities and government secrets. In the meantime, it seems as if the unusual world that VanderMeer wrote about and the one that we live in today are growing closer and closer.”
―Siri Chilukuri, Mother Jones
“An eerie and evocative coda to [Jeff VanderMeer’s] Southern Reach horror-fantasy trilogy . . . This foray into the human cost of bureaucratic paranoia and the abandonment of logic to ‘hope, prayers, and blessings’ provokes, mystifies, and challenges readers in turn. VanderMeer’s horrifying declaration of the impossibility of knowing the other is a knockout.”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
