Engagement:
Genre:
Science Fiction
Published:
2014
Page Count:
342
Where to Buy:
Authority
Southern Reach
#
2
Content Ratings
Intense Themes
Themes of institutional corruption and denial, the psychological damage of prolonged exposure to inexplicable forces, and the dissolution of individual certainty about reality are sustained throughout.
Mild Violence
Violence occurs in the form of Area X's disturbing effects and an act of personal violence near the novel's end; the horror is primarily psychological and institutional rather than physical.
Synopsis
The new director of the Southern Reach—the agency that manages Area X—arrives to find the organization as strange and dysfunctional as the anomaly it studies, and begins to unravel his predecessor's obsessions and the secrets the agency has kept about what Area X truly is. Less viscerally frightening than Annihilation but richer in institutional paranoia and psychological dread, the second novel shifts perspective to the bureaucracy surrounding the mystery. Slower and more cerebral.