What to read this weekend: Jeff VanderMeer returns to Area X

One thing I did not foresee happening this year was us getting a new entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. But the author announced exactly that back in April, and I’ve pretty much been counting down the days until the book’s release ever since. Absolution, the fourth novel in what previously stood as a trilogy, hit the shelves this week and it takes us back to the beginning of Area X and the ill-fated first expeditions to explore it.

For the uninitiated, the series deals with a strange coastal region in the US that’s inexplicably been shut off behind an invisible border and has returned to a wild state. A shady government agency has been tasked with studying it, but the people who set out on those exploration missions either never come back out, or come back different. The series includes Annihilation (which inspired the 2018 movie starring Natalie Portman), Authority and Acceptance.

Ten years after the series was originally released, a prequel feels like the perfect way to dive back into the mysteries of Area X and the Southern Reach. The trilogy concluded in a way that answered some questions but also left so much else up in the air. And while you probably shouldn’t expect Absolution to neatly wrap it all up, it does give us more insight on the early days of the anomaly and the perspective of key characters in that timeline, like Lowry. Absolution is hefty — it’s structured so there are three novella-like parts, and is nearly 500 pages long in all. Which is great, because I can’t get enough of Area X.

If you remember being a child and at some point thinking, “I want to be a marine biologist when I grow up,” Sönke Johnsen’s Into the Great Wide Ocean is for you. The book is a personal account of what it’s like being a scientist out on the open sea, and a glimpse into the mysterious lives of the creatures that inhabit it. It focuses on the ocean’s pelagic zone, or, as Johnsen describes it, “everything that is not the bottom, which includes the surface and the watery world between it and the seafloor.”

Life out in the ocean isn’t easy (neither for animals nor the humans working out there), and the species that exist there display some remarkable adaptations that have allowed them to persist. Into the Great Wide Ocean shines a light onto a world that’s completely alien to most of us, and you’re bound to come away from this one with a host of cool new facts in your arsenal.

Issues from the third volume of Creepshow comics started coming out this fall, and October’s release is appropriately Halloweeny. Issue #2 contains two stories — one about a Halloween sleepover that takes a grisly turn (by Eugenio Mira and Jorge Fornes), and another about a haunted building that might not be what it seems (by John Ridley and Stefano Raffaele).

It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it makes for a fun and campy quick read. Being an anthology series, you can drop into Creepshow at any point without being lost, so you can start with this, or go back and devour Volumes 1 and 2 to get caught up with the current schedule.