Jeff VanderMeer will venture back into Area X with new Southern Reach book

VanderMeer announced the news on Bluesky today, where he gave a little more context to the book’s Publishers Marketplace announcement. Area X: The Southern Reach Files is aimed at “Area X completists” and follows “30 years of Southern Reach expeditions, reaching into the past and the future,” the announcement reads. In VanderMeer’s comments, he further clarified that the book will be anchored by the diary of Hargraves, a character introduced in Absolution. “The book roves across a variety of locations, incorporating the Seance & Science Brigade’s private tarot deck, Whitby’s survey of unexpected appearances at abandoned lots and swimming pools, declassified info on a certain topographical anomaly, and more,” he continued.

In a manner befitting of this cryptic, mysterious series, the book won’t take a typical novel form at all. “If you think of it almost like a deconstructed graphic novel, in a photo-realistic mode, that’s closest to the effect,” VanderMeer suggested of the full-color work. “It builds, has rising tension, and the images, many created for the book, are absolutely sick. This is going to be a gorgeous, mysterious, narrative-driven experience.” While the new release is clearly aimed at fans who already have a pretty deep knowledge of the goings-on inside the elusive Area X, the author also promises that it’s “in no way a kind of encyclopedia… It’s a dynamic, living hybrid that should terrify, delight, and immerse you in something very new and different.”

That’s pretty much exactly what the film adaptation of Annihilation did for audiences in 2018. The Alex Garland-directed project starred Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac in a thriller that “wages war on the nerves across multiple fronts,” as The A.V. Club wrote at the time. (We also revisited the film to mark the release of Garland’s Civil War last year.) If you want to catch up on the book series before the new release, you can also check out Features Editor Jen Lennon’s journey through complicated texts here.