Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Absolution, frustrates. It pokes and prods. It needles. It absolves nothing. If anything, Absolution intensifies the mysteries of Area X and the Southern Reach, as if the series’ preceding novels (to which this is a prequel) were a nest of coiled intestines, not a trilogy with a beginning, middle, and end. Like one of his own operatives, a spook from Central, VanderMeer won’t betray the secrets of Area X but presents them in encrypted documents, arcane rituals, and hypnotic suggestions. So many problems, so many mysteries, without answers. Wouldn’t it be nice, the character Lowry muses, if there were an “off switch” to Area X, “As if the mish exped would saunter into Area X and find a huge red fucking button, like a giant toadstool, sans caterpillar, and all jump up and down on it until the fucking thing depressed and Area X would just go away. And they’d come back to endless thankful reach-arounds and ticker-tape parades.” VanderMeer isn’t a band leader; he isn’t going to conclude the events of Area X with a parade. No final revelation. No fireworks. “There shall be a fire that knows your name,” but it won’t illuminate so much as immolate.

Absolution is the kind of prequel that shouldn’t be read first. It depends too much on allusions to the other three novels: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance (all 2014). This latest novel, then, is a prequel-sequel, inserting itself into the voids in the other three novels, a retrospective following-up, a hunting-down of loose threads, if not a tying of them into neat bows. The three sections composing Absolution are in chronological sequence—“Twenty Years Before Area X”; “Eighteen Months Before Area X”; “One Year After the Border Came Down”—but the sequence turns out to be a ruse, a prank played on the unwary reader. It’s not that the dates are meaningless but that lurking beneath the appearance of chronological sequence is the vortex: an inward spiral—like the steps descending into “the topographical anomaly” (the “Tower,” the “Tunnel”)—that goes deeper and deeper without hitting bottom, that evokes meaning without settling interpretation. It’s a screwy loop in which time splinters, the past haunting the present, the future crawling through both. Readers of the trilogy shouldn’t be too surprised that Absolution is both prequel and sequel, prelude and aftermath. It involves literal, as well as figurative, time travel, though nothing as straightforward as a time machine.

Here’s the simple version of events with minimal spoilers: Part 1, “Dead Town”: A washed-up spy, Old Jim, reads a set of transcripts recounting pre-Area X adventures on the Forgotten Coast (“Once, the story went, there had been biologists on the Forgotten Coast, in numbers so great that the ground shook in the aftermath of their passage. Eager men and women who without warning bestrode the terrain like conquerors”). Part 2, “The False Daughter”: Old Jim’s daughter, Cass, disappears (“The Ghosting, Old Jim called it, how he lost his daughter, and only him the one losing her, and he figured he would never know the why and that’s why she’d done it that way”); Central sends Jim to the Forgotten Coast to get right, tasking him to surveil the strange happenings that will become the prelude to Area X. Part 3, “The First and the Last”: The first expedition of the Southern Reach, narrated from the perspective of Lowry, a parody of toxic masculinity, a military man with the veneer of an anthropologist (“‘We’re like the colonists in days of yore,’ someone said, and even Lowry winced. Fucking shitheads on wooden ships finding the wrong fucking place and spearing wild pigs on their arrival and eating them off spears el dente like fucking snacks”); everything goes horribly wrong, of course.

We already read about the first official expedition in Authority, the second book of the Southern Reach series. We witnessed Control watching the infamous video of the expedition; we gleaned fragmentary images of doppelgangers, an entity watching from above, a wall of flesh. It might therefore be tempting to diagram the Southern Reach novels as a circle: The publication of Absolution would seem to mark the closing of the loop, a return to the beginning of things, as if the seeds of the future were buried in the soil of Area X’s history. But a circle is too neat a figure for Area X. The Southern Reach novels warn us that borders, whether institutional or cognitive, don’t hold, that reality leaks over edges, that material objects are too porous to store away in boxes or barrels. Humans transform into alligators and owls. Bodies replicate, doubling and doubling again. A lighthouse radiates a brightness that is otherworldly or extradimensional. Central isn’t a center; it’s a loose collection of warring factions and competing agendas. This is the horror of Area X—the horror not of monsters (though Absolution has its stable of monstrous beings: the Rogue and the Tyrant, the sociopath Henry Kage, Commander Thistle in his black mask) but of reality’s instability. Call it an ontological horror, the terror at the heart of things. It’s the Lovecraftian element in VanderMeer, except that VanderMeer doesn’t project the otherness of Area X outwards onto racist and xenophobic caricatures. VanderMeer invites the alien in; he embraces it without ever imagining that he can tame it.

Not a circle, then, but a spiral: The Southern Reach novels turn in a gyre; characters, motifs, and events turn and return, but the repetition differs, and in such a way as to call into question the identity of what’s come before. Take the first expedition, for example. Which first expedition? Lowry’s first expedition, with its experts armed with rifles? Or the chicken’s expedition? “Because they’d put a small, primitive camera on the chicken and the chicken went through the hole [into Area X]—they knew it was possible for a person to go through.” (What happened to the chicken? “That’s the really great, interesting part—it didn’t resemble a chicken at all any more, but at least the camera was intact.”) Or does the first expedition precede Area X? Is it the experiments of the Séance and Science Brigade, tinkering with lighthouse lenses and testing out telepathy underwater, perhaps bringing about Area X in the process?

Numbering and sequencing are efforts to assert order. They are attempts to exert control over chaos, to plug leaks in borders. Already in Authority, however, VanderMeer laid bare the artifice of exercises in chronological order:

The Southern Reach called the last expedition the twelfth, but Control had counted the rings, and it was actually the thirty-eighth iteration, including six ‘eleventh’ expeditions. … After the true fifth expedition, the Southern Reach had gotten stuck like a jammed CD, with nearly the same repetitions. Expedition 5 became X.5.A, followed by X.5.B and X.5.C, all the way to an X.5.G.

All it takes is a decimal point to plunge sequence into bad infinity, a proliferation of doubles, like the Biologist/Ghostbird of Annihilation or the Director/Psychologist/Gloria. Absolution is another exercise in fatal replication, in conjuring plurality out of identity. Old Jim’s daughter will reappear, but not as herself.

The last section of Absolution is “The First and the Last.” The phrasing is almost Biblical, as if VanderMeer were gesturing to Genesis and Revelations, creation and apocalypse. But it’s another prank, the conclusion to a long con, a send-up of the human desire to control the environment. The section is filled with fucks (“Fuck? Fuckfuckfuck”), as the drug-addled, puffed-up Lowry goes gung-ho on Area X. I have to admit to finding this section the least enjoyable. The puerile humor gets old quickly, making me miss the solemn wilderness of Annihilation, the bureaucratic machinations of Authority, the surreal cosmic flights of Acceptance.

But Lowry and his fucks serve their function well. They indicate, with fitting bombast, that conquest is impossible: there will be no turning off Area X, no taming its strangeness. The mission to Area X is over as soon as they enter it, one expedition member lost in transit, another crushed by his own protective suit, so that “even Lowry realized he was beginning to spiral, not twenty minutes out of the cave mouth or symbolic vagina or whatever the psych-witches back home would no doubt assign it without the imagination to just think of it as a conduit between states of being.” Neither the first, nor the last, then, but rather the attrition in between—an ongoing process of disintegration that is also a rebirth, a mutation, a strange becoming.

Becoming what? Certainly, not a conqueror. Lowry tries to eat his way out of Area X, tries to consume its fleshy walls in heroic defiance. “So he bit down hard and Area X tasted like sour juice, like fresh hail sucked on before it became water, with some acid rain in there and grace notes of fucking merlot for all he could guess. Just gnawing and he was going to fucking eat Area X before it ate him.” But just as there is no proper first expedition, there is no end to Area X, which sends the dead—doubles of the dead, doubles of doubles—after the expedition, like an army defending the strange wilderness from fantasies of control. “Lowry did not like to recall how in the shitty horrifying gap of the killing and resurrection of the winky-dinkys, how their own words had come out funny, disjointed, as if the murder of their shit-gobby doubles had scarred their minds, as if they, not their doubles, had created a crack in the logic of the world.”

Area X consumes the characters that enter into it. It ingests the stories woven around its borders. It feeds on readers, on the desire for narrative satisfaction. I wouldn’t say Absolution has a message—it eats messages and shits out horrors—but it does have something to say. At one point in the novel, VanderMeer introduces cameras that aren’t cameras, attached to rabbits that act nothing like rabbits. A study of the cameras produced by Central’s R & D division is short on conclusions, limited to spurious analogies. But Central isn’t after a true encounter with the “foreign entity” that is Area X; it wants to make use of Area X, to plunder it for new technology: “But it was also clear from R&D that although they could replicate by mimicry the properties of the object, they did not understand the object’s initial purpose, coming from a purely extractive point of view.” The Southern Reach series has been described by critics as climate fiction, Anthropocene fiction, ecohorror, and the New Weird. It’s all of those things. However, at its core, in the vortex that churns where its center should be, Absolution offers up a truth against extraction, against conquest: There is no getting out of Area X, no possibility of stealing away with some final interpretation; no extraction from the wilderness, no reducing it to a resource or a tool. Area X is our planet; it holds us in its strange embrace and it is impossible to escape.