Black Gate

Authority is the second novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which has a very aggressive 2014 publishing schedule. I recently reviewed the first volume, Annihilation. Though I loved the first book, I also found it incredibly frustrating in that it stacked up a lot of mysteries providing little to no answers. As I had hoped, the second volume, Authority, begins to shed some light on some of these mysteries.

The Southern Reach Trilogy centers upon a government agency (i.e. the Southern Reach) that is responsible for investigating, and containing, Area X, an expanse of (presumably American) southern coastland that has been “captured” (in some strange way) by some sort of unexplained anomaly. Whereas the first volume Annihilation centered upon a seemingly doomed expedition that went into Area X, the second volume Authority centers upon the Southern Reach agency itself outside of Area X, out in the real world (presumably our world).

Our main viewpoint character is John Rodriguez, a fairly young bureaucrat and ex-spy, who is the new director of the Southern Reach. Rodriquez goes by the code name “Control,” which is ironic given that he seems to have so little of it throughout the book. We slowly learn that Control has a somewhat tainted vocational track record and that his new appointment to the Southern Reach is perhaps his last chance to redeem himself. But this government job is like no other that Control has had before and he may very well be in too deep for his own good.

Authority seems to pick up where the last book left off. The Southern Reach has recently picked up three survivors from the last mission — which in itself is puzzling since Annihilation seemed to end with possibly only one survivor. Control attempts to piece together the disparate threads of this last mission as well as various other endeavors that the Southern Reach has also been attempting. The revelations we get — what few we do get — are far from satisfying, much less reassuring, for Control.

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Know what I’ve always wanted to see in a past-lives-intrude-on-present story? A protagonist who finds out about her past lives and, instead of taking that as an immediate mandate to robot out the dubious decisions of her previous selves, tries something new. Were you married to someone in a past life? Okay, but that doesn’t mean you have to marry him again. I mean, what if he was a thug or a dud? If a story’s world dictates that people are supposed to improve themselves, right their wrongs, grow as spirits as they progress through their incarnations, I would like to see reincarnation used for something other than an idiot plot, a transparent cheat on the part of so many authors. If some old decision is going to get remade, it should have to earn the remaking. For pete’s sake, somebody write me a reincarnated skeptic!

And now I have what I’ve always wanted.

If Kelly Ann Jacobson’s sequels to the slender YA volume Dreamweaver Road can keep up what’s working here, we may get to read a story that happens to include reincarnation without being shackled by it. Maybe that’s one of the things that can happen now, in this weird new age when writers like Chabon and Lethem have forced the mainstream to make its peace with genre writing enough so that an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins can write fantasy openly. The MFA polish also seems to have resulted in a little more music in the sentences than YA novels generally have, which is all to the good.

Our heroine Zoey is a sixteen-year-old farm girl when she comes into her powers. She’s been picking those powers up gradually over many lifetimes, mostly by making mistakes that get her killed. At the book’s opening, she remembers none of those other lives and the mistake she’s looking to set right is one she made just a year ago.

She thinks her quest is to find her best friend, who was stolen away by an unknown enemy that seems to have guessed wrong about which kid had the magic. It’s bigger than that. Much bigger.

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This book is the strangest thing I’ve ever read.

Within the first hundred pages, you’re treated to a seven foot man made of meat, wig monsters from another dimension, a man with the ability to communicate through a bratwurst, a dude taken over by small glowing alien things with a penchant for punching people in the balls, a hamburger that screams as you eat it, and a weirdo with a pseudo-Jamaican accent who can tell everything about you at just a glance.

And it never lets up from there; Wong somehow manages to produce a steady stream of balls-to-the-wall crazy throughout. It’s delirious, insane, and stark raving mad. If this book were a person, he would charge into the street and head-butt the first person he sees, before flying away with David Bowie and a dragon. This book is John Dies at the End by David Wong.

John Dies at the End follows the somewhat delirious exploits of David and his best friend, John, who’s never given a last name. This is where anyone else would talk about the plot, but it’s the kind of thing you need to actually read yourself to really appreciate. But I’m going to try anyway, just for you.

Dave and John are kind of like Ghostbusters, except with more swearing and fewer crappy sequels. They deal with paranormal occurrences in their town and its surrounding area, and in doing so have attracted something of a cult following, which arouses the interest of a reporter, Arnie, who interviews Dave about his experiences and the events leading up to him becoming a kind of paranormal detective guy. The story Dave tells Arnie is the story he tells us.

In short, he and John stumble across a drug called “soy sauce,” which heightens the user’s senses to an extreme level and gives them a window into another plane of existence. From here, the two embark on an adventure of Moorcockian proportions: uncovering a dark conspiracy, going to other planes, alternate dimensions, fighting aliens with a flamethrower made from a squirt gun, and meeting a supreme being called Korrok.

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