The second book of the Southern Reach trilogy! Go read the first one.

This one is much less traditionally horror. (Though the moments it has are quite effective. I particularly hope someone makes a short movie out of the first expedition snippets.) When I began reading it, I was wondering if it’d actually make more sense to read this one first, since there’s a lot about the character trying to figure out what happened in the previous book so you already know and it’s harder to be anxious about. As things went on, though, that dramatic irony expanded to include that precious horror staple, the slow disaster that the main character is unaware of.

Also, after Dresden, it’s just so nice to have a main character who is a nice, pleasant person.

Most of the book chugs along like a mystery. He’s trying to deal with the interpersonal dynamics of this crumbling research institute full of failure and work out what’s going on and not get fired, and the characterization is good enough that this makes for a perfectly entertaining story, then out of nowhere, in the middle of a character’s dialogue, the wrong word used for something, the exact same wrong word as last book. And there’s things in the middle, where the reader doesn’t know exactly what it means but, knowing the sort of things we saw last book, can guess. The white rabbits hopping about that everyone’s blithely assuming are descended from the half that escaped being shoved into the barrier so many years ago. The rotten honey smell. “Better late then never.”

But it’s all nestled amid such ordinary things that it’s easy to be swept along. I didn’t feel the constant tension of the last book…which made the whiplash ending so effective, as all the pieces fall into place.

As I said, I liked the characterization a lot. This is simply a pleasant book despite the very unpleasant horror looming throughout.

Our main character is something I’ve honestly never seen before. You know the Strong Female Characters with Traditionally Masculine Jobs but secretly they’re full of daddy issues and just doing it to try to be closer to their distant fathers who were better than them in every way? This time, he went into the military to be like his mom, who was always physically and emotionally distant, who he worshiped but has never managed to live up to. And we don’t even get page after page about how shockingly different this makes his family dynamic. It’s just there, informing his life and decisions.

The main character has just been appointed director and the assistant director says outright to his face that she’ll be doing everything in her power to make his time there hell. She’s still loyal to the previous director. Some interloper pawing through the real director’s paperwork and asking about the words scrawled behind the door and why there’s a  plant growing out of a mouse in a locked desk drawer isn’t something she’s going to put up with. He never takes any of this abuse as a cue to go on a hateful rant or try to humiliate her or really do much of anything – he tries to engage a little in the power struggles along the order of not telling her things he’s going to do or not explaining his reasoning in the hopes it’ll get her to stop messing with him, and that’s about it.

The book’s a Lovecraftian thing, in that it’s about dealing with things we can’t understand and that may be outright hazardous to even try to understand, but it’s sort of nega-Lovecraft. His mom being a high-level official isn’t a problem. The assistant director was involved with a woman…but this isn’t noteworthy, and if she was actually in a relationship with the director it seems they’d have been open about it, so that’s not the secret shocking horrible revelation underlying her behavior. We learn that they were trying all male and all female expedition groups to see if that did anything (and in the process, that prior to the eleventh expedition set, the groups were quite mixed), and he idly wonders about if people who don’t identify as either might be a relevant variable.  Types of people are not the horror in this book. They are individually dealt with sympathetically and broadly treated as different sorts of normal.

“Then, in that case, John Rodriguez, I have no comment on your recommendations, except to say that I will begin to implement them in as excruciatingly slow a fashion as possible. You should begin to see a few of them–like ‘buy a new floor cleaner,’ in place by next quarter. Possibly. Maybe.”