‘I woke up and had the whole idea in my head’: returning to Area X with Jeff VanderMeer

After a decade away, Jeff VanderMeer is heading back into Area X. In 2014, the author released all three parts of the Southern Reach trilogy over the span of just a few months, and the series became a breakout hit; the first was even adapted into a Hollywood film from director Alex Garland. Starting with Annihilation and culminating with Acceptance, the books told the story of an abandoned coastal area that had become reclaimed — and forever changed — by a mysterious phenomenon known as Area X and the secret agency attempting to understand and contain it.

The trilogy solidified VanderMeer’s particular style of surreal sci-fi and environmental activism, and in the intervening years, he’s explored similar themes in novels like Borne, Dead Astronauts, and Hummingbird Salamander. But there were questions that always lingered after Acceptance. And while he had been thinking about a potential new Southern Reach book since 2017, it wasn’t until 2023 that all of the pieces fell into place.

That book would turn into Absolution, a prequel that’s out on October 22nd. It’s split into three parts and largely follows two characters from the original trilogy: Old Jim, a resident of the abandoned village in Area X, and Lowry, sole survivor of the first expedition into the phenomenon. The book is haunting, strange, and disturbingly funny (just wait until you meet the carnivorous rabbits).

Ahead of Absolution’s release, I had the chance to talk to VanderMeer about why he had to come back to the Southern Reach saga and how it all came together so quickly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote Absolution in six months. How does that compare to your typical writing experience?

I’ve started writing novels later and later, which lets me think about it more because I’m more relaxed about it now. I’ve realized, the longer I think about something, the more fully formed it is on the page when I write it. I’d been thinking about Absolution since 2017, and then lightning struck on July 31st of last year. I woke up and had the whole idea in my head: the characters; the interplay of the three sections; how they were going to be written. And I just started writing. I didn’t stop until December 31st. It was like having inspiration after inspiration. I wrote morning, noon, and night — which is unusual for me. I usually write in the mornings.

I woke up, in a sense, on December 31st, and I had a final draft: 150,000 words. That was pretty intense. It was exhausting. I kind of put the rest of my life on hold to do it. It was incredibly satisfying. I’d hunkered down for covid and hadn’t written a novel since Hummingbird Salamander in late 2020, so I think I was really ready to write something.

Did you take a break after that at least?

I basically just did nothing. My brain kind of shut down for a couple of weeks. And then I told my editor, “Well, this novel is done. I know it’s kind of unexpected. Do you want to try to put it out next year?” And he was like, “Yeah!” That’s something I’ve always been really good about: unusual publishing schedules. We found ways to move up the preproduction stuff so it could get done without cutting any quality corners.

With the Southern Reach trilogy coming out in such quick succession, you didn’t have to worry much about the kinds of expectations that come with following up a big hit. Here, you have 10 years’ worth of demand. How do you deal with that?

Honestly, it’s been liberating. So many people have read this series, which is basically about ambiguity and the unknowability of the universe, and completed the story in their heads and really engaged with their imaginations. I had a lot of freedom. I didn’t think about the pressure of that. I just felt that they’ve given me permission to go for it. And even when I posted excerpts, the readers who responded were so thoughtful, so positive, and so caring about my creativity, to the point of not wanting to say something that might mess with what I was writing. They were just excited there was going to be more. It was this unique situation where it definitely could’ve been pressure-filled, but in fact, it was actually the opposite.

How do you know when the moment is right to take one of those gestating ideas and fully turn it into a novel?

Here, it was useful that I had this really abrupt and amazing… I don’t even really know how to describe it. In writing workshops, they want you to answer questions about craft. And sometimes, it’s literally, “I had a dream and I ran with it.” How do you give advice like that? And how do you talk about it? In terms of the structure of the piece, the fact that Old Jim was a character throughout in some guise or mode really helped because there’s this mystery involving him and Central that, as I’m writing, I started writing all three parts at once. And I keep going back and forth.

A lot of Absolution is meant to make readers feel disoriented. I wonder how you think about balancing that feeling with still being comprehensible.

One thing that readers have taught me is that they reread these books. So, for example, I saw a lot of reevaluations of Authority and people saying that they saw the humor in it on a second read as they got ready for Absolution. Here, first of all, I’m trusting the reader, and secondly, every word counts: every sentence, every paragraph. There’s not a single word in there that isn’t intentional. The answers to a lot of things are right there in plain sight. The disorientation is that, in creating a sense of claustrophobia or unease because of what’s happening, some of that may not come through on the first reading. But I don’t actually think these books are that surreal or weird — especially this one, which is more of a fun, weird point of view. But that’s up to readers.

Now that you’ve written it, do you feel that this is really the end of the series? Are you satisfied with where you ended up?

I think so. I was grappling at one point with how I would tell the story after Acceptance. The solution in my subconscious was Absolution, which is something that’s both a prequel and, sneakily, a sequel and also contiguous with the events in the first three books. That is also what sparked my imagination. This way of doing something that is visceral and lives in the body, which is always very important to me, and that expands the story without answering every mystery, which I think would also be a mistake for a series that’s grappling with the unknowable.

As for something in the future, it would have to be similarly clothed in the tactile. You look at a series like Dune, which I love parts of, but as you get to the later books, they become much more abstract and less grounded in specific detail. And while that creates some interesting effects, it also means that a series can become airless. I never want it to become that. So, for right now, I do believe this is the last of the Southern Reach.

I read an interview after Hummingbird Salamander came out where you said you still had two novels you wanted to write. Is that still where you’re at?

It’s funny because I’ll always mention something, and then it won’t turn out with the same chronology. What happened with Hummingbird Salamander is that there were several other books that I started, like Borne, where I started it one year and then finished it five years later. I realize there’s something missing in my own experience of life that I need to get from somewhere else or that I need to live my life for a few years and I get it. Or there’s some other question that my subconscious is grappling with. I think those books are probably still on the table, and they’re probably next.

Again, it’s kind of liberating. You write something longhand in a journal, and you get maybe 30,000–40,000 words of it, and you don’t feel any compulsion to finish it at the time. And then you can revisit it and reimagine it when you want to, but you still have all of this material to work with. I like that approach a lot, having a lot of things half-finished, because I don’t get writer’s block. I just go with the thing that’s most inspiring, and that tends to work.

That sounds so stressful.

An attribute of Angela Carter’s that I admired is that she always went for it. I think that’s really important. It’s really important to always go for it and not be worried about failure. Honestly, if one of these novels, somehow before it got typed up, I lost it or it burned or something, I’d just write something else. I’ve learned to let go of worrying about that kind of stuff, and that’s been very useful in terms of having confidence in writing.