I read this in under two sittings, which for me is rare, and the whole time I had this specific dread sitting in my chest that I couldn’t fully account for, because on the surface not that much happens. Four unnamed women, a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, go into Area X on a research expedition, and Area X does something to them, and that’s most of the plot. What makes it work isn’t incident, it’s how VanderMeer builds an atmosphere so thick and so specific that you start distrusting your own read on every sentence the biologist narrates, the same way she starts distrusting hers.

The tower, or the tunnel depending which the biologist calls it in a given chapter, and the words written down its inside wall in something that might be fungal growth and might be language, is the image that’s stayed lodged in me longest. VanderMeer withholds almost everything you’d normally expect an explanation for, what Area X actually is, why the border exists, what happened to every previous expedition, and I know that’s exactly the thing that loses some readers, the sense that any explanation offered would only shrink the dread rather than resolve it satisfyingly. I’m firmly in the camp that thinks withholding was the right call. I don’t want Area X explained. I want to keep not knowing.

The biologist herself is doing a lot of quiet, cold work under the surface too, someone whose entire emotional register runs through her relationship to nonhuman life rather than to other people, and by the last third that emotional distance stops reading as a character flaw and starts reading as the most honest response to what she’s walking through. It’s rural and eerie in a way that reminded me more of a slow building fever dream than of a haunted house, no jump scares, no monster reveal you can point to and say there, that’s the threat. Just an accumulating wrongness that gets under your skin exactly where a louder book wouldn’t reach.