Joseph K. comes to the castle

30 years Area X - and the veil of mystery is despite the best efforts of the intelligence agency Southern Reach not aired a millimeter. The resistiveness which, by its nature, we do not have the slightest idea: you can explore what will not be researched, which denied any reaction?

The door to the Southern Reach is pushed open a crack, but I feel like John Rodriguez aka Control, which takes over after the supposed death of the previous director of the SR, the psychologist from the first volume, the management: we see much and know a lot about little to understand. Let us turn from distraught and leaving the facility, then we arrive at the Area X and admit that it still incomprehensible, uncanny approaching as the government agency. So strange is everything that I think just as the reader from me soon. I'm on an expedition in Vander Meers second volume of his trilogy. The reader of this second expedition are many, but in the paranoid topography they lose soon out of sight and get upset, changed and back out alone; it was made to me as a biologist (Did not I tell you I was not the biologist)? Or are we readers do the rabbits, which are driven for experimental reasons, through the gate in the area X?

Vander Meers very slowly evolving horror goes deeper than, say, the Lovecraft and is raffinerter because the fear of the inability founded to really grasp alien. Yet it manages Vandermeer to produce an idea of ​​the extent of the strangeness of the reader.
The sense of unreality is the constant companion; tracking delusional world of intelligence, the supernatural Area X, the biologist who is hopefully not the biologist, surveys which rotate in a circle, The Voice and thousands of disturbing details that might be significant or not; Control is trying his best to enlighten the events surrounding the 12th expedition to solve the mystery of Area X, but there are opponents and ultimately Control is in the world of agents hardly alien than in the Southern Reach. And what was just him, son of a woman who lived in a byzantine realm of secrets, enable them to understand Area X, to solve the mystery?

The mood is still gloomy, paranoid and more mysterious than in ANNIHILATION in AUTHORITY straight line through the widest possible waiver of plot elements and a slow narrative pace.

But then it comes thick.

--- Mild spoiler ---
Control is tampered with (post) hypnotic commands and conditioned.
Were there always the plan that controls will be placed in the SR? "He'd been on on expedition sent into the Southern Reach and just like the expeditions into Area X not told the truth (...) what else had he done that he might never know?"
If John has already been conditioned as a child to become Control? And who is behind The Voice? Gives the word "limit" a misconception as to the nature of Area X?

Control is increasingly aware that he can know neither the backgrounds of his order still the essence of Area X:
"He Was not sure he knew the difference anymore between what He Was Meant to find and what he'd dug up on his own. A tower Could become a pit. An expedition member might even return thirty years later in the form of a voice whispering strange nothings in his ear. "
After him the incredible nightmarish reality catches up; here's an example:
"Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again.
But there were no doors where there had always been before doors. Only wall.
And the wall which soft and breathing under the touch of his hand.
Hey what screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath th sea.

The last 100 pages of this second part contribute duly to the fact that part of the exciting-AUTHORITY scariest I've read in a long time. An extremely insistent, intense novel that simply does not where ANNIHILATION has ceased but new attaches with new people and new topics, and finally the action further promotes consistently.