Jeff VanderMeer has explained that the idea for his widely celebrated Southern Reach series came to him in a dream. He was walking down the steps of a tower with words glowing on the wall. There was a creature – ‘something’ – waiting at the bottom. He is convinced that his subconscious woke him up before he could glimpse it: ‘If I’d seen whatever it was I wouldn’t have wanted to write the story.’ When the first three volumes appeared in 2014, fans were hungry for resolution. It was VanderMeer’s decision to keep resolution at bay that made the books classics. And despite promises that the surprise fourth volume, Absolution, would provide the ‘final word’ in the series, VanderMeer has completed it while maintaining a sense of mystery.

Like all great science fiction, the Southern Reach series combines the energy of a thriller with the richness of myth. In Annihilation, the first novel, four nameless women are sent to survey a contaminated exclusion zone on an unidentified stretch of coastland. It emerges that Area X, as the zone is called, is a simulation – a virtual-reality rendering of the space that was previously there. The second instalment, Authority, is closer to a conventional spy novel, focusing on a secret agency called Southern Reach that is trying to monitor Area X. The third instalment, Acceptance, undoes the conventions on which such genres rely, swapping linear narrative for a series of impressionistic fragments.

In Absolution, we seem to be back on solid ground. In the opening section, set twenty years before the creation of Area X, a team of biologists is tasked with introducing a population of alligators into the ecosystem of the Forgotten Coast; the second section centres on a hitherto minor