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This forgotten coast prequel is not strictly necessary. But if, like me, you loved the twisted wierd-fiction spycraft and inscrutible bureaucratic intrigue of Control and Authority just as much as the shock-to-the-system wierdness of Annihilation—then you’re going to want to pick this one up, too.

Absolution is almost a collection of linked novellas—but it really is a novel. It comes together in the end with deliciously incoherent coherence. I found part one, Deadtown, pleasantly creeping; part two, The False Daughter, wildly absorbing. But part three, The First and the Last, is interminable. I couldn’t stand the narrator. Drug-addled stream-of-consciousness is one thing, but did he have to be an asshole to boot? I ended up reading half the stories in Naomi Novik’s delightful new collection while the last chapters of Absolution taunted me—how badly I wanted to know what would happen; how little I wanted to read the sentences that would tell me... But once I forced myself to sit down and finish the thing, exactly those stylistic choices that had been driving me up the wall paid off in a way I wasn’t expecting. Extraordinary to watch prose so tiresome turn sharp and dreaming on a dime.

What lingers: Old Jim, in the village bar, on the forgotten coast, playing Schubert's Winterreise on an old upright piano and trying to hang on to a world slipping away. Any old Winterreise won't do, if you want to capture the feeling of it. I've listened to many, but only one is right for Absolution: Roland Neuwirth's weary folk-singer version in Wiener dialect. Neuwirth captures the half-whispered pain of these songs, the other-worldliness, the winter chill on a summer’s day. That blend of the uncanny and familiar that the German romantics made into all-encompassing Weltanschauung—and that Jeff VanderMeer turns inside out, so you can see the guts splayed out, half-digested contents of stomach, slippery limp nerve stem behind lolling eyeball, ghostly flicker from broken (rabbit) camera.