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I have to say right up front that this is going to be one of my shortest reviews and it is not favorable. Unfortunately, far from it. It is the lowest rated book that I’ve read this year, and since I am not crazy about criticizing an author’s work, I am going to keep things short and brief.

“Absolution�� is promoted as a prequel to Jeff Vandermeer’s very strange and unique Southern Reach trilogy. However, it really is three related novellas that are absolutely disappointing. I enjoyed the previous three books that were very strange, suspenseful, and full of government conspiracies and mysterious X-Files mysteries. That spirit carries into this one, but that is about all that I can say from a positive perspective.

For me, this was an incredibly wordy 437-page book in which nothing really happens of significance. Nothing new is revealed or added to the mythology of Area X. Each of the stories just dragged on with exposition after exposition. The first 60 pages or so, I was literally hurting my head from all of the bouncing around that Vandermeer was doing in his short essay-oriented chapters. I kept hoping and feeling like things were going to pick up, but they never did. Everything was vague, unclear, obtuse, and several times just wasn’t coherent or made enough sense. And then the last 100 pages included the “F�� work like 20 �� 30 times per page, and in every flipping sentence on several pages. That was way too excessive and distracting.

Overall, a novel should not be this hard and painful to read, leaving your so mired in the minutiae that you completely lost track of why you were reading it in the first place. You just want to move on to something else and are left confused as to whether the editorial team was somehow lost in Area X during their work on this novel��