Sinister spycraft, weird horror in Absolution

In a remote ruin called Dead Town, in a place called the Forgotten Coast, in an unnamed backwater of the US, a group of biologists set up camp to study the landscape.

- Olivia Ho

ABSOLUTION By Jeff VanderMeer Science-fiction/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Paperback/528 pages/ $24.98

The landscape, however, resists understanding. For instance, white rabbits start appearing out of nowhere, some wearing small cameras around their necks. They are inexplicably carnivorous. The biologists first observe them eating fiddler crabs, crunching through the carapaces while the crabs are still alive. Then, they start eating one another.

It has been 10 years since American author Jeff VanderMeer published his extraordinary Southern Reach trilogy -- Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance, all released in 2014 -- in which a strange zone called Area X spreads unfathomably and uncontrollably through the American wilderness, transforming everything it touches in uncanny, alien ways.

A secretive government agency, the Southern Reach, keeps sending expeditions into Area X, all of which fail disastrously -- the expedition members kill one another or themselves, develop aggressive cancers upon their return and die, or other variations on catastrophe.