“In Control’s dream it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light.”

From Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach: Authority.

Control has been give the seemingly impossible task of bringing order to the Southern Reach after the previous director disappeared on the last expedition into the mysterious Area X.  He is met with nothing but confusion from the unexplainable “rituals” from the staff and resistance from the assistant director, Grace.  Raised partially by an absentee secret agency mother, Control has been groomed for this post for almost his entire life.  His first few days are spent meeting with department heads, interviewing the Biologist (the narrator from Annihilation), digging through paperwork/clues from the previous director, and reporting back to his handler (“The Voice”) over the phone.  More than anything, Control is shocked by the senseless and outdated methods that have run the Southern Reach for so many years.  The deeper Control gets into trying to figure out what is going on at the agency that is trying to understand/contain Area X, the more he feels that something is definitely not right, but he just cannot put his finger on it.

The books really struggles to get rolling, taking almost half the book to build up momentum. The main problem are unannounced flashbacks to situations from the narrator’s life that is supposed to make sense, but just leaves the reader confused for a few paragraphs until you realize it’s a flashback.  The clunky flashbacks do help to develop the main character, but the switched writing style from the first book takes a while to get used to.  The ending of this book is terrifying, more so than the first book, because of the unanswered questions it leaves with the reader.  Authority does leave the reader wanting to continue the story in the next/third book; it is just frustrating how long it takes the story to develop that page-turner quality.