Book reviews: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer | The Hotel by Daisy Johnson & more

Harrison’s earlier Viriconoium stories were a clear influence on Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris trilogy, and his new book Absolution is a chimeric fourth volume of the Southern Reach trilogy, following Annihilation (made into a decent film), Authority and Acceptance. Together they describe a kind of “ecopocalypse”, a territory which resists scientific investigation and slowly incorporates and transforms incursion.

“Area X” as it is called is eerily luxuriant, reminiscent of the Homeric lotos-eaters, whereas the shadowy government agency probing it, Control, is genuinely sinister. This book begins decades before Annihilation – and one of its key revelations was that interaction with the Area was far older than the explorers realised.

“Old Jim” is assigned to the Forgotten Coast, as it was then called, and paired with a rookie who has been told to tell him she is his missing daughter. Tagged alligators have been introduced into the biome to monitor their adjustments from captivity, a mysterious individual codenamed the Rogue was involved with the “Dead Town Disaster” and a cultish group called the Séance and Science Brigade (aka the Ouija Hicks) have taken an interest in the old lighthouse. (Readers of the previous books will realise the significance).

The links between the lighthouse, a kind of rending of space-time and the fungal menaces are very reminiscent of the “grey caps” and their mysterious skyscrapers in the previous trilogy – and much though I loved this, I would give my eye-teeth for a new Ambergris novel.

The horror is, ironically, unnatural in a book much concerned with ecology. A plague of rabbits is made even more eldritch by their change of diet. There is something simply wrong about rabbits eating fiddler crabs, and concentrating on the sound of their mastication makes things even more queasy. Absolution is no hackneyed “revenge of Gaia” and the repeated references to Schubert’s Winterreise chime with the “Irrlichts” and tantalising, foreboding glimpses. Words associated with conservation – invasive, alien, pollution – frame its haunting question: “what non-human could make music that felt like long distance home?” Life, to misquote Kafka, will out, but maybe not ours.

VanderMeer and his wife Ann, as anthologists and editors, have been instrumental in canonising what is now called “weird fiction”. Penguin are again attempting to boost the genre with five reprints in their Weird Fiction series. Fans of True Detective might be pleased to be able to read Robert W Chambers’ brilliantly odd The King In Yellow, and why Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries about the “occult detective” Dr John Silence are not better know is a case for, well, Dr John Silence.

Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! was a new one to me, and would be a good Christmas chiller, especially the misanthropic uncle’s catchphrase “what I want I get, and – what I get I keep!”

Also republished is William Hope Hodgson’s The House On The Borderland, a text probably better known to aficionados of the esoteric avant-garde. It is worth bearing it in mind if you pick up Daisy Johnson’s elegant The Hotel. Although she has been compared with Stephen King, it’s not an especially enlightening analogy – The Hotel is not a Fens version of The Shining. It belies its origins as a radio series, in that each of the 15 linked stories is about eight pages long, and is narrated by a different person in orbit of the place: guests, workers, cult film obsessives, urban explorers.

The back story is revealed a little too early and it’s a little too pat - unfinished business, false accusations of witchcraft. There are some admirable shivers, but anyone doing haunted houses is up against Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which is a modern masterpiece, and this doesn’t even quite reach the level of the Doctor Who episode The God Complex or the YouTube Backrooms phenomenon.

Finally, Mariana Enriquez’s collection of short stories, A Sunny Place For Shady People, is a revelation. The titular story is also about urban myths and hotels, and again, less is far more: there are no jump-scares or gross-outs.

“Julie” manages to be truly horrible and yet laced with a vicious sympathy in a tale about an unattractive girl’s ghost lovers. Indeed, the female body is often the subject and object of strange apprehension in these stories. Enriquez uses epigraphs from writers like Thomas Ligotti and Katherine Mansfield, and these are not falsely bedecking her work with association. They are wholly apposite, and she goes beyond her influences in a thrilling manner. The final story, “Black Eyes”, is more gruesome in the political context of South American poverty, but the line “I didn’t ask what he had seen” is a timely gesture to how much more horrible the unsaid can be.

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, Fourth Estate, £20; Penguin Weird Fiction series, all £9.99; The Hotel by Daisy Johnson, Jonathan Cape, £14.99; A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, Granta, £14.99