Authority

Authority pulls back a bit from Annihilation to provide a bigger picture and answer some questions. Not too many questions, though. Annihilation was laser focused on an unreliable narrator with incomplete and occasionally incorrect information. Authority adds more characters and shifts its focus to the organization that's been organizing the expeditions that were detailed in the first book. Albeit, it's also told from the perspective of an outsider, the new director who has only just arrived on the scene and is tasked with making sense of the mess that's been left behind in the wake of the last expedition.

Like the first book, this one kept me off balance, which was definitely intentional. But it occasionally got frustrating. The book plays fast and loose with time, slipping into flashbacks and jumping forward only to loop back with almost no warning. It helps adds to the general feeling of paranoia, but it also felt a little cheap and obvious at times, and it definitely frustrated me more often than not.

For each question this book answers, it adds a new mystery or two. The picture starts to get painted in, only for it to be revealed that it's a whole lot bigger than previously suggested. The history of Area X is much longer than we knew, and there were many more than twelve expeditions into it. Not that the data has been anything like conclusive or even illuminating really.

At the end of the day, this is clearly a middle book, meant to entice and tease the sweeping finale. I enjoyed it somewhat less than the first one, but enough to be looking forward to the final one.