Excerpt from Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

001: THE BIOLOGISTS

Once, the story went, there had been biologists on the Forgotten Coast, in numbers so great that the ground shook in the aftermath of their passage. Eager men and women who without warning bestrode the terrain like conquerors, sent by the government and funded by money that came in the form of buried gold bars that could not decay or devalue like the money kept in banks. Which is why, the conspiracy theorists at the Village Bar claimed, the biologists had been so stooped and weighted down when they arrived. Their packs had been full not of supplies and food but of gold.

That the force or forces that had sent the biologists to the Forgotten Coast wanted the biologists to be ungoverned by barter, isolated, free of the sense of neighborly responsibility that had held the Forgotten Coast together for so long.

That the biologists had been complicit, aware of their role, which was important, Old Jim believed. They had to be complicit if the folks in the Village Bar were to keep telling the story. Because if they weren't complicit, telling the story meant the story would at some point peer back and condemn the teller.

In their initial explorations, the biologists, clad in their yellow gloves, carried out a series of ever more arcane rituals. They plucked clumps of native grasses from the mud flats with a finicky precision, tweezered scraps into vials. They shoved bits of bark mottled with lichen into tiny metal boxes. Jars small and large allowed them to sample strange aquatic species like crayfish and mudpuppies.

At night, they slept in space-age sleeping bags that looked at times like the vanguard of an alien invasion: shimmering silver cocoons against the dark green of tree islands and the golden wash of reeds and the drab gray-brown river mud pocked with the holes of fiddler crabs.

The decision to conduct an initial survey and then, later, bivouac inland had been made by someone higher up. Someone remote who thought a permanent location on the beach "would seem to flaunt," according to one biologist in their diary.

(The diary, retrieved, had been gone at by beetles and rot, and in the searing shades of green, the watermarks that seemed more like records of tidal patterns, it had the look of an object in a museum exhibit. Old Jim had run his hand over the roughness of that faux coastline more than once as he read the faded pencil marks, before he'd thought, almost quaintly, of contamination and put the journal back.)

None of the locals ever did get a straight answer about why the biologists had been sent, this much Old Jim knew from the files, because it had been ordered that no straight answer ever be given to "those people." But perhaps that didn't matter, either, for most of the locals had always seen the government as an invading hydra. The "slid-off" answer, as one local called it, only reaffirmed the long-held suspicion, the desire forever gestating in them: to be left alone, left to whatever state of dissolution and decay or, yes, peace they aspired to in that wild and beautiful place.

In the transcripts, Man Boy Slim—a rickety thin twenty-year-old local, with, at a cursory glance, a distinguished career at that time of stealing hubcaps and hunting deer out of season—made many claims about the biologists. For example, he claimed to have seen a biologist "leap into the air and catch a dragonfly with his teeth," so delicate this maneuver that the lithe biologist spit the insect unharmed into a jar, where it vibrated a confused blurred emerald, unsure of what had happened.

Already, almost from the start, the biologists were changing from something human in the eyes of the locals into something uncanny. One day, a local would be walking down a weed-strewn trail on the Forgotten Coast, glimpse a biologist from the corner of their eye, and not be sure of what they had seen.

Nothing that happened next changed people's opinions in its particulars, as far as Old Jim could tell.

002: THE CAVALRY

In addition to equipment and supplies, the biologists had brought a kind of burden with them to the Forgotten Coast, and it was with a sense of relief that they prepared to release that burden into the marshes before setting up a base camp.

Excerpted from Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2024 by Jeff VanderMeer. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.