Seven months to finish one book...
Area X fatigue, my night in jail + the nihilistic joy of 1980s teen horror
I've been thinking a lot about the distance between anticipation and disappointment that we face in works of art when we chase sequels and follow-ups to things we once loved. Like the masochism of an addict chasing a high with diminishing returns we revisit our favourite stories, even though we know objectively that lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place.
I’m P M Buchan, a former comic-book writer and lover of horror and dark art. I’ve written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and SCREAM: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement. I’ve collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, and written for clients including Lionsgate and Heavy Metal Magazine.
This week in IF YOU GO AWAY I wrestle with Jeff VanderMeer's latest Southern Reach novel, reflect on my night locked up in Cornwall's most notorious former prison, and revisit the deliriously unpredictable world of Christopher Pike's teen horror, all exercises in either chasing or avoiding the ghosts of previous experiences.
Absolution: A Southern Reach novel by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach series by Jeff VanderMeer, is one of the most powerful novels that I've ever read, packed with haunting imagery and a uniquely realised world that echoes the other stories but creates something individual and unreplicable. The two sequels that combined with the first to make the Southern Reach trilogy were at times infuriating and obtuse, at times rich with detail and fascinating in their own rights. As with almost every story I've ever enjoyed, I could live without the sequels and am unlikely to revisit them, but I'm not sorry to have read them and they absolutely do enrich the world that VanderMeer has created.
When I heard that VanderMeer was writing a fourth entry in the series, I preordered it and started it as soon as it was released, late October 2024. Released a decade after the original trilogy, Absolution attempts to be both prequel and sequel, offering three interconnected narratives that circle Area X's mysteries from new angles. That I'm writing about it now, seven months after release, is indicative of the struggles I've had engaging with Absolution, which offers a plethora of meandering, looping distractions that pull back the curtain on a world that was already weird and abstract enough for my tastes.
There is no denying that Jeff VanderMeer is a blisteringly talented author. I read his Borne last year, about a radioactive post-apocalyptic wasteland overseen by a Godzilla-sized science experiment of a savage bear, and loved that passionately also. So the man knows how to write and how to write well. In the case of Absolution, however, the ethereal geography of the Forgotten Coast and the attempts of the esoteric Central agency to interfere with and control the incursion of the unknowable Area X in the human world feel like they've repeatedly been demonstrated to be doomed to failure.
There are readers who love worldbuilding and pore over trivia about invented species and fauna, but I'm not one of them. Whilst Absolution offers hints and new perspectives on how and why Area X formed, physically and temporally, and revisits a number of characters from the original trilogy, the greatest problem that I had whilst reading it was with the pervasive feeling that nothing that happened to any of these characters mattered or could matter, because nobody in this world is ever allowed to achieve anything resembling a resolution to their narratives. Not so much that everyone is doomed, which is a theme that I adore in fiction, but that none of their actions can have consequence.
Absolution does have some haunting imagery and scenes, many involving rabbits fused with haunted cameras and time-loops that corrupt the viewer and the listener. There were some innovative, disturbing ideas, but these were rare moments of intrigue in what felt like vast, plodding sections where I had no hope that any characters would or could reach their destinations, or would even recognise those destinations if they arrived at them.
I understand the argument that Area X represents our helplessness before ecological collapse, that the characters' impotence mirrors humanity's powerlessness against climate catastrophe. But metaphor without momentum left me cold. I persevered to the end of Absolution and the final (of three) sections revisits the story of the first known survivor from the Southern Reach, looping back into events of the first novels and descending into a metaphysical nightmare. I enjoyed the madness, and would be remiss to not state explicitly that the third section reads like an extended exploration of the Hell dimension in the film Event Horizon, but I struggle to invest in stories where I either don't have a character who I like enough to root for or a story so compelling that I have to know what happens next.
In many ways, Absolution reads more like jazz than prose fiction, all improvisation and atmosphere, circling themes without resolution. Like experimental jazz, it demands you appreciate the journey rather than waiting for the destination, but I found myself longing for a melody to follow. It's more of a surrealist experiment forced into a literary structure. I'm sure that I'd be rewarded by repeated rereadings, just as I'm also sure that my life is too short to spend time doing that. I don’t demand a slavish focus on plot, or an abundance of character narrative arcs, but I’m here for the story, not just the vibe.
I'll continue to buy and read books by Jeff VanderMeer with optimism, but Absolution has convinced me not to explore any of the surreal spinoff Borne books, which sound equally more like poetry than story. If Absolution gripped you and I've completely missed the point, I'd love to hear your theories on why I should care what happened to Old Jim or ever endure his presence again. Sometimes a book can be both admirably ambitious and thoroughly exhausting. Absolution is both.
My night in jail
I finally got to spend a night in jail without having to be drunk and disorderly to get there. Bodmin Jail Hotel invited me to try their new Prisoner Experience, and after covering their scare mazes and paranormal events more times than I can count, I was ready to finally explore the converted prison.
The experience combines theatrical roleplay (ie Wardens reprimanding you for speaking out of turn), a jailhouse dinner served on metal trays in The Chapel, and late-night ghost hunting in the basement, which they called the most haunted area of the building. My suite was three former cells knocked together, complete with an enormous bathtub where Cornwall's most notorious inmates once languished.
What struck me most was how natural it all felt. This is exactly what visitors to a converted prison hotel want to experience. Every time I looked around the restaurant, I saw fellow guests in horror T-shirts and full sleeve tattoos. These were clearly my people.
I wrote about the full experience for Cornwall Live, including what it's like to sleep somewhere supposedly crawling with spirits (surprisingly peaceful).
Read about my night in Bodmin Jail.
Spellbound by Christopher Pike
“They found Karen Holly in the mountain stream, her skull crushed. There was only one witness to the tragedy, Karen's boyfriend, Jason Whitfield. He said a grizzly had killer her. But a lot of people didn't believe him. They thought Jason had murdered her in a fit of rage. And now weeks have passed, and Jason has another girlfriend, Cindy Jones. And there are the new kids in town. Joni Harper, the quiet English beauty that Cindy's brother, Alex, cannot get out of his mind. And Bala, the foreign exchange student from Africa, the grandson of a powerful shaman. Together they will return to the place where Karen was killed. Some will die. The others will come face to face with a horror beyond imagining.”
Growing up, no author wormed their way into my heart more deeply than the master of young adult horror, Christopher Pike, whose nihilism, unpredictability and penchant for gore and unhappy endings stood in stark contrast to so many of the other bland stories that were packaged for teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of my happiest memories were discovering Christopher Pike novels in our village library, including this one, Spellbound, which I revisited nearly 40 years after its initial release. Published in March 1988, it was Pike's fifth novel and marked his transition to Archway Books, where his supernatural horror began in earnest.
I've been rereading Pike's teen horror in no particular order, beginning with the Final Friends trilogy, followed by Fall Into Darkness, Whisper of Death, Scavenger Hunt (which is completely bonkers but I forgot to write about) and now this one, Spellbound. Seven novels in, and I feel like I'm beginning to peek behind the curtain into Pike's authorial style in a way that wasn't apparent to me when I was reading his books as a ten-year-old.
The shy, brilliant student who tutors his peers and has impeccable morals. The mysterious, quiet transfer student who could be a love interest or might be a monster. The classmate who breaks the natural order by either being a slob and great athlete, or an abrasive arsehole who people nonetheless find charismatic. Pike has a way of constructing his novels and a stable of archetypal characters who he revisits in different iterations and combinations.
Pike was cranking out these novels at breakneck speed. By 1988 he'd already published five books in three years, establishing the formula that would make him the king of teen horror. The slight page counts and brisk pace mean that a cast of nine core characters might be reduced to six by the midway point and three by the conclusion, making it easy for an adult reader to see what's being telegraphed and undermine the tension by predicting the outcome. That was what happened to me reading Spellbound again all these years later, tempered by what might have been dormant memories of the plot reawakening.
With a starting point very similar to Fall Into Darkness, circumstances conspire to send a group of horny teenagers hiking to a waterfall on a nearby forest mountain, which just happens to be the site where one of the teens, Jason, was accused of murdering his girlfriend weeks earlier. Things take a mystical twist pretty quickly, with the intervention of an overseas student from Africa, Bala, who just happens to be shaman in training. Pike used the same wilderness-death premise to explore vastly different themes, from realistic manipulation in Fall Into Darkness to supernatural horror in Spellbound, showcasing his range within the teen horror format.
In many ways, Spellbound is the best of Christopher Pike and the worst of Christopher Pike. The one black character in the novel is a magical shaman who represents the most cartoonish 1980s misrepresentation of an African possibly imaginable, but he's also one of the main love interests and is coveted and respected for his integrity by most of the white characters. This is typical Pike, cherry-picking magical ideas from around the world and trying to represent them in a well-meaning way that felt progressive in the context of other teen novels being published at the time, as well as being clumsy and ageing abominably. Pike's use of what would later be called the “Magical Negro” trope appears throughout his early work, a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt at diversity that reflects the limited cultural vocabulary of 1980s YA publishing.
What redeems Spellbound in the end is how batshit crazy it turns out to be, reminding me that the danger of Pike's writing is what enchanted me as a child reading it. There were no rules when you opened a book by Christopher Pike, no guarantee that your heroes would survive, no promise that the love interests would find happiness. You might be reading a realistic mystery as easily as an gonzo horror about ancient gods, visiting aliens or spontaneous human combustion, and you could never be sure until you got to the end.
Reading without safety guards is what I wanted out of life, in the same way that I want to sign a disclaimer when I arrive at a scare maze to give the actors permission to touch me. I want to dissolve the barrier between me and the experience, and that was Christopher Pike's gift, in much the same way that most television shows offer main characters a guaranteed number of appearances per series, then Game of Thrones blew that rule out of the water by killing off our heroes en masse.
I need to cleanse my palette before returning to that world, but next on the list is Weekend if anybody wants to read along with me and compare notes.
IF I WENT AWAY
Regular readers of IF YOU GO AWAY may have noticed that I spent a good chunk of 2025 keeping the newsletter to a regular weekly schedule, which drastically lapsed throughout May.
My inbox has become a wasteland of weekly newsletters, filled by other writers who are also dutifully following the Substack orthodoxy that consistent publishing is the only way to reach new readers. The irony isn't lost on me that I've been part of this problem, forcing myself to keep to a weekly schedule that brings in new readers and drives away people who’ve been following my work for years.
For that reason, expect to receive IF YOU GO AWAY on a more relaxed schedule, driven by what I have to say rather than what day of the week it is. Please let me know in the comments or reply to this email if you have any thoughts or preferences, but know that I value each and every person who reads my work and that every share is worth its weight in gold, so the last thing I want to do is become another chore. That said, expect to be bombarded with emails in the run-up to Halloween when I start driving to scare events in every spare moment.
Speaking of subscribers – If you’re a regular reader and want to share your work in IF YOU GO AWAY, get in touch and let me know what you have in mind.