This book feels like a hum that is in the back of your head and that gets louder every time you turn the page. Kind of unnerving and you have the feeling it will implode soon enough but then it just stops. ‘Huh’, you might think. ‘Where is the rest of it?’ The hum will not start again but you are probably too tired to ask more questions about it, so you put the book aside and let Area X be where it is and not is. That being said, I think I enjoyed the third part of the Southern Reach trilogy on my second read much more than before. It is better than the second book, but not better than the first part. I can’t stand Control and everything he does, but the chapters about the Lighthouse Keeper and of course the Director, who is my favourite character, are good, intriguing and fascinating. There is also one scene with Whitby and the mouse, that is a tiny snapshot but refuses to let me go. It is so intimate and weird, strangely fitting for the feeling of the third instalment of the Southern Reach trilogy. I think you need to go along with it – the strangeness of Area X and the unanswered questions. Fill out the blanks by yourself, make your own assumptions and enjoy a well written story about an anomaly that cannot be explained.