Status Updates From Authority (Southern Reach #2)

Six seveeennn *drools like a Neanderthal*

The lighthouse as a beacon or a lure or ?

I like how weird and strange this book feels. I can totally see the Kafka comparisons. However, the writing isn't good enough and the barely-there plot just doesn't really sit right, almost like it should either be more pared down or more complex rather than conspiratorial. Being made uneasy and uncomfortable is cool, but I kind of want more from this supposed...trilogy/series/whatever.

Very little has actually happened so far. I like that the main character from the first book was made consistent in her musculature in this book, and the described scent of "rotting honey" (tho nonsensical since honey doesn't rot) was threaded cleverly into this book. But otherwise the story is moving sluggishly so far, and I'm a bit bored.

"But he recognized his bottled-up laughter for the onset of hysteria, and his cynicism for what it was: a defense mechanism so he wouldn’t have to think about any of it."

"He’d had a vision of the samples starting to dance behind that door, freed of the terrible limitations of the human gaze. 'Our banal, murderous imagination,' as the biologist had put it in a rare unguarded moment with the director before the twelfth expedition."

Sometimes I think: what is crappy literary writing except for stuffed metaphors? "He knew that quite a bit of the information peeking out at him from the beige folders came from lighthouse journals and police records—and that the inexplicable in it had to be teased out from the edges, pushed forward into the light like the last bit of toothpaste in the dehydrated tube curled up on the edge of the bathroom sink."