Every once in a while, a book series comes along that's so good you stay up reading it till 4 a.m. on a school night. One such series is Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, a thoroughly creepy (but delightful!) set of genre-blending novels that explores a mysterious and hostile tract of land known only as Area X. The first two books, Annihilation and Authority, left at least three Cosmopolitan.com staffers so terrified that they had to sleep with the lights on for several days. Acceptance, the third and final book in the trilogy (out today), wraps things up while still leaving readers with a few unsolved mysteries to ponder. In advance of the Acceptance release, Jeff talked about his inspiration for the whole series, his love for The Shining, and his upcoming anthology of feminist science fiction.

You've said that the idea for the first book came to you in a dream. Can you explain that a little more?

Basically, Annihilation kind of came out of intense dental surgery followed by bronchitis. I was in this state where I had to slow down completely and was actually fairly sick. In the middle of the night I had this dream that I was walking down into this tunnel that somehow I also thought was a tower, and spiraling down into it, I saw these words on the wall that were made of some living material, and I noticed after a while that they were getting fresher or brighter, more luminescent. This was fairly horrific because it was one of those dreams where you don't know you're dreaming and everything was very tactile. At a certain point, I knew that if I turned the corner [in the dream tunnel], this light I was seeing in front of me would reveal itself to be whatever was writing the words, and at that point, I woke up. I really think it's my writer's brain that kind of woke me up at that point and airlifted me out, because I knew that if I saw [the creature] — I mean in addition to it being fairly terrifying — I wasn't going to write the story. I woke up and immediately wrote down the dream and the words on the wall, fell back asleep, and then in the morning, I woke up and started writing the story with the biologist character in my head. I found that the words on the wall I used unchanged in the novel, which was kind of strange too.

How do you remember your dreams in such detail?

I tend to have fairly lucid dreams every once in a while. I'd also been kind of seeding the idea in my brain that I want to write about Florida and the wilderness of Florida, and I had been thinking about the Gulf oil spill [of 2010] quite a bit, which, at the time it happened, was this relentless spiral in all of our minds because it seemed like it would never end and it was going to destroy all the places that we knew and loved.

Jeff VanderMeer, as illustrated by the artist who drew the Southern Reach book covers. Eric Nyquist

Besides the landscapes around the Gulf Coast, did any particular films or writers inspire the Southern Reach trilogy?

I studied the movie The Shining and the documentary about The Shining [Room 237] quite a bit, because those conspiracy theories about what the movie's actually about are quite compelling. There are also quite a few interesting effects that Kubrick throws in there that could be seen as continuity errors but actually play off as really cool ideas if you can transfer them to fiction. Like there's a scene with a TV with no cord coming out of it, but the TV's playing, which you know is possible now but certainly wasn't back then. Little things like that that Kubrick threw in — it's like how can I transfer this so that it creates a sense of unease when you're reading a scene but you don't know exactly why something's off.

A lot of things that happen in the Southern Reach trilogy aren't on the surface scary — it's just Control walking around in an office building, or someone hanging out in swamp. How do you make such banal scenarios so creepy?

I'm tempted to say I don't know what you're talking about. I think these are really straightforward, non-creepy books! That's not true, but that would be funny, wouldn't it? I think some of that comes from the ambience of real life. Before I became a full-time writer, I worked in some fairly, I don't know if you'd call them backwater companies or what, but places where the people and the ambience is not that far off from what you'd find in Authority. I remember working late at certain places and going down corridors and being kind of freaked out just being there by myself and having this sense of something there. I don't mean like ghosts, but your reptile brain just kind of turns on. I do exploit that a bit. Even in The Shining, there are those scenes where you're just walking down these corridors, and it shouldn't be creepy, but there's something about it, some atmosphere that kind of gets to you.

The smell of the cleaning product in Authority is a great one too. If only they made scratch-and-sniff books.

[Laughs] I think a scratch-and-sniff version of the Southern Reach would be a terrible idea.

It's possible to read these books as kind of a parable for what might happen to us if we don't clean up our act, environmentally. Do you think something like Area X is in our future?

I think that having to think about our environment in a different way and our ecosystems in a different way is definitely in our future. Even if we develop the technologies to control our environment to the point where we can survive what's coming in terms of climate change, we really need to change our attitudes. It's not so much that I think something like this could happen as it was interesting for me to explore how characters might interact with this. I think in the second book, there's a section where the scientists are kind of divided because as long as human beings don't interact with Area X, everything seems to be fine, the wildlife seems to be fine, and the environment is actually recovering. Another parallel I was thinking of a little bit is Chernobyl, which is not that great for the animals either, but because it's become a no-go zone for human beings, it actually allowed a lot of wildlife populations to recover. There is this tension between what's good for the planet and how we fit into that that I wanted to explore.

One of the things that initially drew me to Annihilation was the fact that it's a sci-fi novel where all of the main characters are female. Was that just coincidence or did you consciously decide to make them all women?

I kind of had the sense that they were all women when I first wrote it, and then I kind of tested that by trying to change them, but by then I had already built backstories around all of them, even though you don't get all that on the page. I just left it that way. Then I had this idea that there was a reason why [the Southern Reach] kept changing the gender of the expeditions, because they were at their wit's end as to what variables would make a difference. I kind of liked the fact too, because you usually get a lot of expeditions in these books that are all men, or all men and one woman, so I thought it was an interesting thing to do.

The books have been optioned for a movie. Which director do you think could really nail the look of Area X?

That's really tough. A lot of my favorite directors are dead.

OK, you can pick a dead one for this scenario.

Maybe Kubrick could collaborate with somebody, because he's a little too cold style-wise for this. There's aspects of the way that David Fincher shoots movies that I like, but there's other things that I'm not sure about. The guy who did Gravity might do a really good job, but it's probably perilous for me to speculate given that they're going forward with whatever they're going forward with. I do know that I definitely would be really, really upset if they changed the expedition from all women.

Even after reading all three books, I still want to know: What's the deal with the Séance and Science Brigade?

Well, I'm actually writing some stories about them separately that may see the light of day at some point. That actually came from visiting a place in Miami called Coral Castle. This guy built this stone garden using all this kind of weird geometry. Physicists and psychics both go there to take readings, and that's where I got the idea, because when I visited, there was a set of physicists taking readings on one end and psychics on the other end, and that image just kind of stuck with me the whole time. I did like the idea, having read a lot of stuff about the CIA, about this organization that may itself be altruistic being kind of corrupted or infiltrated by some other entity that wants it to perform some other purpose and gives them cover.

What do you have planned next, now that you're done with the Southern Reach trilogy?

I'm starting work on another novel called Borne. It's kind of a weird combination of a Chekhov play in the round, with the equivalent of Godzilla and Mothra fighting in the background. It's got these intense, interpersonal relationships in this kind of post-collapse city, but also this huge psychotic floating bear. Just your normal kind of thing you find.

I also read that you and your wife are doing a feminist sci-fi anthology for next year?

Yeah, it's called Sisters of the Revolution. It covers feminist speculative fiction or science fiction from around the mid-'70s until now. It's just the opening salvo — it's about 250,000 words long and could easily have been twice that length. It's like the first volume of something that I hope will be a continuing series, maybe with other people as editors going forward. The weird thing about that is that going into the research for it, I realized that there's also a real need for feminist anthology that's not just science fiction but everything — that has all the science fiction mixed in with the mainstream literary stories — because there are a lot of communications between those authors. That may be a project down the line.

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Eliza Thompson senior entertainment editor I’m the senior entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan.com, which means my DVR is always 98 percent full.

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