This series is simultaneously becoming weirder and starting to make more sense. While the events are becoming more bizarre, they are all being subtly tied together with undertones in the story. It strikes me as the kind of book that literature students will write shelves of research papers on in the future. This volume focuses more on the aging beaurocracy that is the Southern Reach. John Rodriguez (Control) has been sent in to further investigate the operations within the agency to determine why there has been so little progress in understanding Area X. He does find an organization with a lost focus, but he also finds some truly strange things going on, a strangeness that had already been hinted at in Annihilation. 
 Like Annihilation this is a deeply psychological book, focused more on the inner workings of people and how that affects their interactions and effectiveness. It is also deeply introspective in regards to the main character, looking into what drives him and how he has gotten to be who he is now. The heavy emphasis on the term terroir leads me to believe that all of this backstory and reflection ties into the overall plot of the series and some secret to Area X, but I don't fully see the connection yet.