Control is not his title, Control is a nickname given to him by his grandfather in a moment of mockery or affection, he's not sure which, but when he takes command of the Southern Reach facility he tells his subordinates to address him by it, and it becomes a name and a title and an ironic signifier. In the first Southern Reach volume all the members of the expedition were referred to only by their professional title. So this seems significant. Control is taking charge of a facility in mired in disastrous failure and ramshackle decline. Established to examine the sudden appearance of Area X thirty years before, it has gained a lot of data and lost a lot of lives and accumulated many mysteries but answered none, and now the previous Director has vanished having placed herself incognito on the most recent expedition and Control is there to take control. Or is he on an expedition into the heart of a strange, corrupted, decaying institutional landscape that will transform him or destroy him?

This is a kind of spy novel, about a technocratic intelligence agency spying on something incomprehensible and alien, something that spies back with its own assets and agents. Control must spy on both as he is opposed and undermined by his deputy director and finds an array of vague, eccentric scientists burned out by years of futile study. But this is a strange, haunted place, with walls behind doors covered in writing and strange things in locked drawers and mountains of intelligence but no clear answers.

Superbly written, spooky and strange with a sense of impending catastrophe and reality out of joint, this isn't as incisive and lean as Annihilation, but it sets the scene for the third and final volume which I can't wait to get my hands on.