Authority - The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

After thirty years, the secret government agency known as the Southern Reach has been unable to solve the mysteries of Area X, a seemingly malevolent landscape wiped clean of human civilisation. Or is "pristine wilderness" a better description? Expedition after expedition has failed to come up with answers, often disastrously.

The Southern Reach, in the process, has become a backwater agency, forgotten and underfunded despite the urgency of its mission. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.