I haven't been made to feel this anxious and disturbed by fiction in a hot minute! ( )

...meh... ( )

2.5* really. This was not a good choice to read as an audiobook; the language was too poetic and intricate. I had to slow it down to .75x speed.

Jump scares don't work in text, and I don't mind body horror so much in text either, so it was perfect for me. I do not think I'd like the movie. The character portrait was good! Even though people being unhappy in bad marriages is one of my major dislikes, the remove we get from most of their conflicts and the way the Biologist and Husband are coming towards understanding and loving each other better over the course of the book made it work for me.

I'm a sucker for both earth biology and alien biology, so I expected to really enjoy those parts, but they fell a little flat for me. I don't think VanderMeer completely understands scientific awe, though I can see him reaching for it. The Biologist jumping to conclusions about how the ecosystem of the Tower works as a way for the author to infodump is one of the ways he punctures it, and ultimately falls short. It's narratively convenient to have only one biologist talking, but it makes it harder to do the amount of science the plot requires. ( )

To quote one of my favourite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, ‘What a crock of shit’.

I don’t understand. How does a work like this get into print? How does it even get made into this - an arty hardback priced at £10? (Thankfully I picked it up at a charity shop) Where is the quality control? Is this the new pulp fiction? Or, once an author has made a name for themselves, do publishers just rub their hands at the prospect of guaranteed sales and throw the critical process of judgement whether the work is good enough out the window?

To go back to Vonnegut, he once talked about an author blooming - a certain novel being the peak of their powers; saying, embodying, signifying everything they’ve got to say in the best way they are able to. And what after? Are they spent? Are their future books regurgitations of ideas? Can they actually say anything more about life without significantly changing their status quo and having new experiences? It makes me think about Murakami, are his newest novels as good or have I just read too many?

This book made me want my life back; made me seriously question my aim to finish books despite not liking them. What is the point? A question I also level at the writer and the work - what was the point? The plot was incredibly basic - as if it was the story of a child (or an author struggling for ideas) and the writing lacked skill and authenticity. It was painfully apparent that this was a guy trying to write about things he didn’t implicitly understand; words just cobbled together like an amateur, unconvincing and jarring.

Anyway, sorry to be a Debby Downer on Mr VandeMeer but I’m just a little flabbergasted that this made the shelves of national bookstores, no less. It’s the first of a trilogy but someone would have to pay me a hell of a lot of money to finish the other two - life is too short for bad literature! I hope it is a long time before something as terrible as this gets through my stringent book choosing criteria and onto my bookshelves, because if for nothing I need time to recover and rejoice once more in good writing! #annihilated ( )

What a wonderful short read. I do kind of wish it were longer…..maybe. There are so many layers to this intellectually built story. Each element was interesting and important to the growth. There could have been some tangents with the other characters as I think this could have just made the overall experience just as eerie and dreadful, but I guess if not and having been surgically to the point worked out fine. ( )