Annihilation

This has to be the creepiest novel I’ve read for a long time, I was really impressed with it. It also oddly reminded me of a short story I wrote about ten years ago, about a similar spatial encroachment of the uncanny. ‘Annihiliation’ is set in Area X, a secluded wilderness into which various expeditions have been sent to try and determine what is wrong with it. The latest iteration includes an unnamed biologist, our narrator. She reminded me of the calm-minded narrators of Victorian adventure stories, who set down their thoughts systematically even when confronted with unnamed horrors. This matter-of-fact tone definitely added to the tension, which was effectively sustained throughout. There were several extremely powerful and show more shocking moments, which rather reinforced to me that the worst horrors aren't supernatural but human. Perhaps my favourite form of scary writing deals with the ways places warp people; this is a great example. Being so unsettled by this first volume in the Southern Reach trilogy, I definitely plan to read the other two. It’s also worth noting that the hardback editions are beautifully designed and look very appealing. show less

I made the mistake of seeing the movie before reading this. The film is all crazy monsters chasing the people and cheap scares. The book is a quiet, eerie exploration of Area X. Scientists are sent into the strange space where other teams of explorers have lost their lives or come back changed. It’s a suspense-driven deep delve into what makes people human. I love the biologist’s passion for nature. She’s not comfortable with other people, but is at ease interpreting the world around her. Can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

A book about self-knowledge, wrapped in a dreamy, poetic science fiction horror story. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I like *at all*, but the writing is so good, the concept is executed so well... bravo. One weakness is that early on, everything is doubted. If you doubt the narrator, doubt the background, doubt the people who sent them—no one has names, borders do not have physical reality— you start to doubt the reality of the book, everything is a dream— yes, this folds in well with what the book is trying to do—but when you doubt all of it, it’s hard for a scene or a surprise to matter. Fortunately, things get established and the whiteness becomes a fog over a fascinating landscape.

This is the first fiction I read by Jeff VanderMeer; I had read and enjoyed his writer's manual Booklife, and when I saw this book as the i09 book club choice earlier this year I figured it was worth a look. I'm glad I did.

In some ways, this book is a slight throwback. It's told entirely from inside the mind of the narrator, a biologist discovering a mysterious area along with a handful of other women chosen for their backgrounds and their skills. It's mostly narration, like books from good old-time adventure writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard. Those stories tended to read like a newspaper account sometimes, but Annihilation reaches out and engages you right off the bat.

I highly recommend this novel for its show more depiction of a woman of science with attachment issues striving to understand how the place she explores is changing her, and questioning the nature of her mission and the people behind it. show less

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer is the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, but it can be read as a standalone. It has also been adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman, which will be released at the end of this month. The Southern Reach, a government agency, studies Area X, a mysterious zone of unfettered wilderness that suddenly appeared decades ago. Since its manifestation, the agency has sent out numerous expeditions only for the teams to either never return or to come back as fundamentally changed people. The first book is narrated by a member of the twelfth expedition, a team composed of four women: the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor, and the psychologist.

The first chapter begins with the biologist, our show more narrator, reflecting on the first day of the expedition. Her detached descriptions of the individual members of the team, as well as the standardized process that brought them here, sets the tone for the rest of the book. Her understated reactions to the bizarre environment around her also provide a sense of how reserved she is in comparison to the rest of the women. She is curious about Area X, but its strangeness does not frighten her. VanderMeer utilizes her scientific mind to create a setting that is easy to visualize, yet difficult to comprehend.

The entire book is the biologist’s journal, although it reads as a highly literate one. There are no dates, and it stays on topic for the most part, minus a few flashbacks to her past work experience and her relationship with her recently deceased husband, a member of the eleventh expedition. The plot is more of a journey of the mind than a tangible series of events that lead to a satisfying conclusion. The mind is very esoteric, and so is this book. While I occasionally preferred the sections where characters interacted with each other, as opposed to the biologist’s examinations of her environment, there is a decent balance between the two. That being said, this is a highly atmospheric book, so if you don’t like pages of description, you probably won’t enjoy it.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is how Area X affects the people and things that interact with it. In order to subvert some of the negative interactions discovered on past expeditions, the Southern Reach sets strict rules, most notably that expedition members must never know each other’s real names: “Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.” They are also not permitted to bring modern technology with them due to unforeseen reactions on the first expedition. VanderMeer leaves the reasoning for most of these rules up to interpretation, which is frustrating, but that’s the point. Area X also changes people, which is interesting to see carried out. The biologist, as detached as she seems, is not immune after all.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is a glimpse into an area with a mind of its own from the perspective of someone immersed in fact over emotion. It’s a unique book because it’s highly introspective, yet the narrator’s observations are so clinical that everything that she experiences feels removed, which disorients the reader. The book also teaches you to enjoy the journey, not just the destination, because while some answers to the mysteries of Area X are provided, many are left up to speculation. show less

Like much of VanderMeer's work, there is a good bit of weird in this book. But, the weird serves at the behest of a greater calling and that's to create a chillingly familiar environment that teems at the edges with danger and tension. As he's done before, VanderMeer gives us an unreliable narrator delivering a first-person perspective that vacillates between the personal, subjective view and the objective, scientific exploration of the increasingly fraught Area X into which she's been sent. We feel at once a great sense of wonder at what happens to these characters but a frustrating sense of limitation and lack of will that the narrator necessitates. Ultimately, this tale is a part of a longer trilogy so it serves ably in that show more capacity. I am struck that the novel seems to be as much about the nature of artistic endeavor as it is about any science fiction or supernatural goings-on. There is some wonderfully lyrical writing about the natural world here that enthralls even if the fuzziness of plot points doesn't. You should be in it for the immersive experience of it's enveloping, almost cloying setting and not for the whodunit plot that underpins the novel. show less

3.5/5

Annihilation is a tricky book to contain within the confines of a review. Honestly, even now I'm not sure how I feel about it exactly. Nevertheless, I do know a few things. First, VanderMeer creates an excellent tone throughout the book. It's dream-like, tense, mysterious, wondrous. I was effortless receptive to these moods, particularly because of the writing, which was beautiful and even melodic at times.

I particularly enjoyed how weird this book was. Nothing is as it seems, questions are left hanging with no concrete answers. The flora and fauna of Area X defy human logic, and are deeply imaginative. This is made especially obvious through our protagonist, the biologist, who purposefully unreliable, so I never really knew what show more was either a lie, a bending of the truth, or actually true. She is also mysterious in her own ways, just like the environment. Through her, we experience a lot of self-reflection and contemplation, which is at odds with the fantastical nature of everything else. There's also some exploration of identity, and what it means to be. Not only is the ecology of Area X being altered by the creature in the tower, but some people are replaced by doppelgangers of themselves, and seemingly every person on the expedition is subject to hypnosis.

It's a delicious little nugget of weird science fiction that's over in a flash, which left me with all sorts of theories about the truth behind everything. I think I preferred the beginning of the book when Area X was still an absolute mystery in every sense, and found myself slowly losing interest over time. I also really enjoyed the dynamic between the expedition members, so it was disappointed that became less of a focus as the story progressed. show less