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Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Series, 1) Paperback – February 4, 2014
A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
NOW AVAILBLE IN A SPECIAL NEW TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers―they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding―but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFSG Originals
- Publication dateFebruary 4, 2014
- Dimensions5 x 0.55 x 7.45 inches
- ISBN-100374104093
- ISBN-13978-0374104092
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
From Booklist
Review
“I'm loving The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Creepy and fascinating.” ―Stephen King
“VanderMeer's dreamy narrative, shot through with echoes of Lovecraft, Orwell, and Kafka, is compulsively readable.” ―Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly
“Chilling.” ―Julie Bosman, New York Times
“VanderMeer masterfully conjures up an atmosphere of both metaphysical dread and visceral tension . . . Annihilation is a novel in which facts are undermined and doubt instilled at almost every turn. It's about science as a way of not only thinking but feeling, rather than science as a means of becoming certain about the world. . . . Ingenious.” ―Laura Miller, Salon
“A clear triumph for Vandermeer . . . a compelling, elegant, and existential story . . . The solitary voice of its post-humanist narrator is both deeply flawed and deeply trustworthy―a difficult and excellent balance in a novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark.” ―Lydia Millet, LA Times
“A book about an intelligent, deadly fungus makes for an enthralling read―trust us.” ―Tara Wanda Merrigan, GQ
“[An] altogether fantastic book . . . Annihilation is a book meant for gulping--for going in head-first and not coming up for air until you hit the back cover.” ―Jason Sheehan, NPR Books
“Successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out.” ―Sara Sklaroff, The Washington Post
“If J.J. Abrams-style by-the-numbers stories of shadowy organizations and science magic have let you down one too many times, then Annihilation will be more like a revelation. VanderMeer peels back the skin of the everyday, and gives you a glimpse of a world where science really is stretching the bounds of our knowledge―sometimes to the point where we can't ever be the same . . . [Annihilation] will make you believe in the power of science mysteries again.” ―Annalee Nevitz, io9
“Fans of the Lost TV series . . . this one is for you.” ―Molly Driscoll, Christian Science Monitor
“What frightens you? According to many psychologists, our most widely shared phobia is the fear of falling. Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation taps into that bottomless terror . . . VanderMeer ups the book's eeriness quotient with the smoothest of skill, the subtlest of grace. His prose makes the horrific beautiful.” ―Nisi Shawl, Seattle Times
“Much of the flora and fauna seem familiar, but that's what's so fascinating about the carnage that VanderMeer sets loose. He has created a science fiction story about a world much like our own.” ―John Domini, Miami Herald
“Annihilation feels akin to isolated sci-fi terrors of Alien . . . teases and terrifies and fascinates.” ―Kevin Nguyen, Grantland
“The plot moves quickly and has all the fantastic elements you'd ever want--biological contaminants, peculiar creatures, mysterious deaths--but it's the novel's unbearable dread that lingers with me days after I've finished it.” ―Justin Alvarez, The Paris Review
“It's been a long time since a book filled me with this kind of palpable, wondrous disquiet, a feeling that started on the first page and that I'm not sure I've yet shaken.” ―Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
“A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and a claustrophobic dread that linger long afterward. I loved it.” ―Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
“One of those books where it all comes together--the story and the prose and the ideas, all braided into a triple helix that gives rise to something vibrant and alive. Something that grows, word-by-word, into powerful, tangled vines that creep into your mind and take hold of it. Annihilation is brilliant and atmospheric, a novel that has the force of myth.” ―Charles Yu, author of How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe
“In much of Jeff VanderMeer's work, a kind of radiance lies beating beneath the surface of the words. Here in Annihilation, it shines through with warm blazing incandescence. This is one of a grand writer's finest and most dazzling books.” ―Peter Straub, author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl
“A dazzling book . . . haunted and haunting.” ―Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
“The great thing about Annihilation is the strange, elusive, and paranoid world that it creates . . . I can't wait for the next one.” ―Brian Evenson, author of Last Days
“This swift surreal suspense novel reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world. The reader will want to stay trapped with the Biologist to find the answers to Area X's mysteries.” ―Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy
“After their high-risk expedition disintegrates, it's every scientist for herself in this wonderfully creepy blend of horror and science fiction . . . Speculative fiction at its most transfixing.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A gripping fantasy thriller, Annihilation is thoroughly suspenseful. In a manner similar to H. G. Wells's in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), VanderMeer weaves together an otherworldly tale of the supernatural and the half-human. Delightfully, this page-turner is the first in a trilogy.” ―Heather Paulson, ALA Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Annihilation
A Novel
By Jeff VanderMeerFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 Jeff VanderMeerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-10409-2
01: INITIATION
The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.
There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions. The psychologist, who was older than the rest of us, served as the expedition’s leader. She had put us all under hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm. It took four days of hard hiking after crossing the border to reach the coast.
Our mission was simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp.
The expedition could last days, months, or even years, depending on various stimuli and conditions. We had supplies with us for six months, and another two years’ worth of supplies had already been stored at the base camp. We had also been assured that it was safe to live off the land if necessary. All of our foodstuffs were smoked or canned or in packets. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to “a safe place.” We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours, I had grown so used to it that I hadn’t looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches and compasses.
When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. We would rebuild the sheds later, once we were sure that Area X had not affected us. The members of the last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in “premature dissolution of expeditions,” as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place.
We also needed to acclimate ourselves to the environment. In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still, these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.
Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. This occurred on our fourth day after reaching base camp, by which time we had almost gotten our bearings. We did not expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the water-stained, pine-dust-smeared documents our predecessors had left behind. But there it was, surrounded by a fringe of scrub grass, half-hidden by fallen moss off to the left of the trail: a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. Nothing had been etched into or written on its surface that could in any way reveal its purpose or the identity of its makers. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.
At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.
“This is impossible,” said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us that soon we’d have to use our flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I’d have been perfectly happy doing it in the dark.
“And yet there it is,” I said. “Unless we are having a mass hallucination.”
“The architectural model is hard to identify,” the anthropologist said. “The materials are ambiguous, indicating local origin but not necessarily local construction. Without going inside, we will not know if it is primitive or modern, or something in between. I’m not sure I would want to guess at how old it is, either.”
We had no way to inform our superiors about this discovery. One rule for an expedition into Area X was that we were to attempt no outside contact, for fear of some irrevocable contamination. We also took little with us that matched our current level of technology. We had no cell or satellite phones, no computers, no camcorders, no complex measuring instruments except for those strange black boxes hanging from our belts. Our cameras required a makeshift darkroom. The absence of cell phones in particular made the real world seem very far away to the others, but I had always preferred to live without them. For weapons, we had knives, a locked container of antique handguns, and one assault rifle, this last a reluctant concession to current security standards.
It was expected simply that we would keep a record, like this one, in a journal, like this one: lightweight but nearly indestructible, with waterproof paper, a flexible black-and-white cover, and the blue horizontal lines for writing and the red line to the left to mark the margin. These journals would either return with us or be recovered by the next expedition. We had been cautioned to provide maximum context, so that anyone ignorant of Area X could understand our accounts. We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
“I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist interjected before we had discussed the tower much further. “Are you excited, too?” She had not asked us that particular question before. During training, she had tended to ask questions more like “How calm do you think you might be in an emergency?” Back then, I had felt as if she were a bad actor, playing a role. Now it seemed even more apparent, as if being our leader somehow made her nervous.
“It is definitely exciting … and unexpected,” I said, trying not to mock her and failing, a little. I was surprised to feel a sense of growing unease, mostly because in my imagination, my dreams, this discovery would have been among the more banal. In my head, before we had crossed the border, I had seen so many things: vast cities, peculiar animals, and, once, during a period of illness, an enormous monster that rose from the waves to bear down on our camp.
The surveyor, meanwhile, just shrugged and would not answer the psychologist’s question. The anthropologist nodded as if she agreed with me. The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us.
I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered, but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two. Besides, we were always strongly discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and “anything personal should be left behind.” Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.
* * *
Originally our expedition had numbered five and included a linguist. To reach the border, we each had to enter a separate bright white room with a door at the far end and a single metal chair in the corner. The chair had holes along the sides for straps; the implications of this raised a prickle of alarm, but by then I was set in my determination to reach Area X. The facility that housed these rooms was under the control of the Southern Reach, the clandestine government agency that dealt with all matters connected to Area X.
There we waited while innumerable readings were taken and various blasts of air, some cool, some hot, pressed down on us from vents in the ceiling. At some point, the psychologist visited each of us, although I do not remember what was said. Then we exited through the far door into a central staging area, with double doors at the end of a long hallway. The psychologist greeted us there, but the linguist never reappeared.
“She had second thoughts,” the psychologist told us, meeting our questions with a firm gaze. “She decided to stay behind.” This came as a small shock, but there was also relief that it had not been someone else. Of all of our skill sets, linguist seemed at the time most expendable.
After a moment, the psychologist said, “Now, clear your minds.” This meant she would begin the process of hypnotizing us so we could cross the border. She would then put herself under a kind of self-hypnosis. It had been explained that we would need to cross the border with precautions to protect against our minds tricking us. Apparently hallucinations were common. At least, this was what they told us. I no longer can be sure it was the truth. The actual nature of the border had been withheld from us for security reasons; we knew only that it was invisible to the naked eye.
So when I “woke up” with the others, it was in full gear, including heavy hiking boots, with the weight of forty-pound backpacks and a multitude of additional supplies hanging from our belts. All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee, while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was the least startling reentry I could manage.”
The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been deemed an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining. And I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally. For example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the psychologist’s lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still floundering and apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread her expression; it might have been pained or self-pitying.
We were on a dirt trail strewn with pebbles, dead leaves, and pine needles damp to the touch. Velvet ants and tiny emerald beetles crawled over them. The tall pines, with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds conjured lines between them. The air was so fresh it buffeted the lungs and we strained to breathe for a few seconds, mostly from surprise. Then, after marking our location with a piece of red cloth tied to a tree, we began to walk forward, into the unknown. If the psychologist somehow became incapacitated and could not lead us across at the end of our mission, we had been told to return to await “extraction.” No one ever explained what form “extraction” might take, but the implication was that our superiors could observe the extraction point from afar, even though it was inside the border.
We had been told not to look back upon arrival, but I snuck a glance anyway, while the psychologist’s attention was elsewhere. I don’t know quite what I saw. It was hazy, indistinct, and already far behind us—perhaps a gate, perhaps a trick of the eye. Just a sudden impression of a fizzing block of light, fast fading.
* * *
The reasons I had volunteered were very separate from my qualifications for the expedition. I believe I qualified because I specialized in transitional environments, and this particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a complexity of ecosystems. In few other places could you still find habitat where, within the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed by the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. If you walked along the beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look out to see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat.
I understood why no one lived in Area X now, that it was pristine because of that reason, but I kept un-remembering it. I had decided instead to make believe that it was simply a protected wildlife refuge, and we were hikers who happened to be scientists. This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here, what was still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of the evidence as we encountered it. Besides, for my part it hardly mattered what lies I told myself because my existence back in the world had become at least as empty as Area X. With nothing left to anchor me, I needed to be here. As for the others, I don’t know what they told themselves, and I didn’t want to know, but I believe they all at least pretended to some level of curiosity. Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.
That night we talked about the tower, although the other three insisted on calling it a tunnel. The responsibility for the thrust of our investigations resided with each individual, the psychologist’s authority describing a wider circle around these decisions. Part of the current rationale for sending the expeditions lay in giving each member some autonomy to decide, which helped to increase “the possibility of significant variation.”
This vague protocol existed in the context of our separate skill sets. For example, although we had all received basic weapons and survival training, the surveyor had far more medical and firearms experience than the rest of us. The anthropologist had once been an architect; indeed, she had years ago survived a fire in a building she had designed, the only really personal thing I had found out about her. As for the psychologist, we knew the least about her, but I think we all believed she came from some kind of management background.
The discussion of the tower was, in a way, our first opportunity to test the limits of disagreement and of compromise.
“I don’t think we should focus on the tunnel,” the anthropologist said. “We should explore farther first, and we should come back to it with whatever data we gather from our other investigations—including of the lighthouse.”
How predictable, and yet perhaps prescient, for the anthropologist to try to substitute a safer, more comfortable option. Although the idea of mapping seemed perfunctory or repetitive to me, I could not deny the existence of the tower, of which there was no suggestion on any map.
Then the surveyor spoke. “In this case I feel that we should rule out the tunnel as something invasive or threatening. Before we explore farther. It’s like an enemy at our backs otherwise, if we press forward.” She had come to us from the military, and I could see already the value of that experience. I had thought a surveyor would always side with the idea of further exploration, so this opinion carried weight.
“I’m impatient to explore the habitats here,” I said. “But in a sense, given that it is not noted on any map, the ‘tunnel’ … or tower … seems important. It is either a deliberate exclusion from our maps and thus known … and that is a message of sorts … or it is something new that wasn’t here when the last expedition arrived.”
The surveyor gave me a look of thanks for the support, but my position had nothing to do with helping her. Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.
The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked, “Does anyone yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave?” It was a legitimate question, but jarring nonetheless.
All three of us shook our heads.
“What about you?” the surveyor asked the psychologist. “What is your opinion?”
The psychologist grinned, which seemed odd. But she must have known any one of us might have been tasked with observing her own reactions to stimuli. Perhaps the idea that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen, rather than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her. “I must admit to feeling a great deal of unease at the moment. But I am unsure whether it is because of the effect of the overall environment or the presence of the tunnel. Personally, I would like to rule out the tunnel.”
Tower.
“Three to one, then,” the anthropologist said, clearly relieved that the decision had been made for her.
The surveyor just shrugged.
Perhaps I’d been wrong about curiosity. The surveyor didn’t seem curious about anything.
“Bored?” I asked.
“Eager to get on with it,” she said, to the group, as if I’d asked the question for all of us.
We were in the communal tent for our talk. It had become dark by then and there came soon after the strange mournful call in the night that we knew must have natural causes but created a little shiver regardless. As if that was the signal to disband, we went back to our own quarters to be alone with our thoughts. I lay awake in my tent for a while trying to turn the tower into a tunnel, or even a shaft, but with no success. Instead, my mind kept returning to a question: What lies hidden at its base?
* * *
During our hike from the border to the base camp near the coast, we had experienced almost nothing out of the ordinary. The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight, their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us. As a group, we felt almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training and preparation. While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.
The day before we arrived at the camp, this mood was briefly shattered by the appearance of an enormous wild boar some distance ahead of us on the trail. It was so far from us that even with our binoculars we could barely identify it at first. But despite poor eyesight, wild pigs have prodigious powers of smell, and it began charging us from one hundred yards away. Thundering down the trail toward us … yet we still had time to think about what we might do, had drawn our long knives, and in the surveyor’s case her assault rifle. Bullets would probably stop a seven-hundred-pound pig, or perhaps not. We did not feel confident taking our attention from the boar to untie the container of handguns from our gear and open its triple locks.
There was no time for the psychologist to prepare any hypnotic suggestion designed to keep us focused and in control; in fact, all she could offer was “Don’t get close to it! Don’t let it touch you!” while the boar continued to charge. The anthropologist was giggling a bit out of nervousness and the absurdity of experiencing an emergency situation that was taking so long to develop. Only the surveyor had taken direct action: She had dropped to one knee to get a better shot; our orders included the helpful directive to “kill only if you are under threat of being killed.”
I was continuing to watch through the binoculars, and as the boar came closer, its face became stranger and stranger. Its features were somehow contorted, as if the beast was dealing with an extreme of inner torment. Nothing about its muzzle or broad, long face looked at all extraordinary, and yet I had the startling impression of some presence in the way its gaze seemed turned inward and its head willfully pulled to the left as if there were an invisible bridle. A kind of electricity sparked in its eyes that I could not credit as real. I thought instead it must be a by-product of my now slightly shaky hand on the binoculars.
Whatever was consuming the boar also soon consumed its desire to charge. It veered abruptly leftward, with what I can only describe as a great cry of anguish, into the underbrush. By the time we reached that spot, the boar was gone, leaving behind a thoroughly thrashed trail.
For several hours, my thoughts turned inward toward explanations for what I had seen: parasites and other hitchhikers of a neurological nature. I was searching for entirely rational biological theories. Then, after a time, the boar faded into the backdrop like all else that we had passed on our way from the border, and I was staring into the future again.
* * *
The morning after we discovered the tower we rose early, ate our breakfast, and doused our fire. There was a crisp chill to the air common for the season. The surveyor broke open the weapons stash and gave us each a handgun. She herself continued to hold on to the assault rifle; it had the added benefit of a flashlight under the barrel. We had not expected to have to open that particular container so soon, and although none of us protested, I felt a new tension between us. We knew that members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other. Not until several subsequent expeditions had suffered zero casualties had our superiors issued firearms again. We were the twelfth expedition.
So we returned to the tower, all four of us. Sunlight came down dappled through the moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the entrance. It remained unremarkable, inert, in no way ominous … and yet it took an act of will to stand there, staring at the entry point. I noticed the anthropologist checking her black box, was relieved to see it did not display a glowing red light. If it had, we would have had to abort our exploration, move on to other things. I did not want that, despite the touch of fear.
“How deep do you think it goes down?” the anthropologist asked.
“Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements,” the psychologist answered, with a slight frown. “The measurements do not lie. This structure is 61.4 feet in diameter. It is raised 7.9 inches from the ground. The stairwell appears to have been positioned at or close to due north, which may tell us something about its creation, eventually. It is made of stone and coquina, not of metal or of bricks. These are facts. That it wasn’t on the maps means only that a storm may have uncovered the entrance.”
I found the psychologist’s faith in measurements and her rationalization for the tower’s absence from maps oddly … endearing? Perhaps she meant merely to reassure us, but I would like to believe she was trying to reassure herself. Her position, to lead and possibly to know more than us, must have been difficult and lonely.
“I hope it’s only about six feet deep so we can continue mapping,” the surveyor said, trying to be lighthearted, but then she, and we, all recognized the term “six feet under” ghosting through her syntax and a silence settled over us.
“I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a tower,” I confessed. “I can’t see it as a tunnel.” It seemed important to make the distinction before our descent, even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state. I saw a tower, plunging into the ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me a little dizzy.
All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk, and after a moment the psychologist said, grudgingly, “If that helps make you more comfortable, then I don’t see the harm.”
A silence came over us again, there under the canopy of trees. A beetle spiraled up toward the branches, trailing dust motes. I think we all realized that only now had we truly entered Area X.
“I’ll go first and see what’s down there,” the surveyor said, finally, and we were happy to defer to her.
The initial stairwell curved steeply downward and the steps were narrow, so the surveyor would have to back her way into the tower. We used sticks to clear the spiderwebs as she lowered herself into position on the stairwell. She teetered there, weapon slung across her back, looking up at us. She had tied her hair back and it made the lines of her face seem tight and drawn. Was this the moment when we were supposed to stop her? To come up with some other plan? If so, none of us had the nerve.
With a strange smirk, almost as if judging us, the surveyor descended until we could only see her face framed in the gloom below, and then not even that. She left an empty space that was shocking to me, as if the reverse had actually happened: as if a face had suddenly floated into view out of the darkness. I gasped, which drew a stare from the psychologist. The anthropologist was too busy staring down into the stairwell to notice any of it.
“Is everything okay?” the psychologist called out to the surveyor. Everything had been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now?
The surveyor made a sharp grunt in answer, as if agreeing with me. For a few moments more, we could still hear the surveyor struggling on those short steps. Then came silence, and then another movement, at a different rhythm, which for a terrifying moment seemed like it might come from a second source.
But then the surveyor called up to us. “Clear to this level!” This level. Something within me thrilled to the fact that my vision of a tower was not yet disproven.
That was the signal for me to descend with the anthropologist, while the psychologist stood watch. “Time to go,” the psychologist said, as perfunctorily as if we were in school and a class was letting out.
An emotion that I could not quite identify surged through me, and for a moment I saw dark spots in my field of vision. I followed the anthropologist so eagerly down through the remains of webs and the embalmed husks of insects into the cool brackishness of that place that I almost tripped her. My last view of the world above: the psychologist peering down at me with a slight frown, and behind her the trees, the blue of the sky almost blinding against the darkness of the sides of the stairwell.
Below, shadows spread across the walls. The temperature dropped and sound became muffled, the soft steps absorbing our tread. Approximately twenty feet beneath the surface, the structure opened out into a lower level. The ceiling was about eight feet high, which meant a good twelve feet of stone lay above us. The flashlight of the surveyor’s assault rifle illuminated the space, but she was faced away from us, surveying the walls, which were an off-white and devoid of any adornment. A few cracks indicated either the passage of time or some sudden stressor. The level appeared to be the same circumference as the exposed top, which again supported the idea of a single solid structure buried in the earth.
“It goes farther,” the surveyor said, and pointed with her rifle to the far corner, directly opposite the opening where we had come out onto that level. A rounded archway stood there, and a darkness that suggested downward steps. A tower, which made this level not so much a floor as a landing or part of the turret. She started to walk toward the archway while I was still engrossed in examining the walls with my flashlight. Their very blankness mesmerized me. I tried to imagine the builder of this place but could not.
I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the late afternoon of our first day at base camp. We assumed that the structure in question was a lighthouse because the map showed a lighthouse at that location and because everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like. In fact, the surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality reassured them, anchored them. Being familiar with its function further reassured them.
With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full outline. We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. The psychologist might recite the measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.
“There is a regularity to the circle, seen from the inside walls, that suggests precision in the creation of the building,” the anthropologist said. The building. Already she had begun to abandon the idea of it being a tunnel.
All of my thoughts came spilling out of my mouth, some final discharge from the state that had overtaken me above. “But what is its purpose? And is it believable that it would not be on the maps? Could one of the prior expeditions have built it and hidden it?” I asked all of this and more, not expecting an answer. Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. Had I expressed this anxiety to the psychologist, she would have been worried, I know. But I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful.
A gasp from the surveyor cut me off in mid-question, no doubt much to the anthropologist’s relief.
“Look!” the surveyor said, training her flashlight down into the archway. We hurried over and stared past her, adding our own illumination.
A stairway did indeed lead down, this time at a gentle curve with much broader steps, but still made of the same materials. At about shoulder height, perhaps five feet high, clinging to the inner wall of the tower, I saw what I first took to be dimly sparkling green vines progressing down into the darkness. I had a sudden absurd memory of the floral wallpaper treatment that had lined the bathroom of my house when I had shared it with my husband. Then, as I stared, the “vines” resolved further, and I saw that they were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the wall.
“Hold the light,” I said, and pushed past them down the first few steps. Blood was rushing through my head again, a roaring confusion in my ears. It was an act of supreme control to walk those few paces. I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic. If the linguist had been there, perhaps I would have deferred to her.
“Don’t touch it, whatever it is,” the anthropologist warned.
I nodded, but I was too enthralled with the discovery. If I’d had the impulse to touch the words on the wall, I would not have been able to stop myself.
As I came close, did it surprise me that I could understand the language the words were written in? Yes. Did it fill me with a kind of elation and dread intertwined? Yes. I tried to suppress the thousand new questions rising up inside of me. In as calm a voice as I could manage, aware of the importance of that moment, I read from the beginning, aloud: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”
Then the darkness took it.
“Words? Words?” the anthropologist said.
Yes, words.
“What are they made of?” the surveyor asked. Did they need to be made of anything?
The illumination cast on the continuing sentence quavered and shook. Where lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning.
“Give me a moment. I need to get closer.” Did I? Yes, I needed to get closer.
What are they made of?
I hadn’t even thought of this, though I should have; I was still trying to parse the lingual meaning, had not transitioned to the idea of taking a physical sample. But what relief at the question! Because it helped me fight the compulsion to keep reading, to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had read all there was to read. Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways, finding fertile ground.
So I stepped closer, peered at Where lies the strangling fruit. I saw that the letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism. The curling filaments were all packed very close together and rising out from the wall. A loamy smell came from the words along with an underlying hint of rotting honey. This miniature forest swayed, almost imperceptibly, like sea grass in a gentle ocean current.
Other things existed in this miniature ecosystem. Half-hidden by the green filaments, most of these creatures were translucent and shaped like tiny hands embedded by the base of the palm. Golden nodules capped the fingers on these “hands.” I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.
I was unlucky—or was I lucky? Triggered by a disturbance in the flow of air, a nodule in the W chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores spewed out. I pulled back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced a pinprick of escalation in the smell of rotting honey.
Unnerved, I stepped back even farther, borrowing some of the surveyor’s best curses, but only in my head. My natural instinct was always for concealment. Already I was imagining the psychologist’s reaction to my contamination, if revealed to the group.
“Some sort of fungi,” I said finally, taking a deep breath so I could control my voice. “The letters are made from fruiting bodies.” Who knew if it were actually true? It was just the closest thing to an answer.
My voice must have seemed calmer than my actual thoughts because there was no hesitation in their response. No hint in their tone of having seen the spores erupt into my face. I had been so close. The spores had been so tiny, so insignificant. I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.
“Words? Made of fungi?” the surveyor said, stupidly echoing me.
“There is no recorded human language that uses this method of writing,” the anthropologist said. “Is there any animal that communicates in this way?”
I had to laugh. “No, there is no animal that communicates in this way.” Or, if there were, I could not recall its name, and never did later, either.
“Are you joking? This is a joke, right?” the surveyor said. She looked poised to come down and prove me wrong, but didn’t move from her position.
“Fruiting bodies,” I replied, almost as if in a trance. “Forming words.”
A calm had settled over me. A competing sensation, as if I couldn’t breathe, or didn’t want to, was clearly psychological not physiological. I had noticed no physical changes, and on some level it didn’t matter. I knew it was unlikely we had an antidote to something so unknown waiting back at the camp.
More than anything, the information I was trying to process immobilized me. The words were composed of symbiotic fruiting bodies from a species unknown to me. Second, the dusting of spores on the words meant that the farther down into the tower we explored, the more the air would be full of potential contaminants. Was there any reason to relay this information to the others when it would only alarm them? No, I decided, perhaps selfishly. It was more important to make sure they were not directly exposed until we could come back with the proper equipment. Any other evaluation depended on environmental and biological factors about which I was increasingly convinced I had inadequate data.
I came back up the stairs to the landing. The surveyor and the anthropologist looked expectant, as if I could tell them more. The anthropologist in particular was on edge; her gaze couldn’t alight on any one thing but kept moving and moving. Perhaps I could have fabricated information that would have stopped that incessant search. But what could I tell them about the words on the wall except that they were either impossible or insane, or both? I would have preferred the words be written in an unknown language; this would have presented less of a mystery for us to solve, in a way.
“We should go back up,” I said. It was not that I recommended this as the best course of action but because I wanted to limit their exposure to the spores until I could see what long-term effects they might have on me. I also knew if I stayed there much longer I might experience a compulsion to go back down the stairs to continue reading the words, and they would have to physically restrain me, and I did not know what I would do then.
There was no argument from the other two. But as we climbed back up, I had a moment of vertigo despite being in such an enclosed space, a kind of panic for a moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside of the gullet of a beast.
* * *
When we told the psychologist what we had seen, when I recited some of the words, she seemed at first frozen in an oddly attentive way. Then she decided to descend to view the words. I struggled with whether I should warn her against this action. Finally I said, “Only observe from the top of the stairs. We don’t know whether there are toxins. When we come back, we should wear breathing masks.” These, at least, we had inherited from the last expedition, in a sealed container.
“Paralysis is not a cogent analysis?” she said to me with a pointed stare. I felt a kind of itchiness come over me, but I said nothing, did nothing. The others did not even seem to realize she had spoken. It was only later that I realized the psychologist had tried to bind me with a hypnotic suggestion meant for me and me alone.
My reaction apparently fell within the range of acceptable responses, for she descended while we waited anxiously above. What would we do if she did not return? A sense of ownership swept over me. I was agitated by the idea that she might experience the same need to read further and would act upon it. Even though I didn’t know what the words meant, I wanted them to mean something so that I might more swiftly remove doubt, bring reason back into all of my equations. Such thoughts distracted me from thinking about the effects of the spores on my system.
Thankfully the other two had no desire to talk as we waited, and after just fifteen minutes the psychologist awkwardly pushed her way up out of the stairwell and into the light, blinking as her vision adjusted.
“Interesting,” she said in a flat tone as she loomed over us, wiping the cobwebs from her clothing. “I have never seen anything like that before.” She seemed as if she might continue, but then decided against it.
What she had already said verged on the moronic; apparently I was not alone in that assessment.
“Interesting?” the anthropologist said. “No one has ever seen anything like that in the entire history of the world. No one. Ever. And you call it interesting?” She seemed close to working herself into a bout of hysteria. While the surveyor just stared at both of them as if they were the alien organisms.
“Do you need me to calm you?” the psychologist asked. There was a steely tone to her words that made the anthropologist mumble something noncommittal and stare at the ground.
I stepped into the silence with my own suggestion: “We need time to think about this. We need time to decide what to do next.” I meant, of course, that I needed time to see if the spores I had inhaled would affect me in a way significant enough to confess to what had happened.
“There may not be enough time in the world for that,” the surveyor said. Of all of us, I think she had best grasped the implications of what we had seen: that we might now be living in a kind of nightmare. But the psychologist ignored her and sided with me. “We do need time. We should spend the rest of our day doing what we were sent here to do.”
So we returned to camp for lunch and then focused on “ordinary things” while I kept monitoring my body for any changes. Did I feel too cold now, or too hot? Was that ache in my knee from an old injury suffered in the field, or something new? I even checked the black box monitor, but it remained inert. Nothing radical had yet changed in me, and as we took our samples and readings in the general vicinity of the camp—as if to stray too far would be to come under the tower’s control—I gradually relaxed and told myself that the spores had had no effect … even though I knew that the incubation period for some species could be months or years. I suppose I thought merely that for the next few days at least I might be safe.
The surveyor concentrated on adding detail and nuance to the maps our superiors had given us. The anthropologist went off to examine the remains of some cabins a quarter mile away. The psychologist stayed in her tent, writing in her journal. Perhaps she was reporting on how she was surrounded by idiots, or just setting out every moment of our morning discoveries.
For my part, I spent an hour observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog on the back of a broad, thick leaf and another hour following the path of an iridescent black damselfly that should not have been found at sea level. The rest of the time, I spent up a pine tree, binoculars focused on the coast and the lighthouse. I liked climbing. I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.
The richness of Area X’s biosphere was reflected in the wealth of birdlife, from warblers and flickers to cormorants and black ibis. I could also see a bit into the salt marshes, and my attention there was rewarded by a minute-long glimpse of a pair of otters. At one point, they glanced up and I had a strange sensation that they could see me watching them. It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity. There was also something else, moving ponderously through the reeds, but it was closer to the lighthouse and in deep cover. I could not tell what it was, and after a while its disturbance of the vegetation ceased and I lost track of it entirely. I imagined it might be another wild pig, as they could be good swimmers and were just as omnivorous in their choice of habitats as in their diets.
On the whole, by dusk this strategy of busying ourselves in our tasks had worked to calm our nerves. The tension lifted somewhat, and we even joked a little bit at dinner. “I wish I knew what you were thinking,” the anthropologist confessed to me, and I replied, “No, you don’t,” which was met with a laughter that surprised me. I didn’t want their voices in my head, their ideas of me, nor their own stories or problems. Why would they want mine?
But I did not mind that a sense of camaraderie had begun to take hold, even if it would prove short-lived. The psychologist allowed us each a couple of beers from the store of alcohol, which loosened us up to the point that I even clumsily expressed the idea that we might maintain some sort of contact once we had completed our mission. I had stopped checking myself for physiological or psychological reactions to the spores by then, and found that the surveyor and I got along better than I had expected. I still didn’t like the anthropologist very much, but mostly in the context of the mission, not anything she had said to me. I felt that, once in the field, much as some athletes were good in practice and not during the game, she had exhibited a lack of mental toughness thus far. Although just volunteering for such a mission meant something.
When the nightly cry from the marshes came a little after nightfall, while we sat around our fire, we at first called back to it in a drunken show of bravado. The beast in the marshes now seemed like an old friend compared to the tower. We were confident that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and assign it a place in the taxonomy of living things. It would become known in a way we feared the tower would not. But we stopped calling back when the intensity of its moans heightened in a way that suggested anger, as if it knew we were mocking it. Nervous laughter all around, then, and the psychologist took that as her cue to ready us for the next day.
“Tomorrow we will go back to the tunnel. We will go deeper, taking certain precautions—wearing breathing masks, as suggested. We will record the writing on the walls and get a sense of how old it is, I hope. Also, perhaps a sense of how deep the tunnel descends. In the afternoon, we’ll return to our general investigations of the area. We’ll repeat this schedule every day until we think we know enough about the tunnel and how it fits into Area X.”
Tower, not tunnel. She could have been talking about investigating an abandoned shopping center, for all of the emphasis she put on it … and yet something about her tone seemed rehearsed.
Then she abruptly stood and said three words: “Consolidation of authority.”
Immediately the surveyor and the anthropologist beside me went slack, their eyes unfocused. I was shocked, but I mimicked them, hoping that the psychologist had not noticed the lag. I felt no compulsion whatsoever, but clearly we had been preprogrammed to enter a hypnotic state in response to those words, uttered by the psychologist.
Her demeanor more assertive than just a moment before, the psychologist said, “You will retain a memory of having discussed several options with regard to the tunnel. You will find that you ultimately agreed with me about the best course of action, and that you felt quite confident about this course of action. You will experience a sensation of calm whenever you think about this decision, and you will remain calm once back inside the tunnel, although you will react to any stimuli as per your training. You will not take undue risks.
“You will continue to see a structure that is made of coquina and stone. You will trust your colleagues completely and feel a continued sense of fellowship with them. When you emerge from the structure, any time you see a bird in flight it will trigger a strong feeling that you are doing the right thing, that you are in the right place. When I snap my fingers, you will have no memory of this conversation, but will follow my directives. You will feel very tired and you will want to retire to your tents to get a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s activities. You will not dream. You will not have nightmares.”
I stared straight ahead as she said these words, and when she snapped her fingers I took my cue from the actions of the other two. I don’t believe the psychologist suspected anything, and I retired to my tent just as the others retired to their tents.
Now I had new data to process, along with the tower. We knew that the psychologist’s role was to provide balance and calm in a situation that might become stressful, and that part of this role included hypnotic suggestion. I could not blame her for performing that role. But to see it laid out so nakedly troubled me. It is one thing to think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an observer. What level of control could she exert over us? What did she mean by saying that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone?
Most important, however, I now could guess at one way in which the spores had affected me: They had made me immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions. They had made me into a kind of conspirator against her. Even if her purposes were benign, I felt a wave of anxiety whenever I thought of confessing that I was resistant to hypnosis—especially since it meant any underlying conditioning hidden in our training also was affecting me less and less.
I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably, becoming estranged from the expedition and its purpose.
* * *
Estrangement, in all of its many forms, was nothing new for these missions. I understood this from having been given an opportunity along with the others to view videotape of the reentry interviews with the members of the eleventh expedition. Once those individuals had been identified as having returned to their former lives, they were quarantined and questioned about their experiences. Reasonably enough, in most cases family members had called the authorities, finding their loved one’s return uncanny or frightening. Any papers found on these returnees had been confiscated by our superiors for examination and study. This information, too, we were allowed to see.
The interviews were fairly short, and in them all eight expedition members told the same story. They had experienced no unusual phenomenon while in Area X, taken no unusual readings, and reported no unusual internal conflicts. But after a period of time, each one of them had had the intense desire to return home and had set out to do so. None of them could explain how they had managed to come back across the border, or why they had gone straight home instead of first reporting to their superiors. One by one they had simply abandoned the expedition, left their journals behind, and drifted home. Somehow.
Throughout these interviews, their expressions were friendly and their gazes direct. If their words seemed a little flat, then this went with the kind of general calm, the almost dreamlike demeanor each had returned with—even the compact, wiry man who had served as that expedition’s military expert, a person who’d had a mercurial and energetic personality. In terms of their affect, I could not tell any of the eight apart. I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.
As for the papers, they proved to be sketches of landscapes within Area X or brief descriptions. Some were cartoons of animals or caricatures of fellow expedition members. All of them had, at some point, drawn the lighthouse or written about it. Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.
At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.
Copyright © 2014 by Jeff VanderMeer
(Continues...)Excerpted from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2014 Jeff VanderMeer. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : FSG Originals; First Edition (February 4, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374104093
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374104092
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.55 x 7.45 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #45,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #580 in Exploration Science Fiction
- #914 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)
- #3,975 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker, NYT bestseller Jeff VanderMeer has been a published writer since age 14. His most recent fiction is the critically acclaimed novel BORNE, which has received raves from the NYTBR, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and many more. Paramount Pictures has optioned BORNE for film.
VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy was one of the publishing events of 2014, the trilogy made more than thirty year’s best lists, including Entertainment Weekly’s top 10. Paramount Pictures has made a movie out of the first volume of the Southern Reach, Annihilation, slated for release in 2018 and starring Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, Gina Rodriguez, Natalie Portman, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
His nonfiction appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic.com. VanderMeer also wrote the world’s first fully illustrated creative-writing guide, Wonderbook. With his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he has edited may iconic anthologies. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with two wonderful cats. His hobbies include hiking, reading, and bird watching.
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Customers find the story intriguing and interesting. They appreciate the visual style, describing it as beautiful and poetic. The book is described as enthralling and exciting, capturing their attention and imagination. However, opinions differ on readability, writing quality, and thought-provoking aspects. Some find the story well-told with masterful prose, while others feel the narration seems forced and unscientific.
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Customers find the story intriguing and interesting. They describe it as a well-written story of exploration, discovery, and transformation. The book has psychological depth and intriguing details. It's described as neither hard sci-fi nor hard horror, more a creepy and unsettling exploration.
"...It’s that great kind of creepiness that feels so good even as you feel the shadow stretching out over you inch by inch and you know you should run..." Read more
"...The bones of the story are truly intriguing - a mysterious Area X along the "lost coast"..." Read more
"...I listened to the audio book and the narrator was superb. She related the events and background perfectly...." Read more
"...The lighthouse was what did it for me, ultimately. Yeah, the tower is weird and scary and there are things down there that will cause any sane..." Read more
Customers appreciate the visual style of the book. They find the descriptions beautiful and poetic, with stunning presentation of beauty and terror. The creative universe is fantastic, and the cover art is fantastic. The writing is superb, deftly painting a singular world and journey. The ending is elegant.
"...Besides the descriptive imagery and the sharp characterization, there is a wonderful sense of dread and suspense, of horror, that builds and builds..." Read more
"...She related the events and background perfectly...." Read more
"...Area X is lush, beautiful, and completely abandoned, except for the new expedition, or so they think at first...." Read more
"When I saw the interesting cover design and read the enigmatic book description I was instantly hooked by Annihilation...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's entertainment value. They find it enthralling, exciting, and enjoyable. The book captures their attention and imagination, keeping them engaged even when it slows down. It serves as a good companion for the movie and keeps them thinking.
"...The writing, especially at the start, is both exciting and compelling. However, each mystery only leads to more mysteries...." Read more
"...Instead this book is pure excitement and adrenaline...." Read more
"...It’s meant to be a thought-invoking, thrilling and engaging story, not a character driven hero’s journey...." Read more
"...(giving the novel a frustrating, exhilarating timelessness)..." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the book's readability. Some find it fantastic and compelling, describing it as well-done and worthy of attention. Others mention frustrating elements, ambiguous storytelling, and confusion. The story-telling is unique but has frustrating elements, with few questions answered and long to enjoy.
"...Craft-wise, I think this is one of Vandermeer’s best novels (and I say that as a fan)...." Read more
"...The first book is definitely the strongest of the three, but my feeling is that if you are going to invest time and money in the first book, there..." Read more
"...She related the events and background perfectly. Few questions are answered and the clearest section for me was the last section, which didn't say..." Read more
"...study as it is horror, and horror it most certainly is, of the best kind...." Read more
Customers have mixed reviews about the writing quality. Some find it masterful and relatable, with a detached mainline narration perfectly suited to the biologist's clinical mindset. Others feel the narration seems forced and not scientifically possible. The writing is heavy on prose and lacks explanations of what has happened.
"...Besides the descriptive imagery and the sharp characterization, there is a wonderful sense of dread and suspense, of horror, that builds and builds..." Read more
"...There's not much dialogue though there is a fair amount of introspection and some flashbacks, of a sort...." Read more
"...Yet he is a very good writer and I did not want to wait to get through the series until the prices came down for each book...." Read more
"...I listened to the audio book and the narrator was superb. She related the events and background perfectly...." Read more
Customers have different views on the book. Some find it thought-provoking and engaging, challenging their perceptions of the world. They say it raises interesting questions about the human condition. Others feel the plot is ambiguous, with lots of allusions and exposition but little dialogue or action.
"...whole is larger than the parts here—yes, I like this book for its craft elements—the prose, the characterization, the tone—and yes, I like it..." Read more
"...ANNIHILATION is psychological, and organic, horror and mystery at its very, very best, from a master of his craft...." Read more
"...Many viewers of 'Lost" loved the ending, which I found sappy and saccharine, without any real answers to the questions I asked through-out the..." Read more
"...There's not much dialogue though there is a fair amount of introspection and some flashbacks, of a sort...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it fast-paced with engaging plot points and descriptive imagery. Others mention that the story begins slowly but picks up steam once the main protagonist is introduced. The prose can drag a bit towards the end, but not so much that they wouldn't recommend the book.
"...much of the pleasure—and it really is a pleasure—is the slow reveal of all that ensues, not merely the plot points but the slow reveal of character..." Read more
"...The pacing wasn’t super fast, edge of you seat thriller style, but it wasn’t slow either and 5 part format made it easy to pick up and put down...." Read more
"...I was never unsatisfied with the pace. Jeff VanderMeer has taken this even further by expediting the release of the rest of the series...." Read more
"...is barely 200 print pages long, I found that it took an extraordinary amount of time to read...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the character development. Some find the main character interesting and beautifully realized, while others feel the development is lacking, with little to no personality, lack of descriptions, and lack of dialogue between characters. The characters are never named, making it hard for readers to connect with them.
"...That the characters didn't fully understand themselves (ie, the mystery of their personhood) or the mystery of Area X, so why should we?..." Read more
"...yes, I like it because it tells a compelling story about a likable engaging character...." Read more
"...No characters names are given, it does not follow the normal build up rather you are tossed directly into area x. And area x itself is completely..." Read more
"...The biologist is a flawed character, a woman more comfortable around frogs and dragonflies than people and their conversations and desire for..." Read more
Reviews with images
Vague, Ambiguous Mystery through an Alien Environment
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2014If Loren Eiseley, Charlotte Perking Gilman, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka had a literary baby, it would look something like Annihilation.
In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, an all-women expedition of four is tasked by a secret organization— the Southern Reach—to explore a mysterious region known as Area X, which has been abandoned/cut off from civilization for decades. They are the 12th such expedition, the last one occurring two years earlier, and it’s made clear very early that those earlier ones had some tragic and/or horrific endings. Not long after arriving, they discover a mysterious underground structure (a “tunnel” to everyone save the biologist, who insists on calling it a “tower”) that, unlike the lighthouse and the abandoned village, is not on their map. Her recording of subsequent events is interspersed with flashbacks to her early professional life and to her marriage. And really, even though all that comes out in just the first few pages, this is all I want to mention about the plot, because much of the pleasure—and it really is a pleasure—is the slow reveal of all that ensues, not merely the plot points but the slow reveal of character as well. And equally, or perhaps even more pleasurable, is what is not revealed. Or maybe more precisely, what is not explained. Suffice to say, this is not a novel for those who like clear-cut answers. Or even, you know, just answers, clear or no (though it is possible, this being the first in a trilogy, that some of the mystery will be made more clear by the end of the entire story).
Nor is Annihilation a novel for those who do not care much for unreliable narrators, since the biologist is constantly calling into question not only her own conclusions/speculations, but even her own observations. If she can’t trust her eyes, how are we the readers supposed to? Or whatever theories she comes up with based on whatever it is her eyes see?
Now, I happen to be a fan, generally, of unreliable narrators. So I’m already predisposed to like what VanderMeer does here with this character. But beyond that, I just really liked this character herself. If one ignores the whole can’t-trust-what-she-sees part, she has a startlingly sharp vision. This is true when she is looking at the world around her, whether that world is the transitional and partially alien landscape of Area X or the more “mundane” worlds of her youthful backyard, or an empty lot near her house, which are allegedly “comprehensible” to us but have their own inexplicable nature, are themselves part of the fantastical (and as old stories tell us, fantasy is not always benign). And so Annihilation is filled with lots of nature imagery, all of which VanderMeer, who is clearly a sharp observer himself, conveys in vividly precise fashion. Beyond the natural world, though, the biologist also has a clarity of vision with regard to herself, say in terms of her love of solitude, or with regard to her relationship with her husband, that is hard not to like and respond to.
Besides the descriptive imagery and the sharp characterization, there is a wonderful sense of dread and suspense, of horror, that builds and builds throughout the novel. It’s that great kind of creepiness that feels so good even as you feel the shadow stretching out over you inch by inch and you know you should run like hell. That kind of hurts-but-feels-good pain of picking at a scab.
Between the high level of weirdness that I don’t want to say anything much about, the engaging nature of the narrator and the steadily increasing level of suspense, the book is truly compelling. Not quite in the page-turning fashion of a good mystery or action novel (and then what happens? And then what?) but in the way you just can’t help but look at that flash of movement in the darkness you saw in the corner of your eye, you can’t help but go down that hall, then around that corner. Maybe “fascinating” is a better word than “compelling.”
I also was captivated by the questions raised in Annihilation, such as how we view nature, what is our place in this world, how do we respond when we encounter the ineffable? Questions of agency, of influence, of what lies beneath the surface, of how or even if one can remain “alone” in a world that constantly presses upon us and also impresses upon us the requirement to share, to interact, to “connect.” And other ones as well.
Craft-wise, I think this is one of Vandermeer’s best novels (and I say that as a fan). The pacing is spot on, the prose shifts gears as needed but generally has a great sense of spare rhythm to it, and shifts between flashback and present time are handled smoothly—he seems to know exactly when to interrupt and when not to, as well as when to return. Finally, it’s exactly as long as it should be and no longer.
But the whole is larger than the parts here—yes, I like this book for its craft elements—the prose, the characterization, the tone—and yes, I like it because it tells a compelling story about a likable engaging character. But at the core of Annihilation is something ungraspable, and so it’s also nicely appropriate that I can’t quite nail down exactly what it is I love about this book (as opposed to being able to say what I like about it). But boy, did I love it.
Despite being the first in a trilogy, the book ends in such a fashion that I’d be quite happy if this were it. That’s not to say I don’t care what comes next, but despite, or perhaps because of, the enigmatic nature of the climax and the many mysteries left hanging, it’s pretty near a perfect ending in my mind. And pretty much a perfect read. Highly recommended.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2015I debated between three and four stars, but ultimately decided on four stars, mainly because the writing is so darn good. Also, being a fan of these types of books, I felt VanderMeer had created the bones of great story, thought the fleshing out of that story was highly problematic and ultimately took what could have been a fabulous book down to merely a good story. It could have been so much more, and that, my fellow readers, is what is so deeply disappointing here. I wanted this to be a five star review, not merely three or four stars.
The bones of the story are truly intriguing - a mysterious Area X along the "lost coast" (the location is never truly identified for us by VanderMeer because God forbid we name anything here because names carry something mysterious about them. Unfortunately, we are never really told what. Names and locations are meaningless? Too confining? To defining? Your guess is as good as mine) where something dramatic and alien and unexplainable has occurred. Little goes in or comes out of Area X - and what does come back out is never who or what we think it is.
As I said, VanderMeer is a good enough writer that he hooks the reader early on and doesn't let go. I read all three books in the series, one right after the other, even though, in my opinion, the series remains vastly overpriced. Yet he is a very good writer and I did not want to wait to get through the series until the prices came down for each book. The first book is definitely the strongest of the three, but my feeling is that if you are going to invest time and money in the first book, there isn't much point unless you are prepared to see it through to the end of the series.
Many reviewers have compared the books to the TV series "Lost." I think the comparison is apt in that the island in "Lost" is mysterious and replete with strange and unexplained phenomenon. But I think the analogy is even more apt than that. Many viewers of 'Lost" loved the ending, which I found sappy and saccharine, without any real answers to the questions I asked through-out the whole series. But many viewers became ,more attached to the characters than the storyline, so maybe they didn't care so much that no answers were really provided at the end. I did, however. I wanted real, concrete information to a show I had invested viewing over the course of many years. When I didn't get answers, I felt betrayed and let down.
I think many of the negative reviews of this series reflect this same kind of sensibility. VanderMeer has engaged in the cardinal sin of many writers - getting us hooked on a story, then disappointing many readers by failing to provide a concrete, satisfying conclusion with answers to our most important questions. Yes, you can leave some mystery, but too much unanswered is never a good thing.
I suspect that the author was striving to continue the mystery and lack of conclusive answers that the characters felt when confronting themselves, their motivations, each other, life, the unknown, etc. That the characters didn't fully understand themselves (ie, the mystery of their personhood) or the mystery of Area X, so why should we? I speculate here, but the author probably felt he was simply mimicking Area X in all of its grand mystery (and yes, mimicry plays a large role in the story and no, we are never really told why) and that his mimicry was important to the story.
But the problem is that such an approach is never truly satisfying to a large percentage of readers. What I was hoping for (but never got) was not so much an ending like the conclusion of "Lost" where there are no real answers but we feel so in love with the characters and their relationships with each other that we are not supposed to care our questions go unanswered, but more like the ending to the series "Battlestar Galactica" in which are questions are answered, but the answers are nothing that we really expected. I wanted a refreshing and unexpected surprise at the end. Something I didn't see coming.
You won't get that here. That is not to say that VanderMeer answers no questions about Area X - he does do that by the final book. That said, he just doesn't go far enough with many of those answers, nor are those answers in any way truly a wonderful and unexpected surprise.
Moreover, I failed to feel strongly attached to many of the characters, who seemed "lost" (no pun intended) within themselves. Control plays a strong role in book two, but fades almost entirely away in importance in book three. A lot of times you feel like shaking the characters and screaming "wake up," but they never do, but rather remain mired in their own confused and obscure states of being. Now I get the sense that VanderMeer wants use to revel in this as being a reflection of the utlimate meaning of the human condition, but frankly, it just feels unsatisfying and makes one feel frustrated with the characters. Many times they just meander through the story and their non-stop stream of consciousness fretting and lack of clarity does drag the story down at times.
Ending the story by stressing simply - aren't these characters fascinating in and of themselves and this is just the human condition, to remain an ultimate mystery to us - was deeply unsatisfying to me. Tell me what happens to Control. Tell me what happens to the Earth. Tell me the "why" of Area X. Tell me the "Why" of what happens to the biologist. Or what happens to Saul or the psychologist.
Give me something new and unexpected, but don't leave me in the dark, Mr. VanderMeer.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2024I had heard of this series and decided to read it as a Goodreads challenge. Its a strange tale of an all female expedition into an unusual region called Area X. Previous expeditions had ended in disaster, including the last expedition that her husband had been on. Things don't go well on this expedition either and we follow the biologist as narrator. I listened to the audio book and the narrator was superb. She related the events and background perfectly. Few questions are answered and the clearest section for me was the last section, which didn't say much.
Top reviews from other countries
- Akshay kumbharReviewed in India on January 17, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling
Very good read...with nice detailings of area x...u can visualise every events...very good n short book...experience the thrill...nice writing after jules verne...
Akshay kumbhar
Reviewed in India on January 17, 2022
Images in this review - Books by Proxy | @proxyfishReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2020
4.0 out of 5 stars A Subtle and Eerie Read
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Imagine, if you will, that you are lost within an alien landscape. You do not know whether you have left this earth or crossed through an alternative dimension, or whether you yet remain in a strange forgotten corner of the world. The only thing which connects you to the rest of humanity is a journal. A journal of a woman whose name you do not know, whose life is slowly unfolding as you turn the cracked and brittle pages, and whose fate will yet remain a mystery at its close.
Annihilation is a strange, disquieting and eerily beautiful novel which takes the reader on an expedition into Area X; where those who enter leave changed, if they leave at all. This is a tale of discovery and quiet observation, a preternatural mystery which should be slowly savoured until you are nothing but lost in the wilds of VanderMeer’s imagination.
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Annihilation follows the expedition of an unnamed protagonist, the biologist, as she journeys into Area X, a mysterious and extensive partition of land under an apparent imposed quarantine. Previous expeditions have entered but all have returned altered, if they returned at all.
Together with a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, the twelfth expedition makes its way into this strange and mystifying land only to find that danger is as likely to come from within as without; no one remains the same in Area X. With towers that spiral into the earth, strange cries in the night and creatures straight out of a fever dream, finding a way home might be the least of their problems.
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Annihilation is a quiet flight of (science) fantasy across uncharted territory; a novel which slowly draws you into a world of sinister discovery. Area X is a vast and mysterious zone which takes on an almost alien appearance; its utter unfamiliarity creating a heady and foreboding atmosphere which weighs heavily throughout. VanderMeer’s writing is effortlessly engaging, leading the reader one step at a time into this strange, hypnotic and almost hallucinogenic world which, whilst not overtly involved, rides a line of tension from beginning to end.
Throughout the novel Area X appears overwhelmingly large, but despite this impression the narrative remains confined to a comparatively small zone which the expedition is reticent to leave. Whilst the necessity for staging the narrative in this relatively small area is somewhat apparent, my own imagination was straining at these invisible borders, desperate to discover more of the land and its utterly strange inhabitants. But if it was a ploy to make me want to read book two, it worked! VanderMeer has set me on a voyage of discovery which I am determined to see through.
Our unnamed protagonist is a thoughtful, analytical woman whose perspective of quiet observation and discovery make her an engaging character. Whilst this works in the favour of the biologist, we gain little perspective on the supplementary characters beyond her observations. Her tendency to watch rather than communicate means we never establish any meaningful connection to the other members of the expedition and care little for them when events conspire against them. This does, however, add to the air of mystery and tension; anyone is capable of anything, everyone is disposable and no one is safe.
VanderMeer’s first foray into Area X is a beautiful, subtle and incredibly atmospheric read which resonates with a sense of the unknown and the unknowable. His lyrical writing is saturated with the strange, forming a sinister and other-worldly tale which becomes increasingly difficult to put down. Whilst I would have preferred a little more action throughout the narrative and a more climactic, defined conclusion, the story remained absorbing throughout and the beauty of VanderMeer’s writing more than made up for it. This is a tale of quiet enjoyment. Of the strange. Of dreams and of nightmares.
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If you like your science fantasy subtle and eerie, and wish to venture into the unknown, then Annihilation might just be the book for you. This is a novel which diverted all of my expectations and still managed to impress. Jeff VandeerMeer may be a new addition to my bookshelves but I imagine he’ll be there to stay.
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AmazonRexReviewed in Mexico on October 21, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Léanlo neta
Ame el libro, voy en el segundo de la trilogía. La edición kindle está muy bonita. Mil veces mejor que la adaptación de netflix, léanlo
- FReviewed in Australia on August 9, 2023
4.0 out of 5 stars Gripping, different, immersive
This is a very different take on what the reader would consider to be an alien invasion.
And it's an hypnotic, spiralling descent into hell.
Evocative, mysterious, terrifying, it's impossible to put it down.
Little spoiler here:
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the reader doesn't get all the answers, and that's what I loved as well. You fill the gaps with your own imagination and make up the rest.
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Also, I'll argue that you don't need to embark into reading the trilogy. As weird as it sounds, this book has its own end and it's perfect.
This is a very good, almost dreaming little novel.
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Georg MayerReviewed in Germany on January 12, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting and true mystery
Background: I write this after reading Annihilation, but before reading the other two books of the trilogy. So I cannot judge its content by the complete story. Maybe I'll amend the text once I've read them all.
Three pages into the book it was clear to me that I will like it. It puts the reader right at the beginning of the story, where the action start and does not tell too much about the background - it stays focused on what's happening right now.
VanderMeers style, the language of the book, is easy to read but not simple - it has a down-to-earth poetry that works excellent with the narrating character. And it's already then clear that any type of action or thrill happening in this book will not be just for entertainment, but to bring the story forward. He stays true to this until the end.
Everything in this book has a mysterious aura - we don't know how the details of what's happening in Area X fit together. But we also start to suspect that something in the real world must be significantly different from our (the readers) reality. This is one thing about this book I absolutely loved: whilst we follow the biologist and see how she tries to make sense of the strangeness of Area X, the reader not only tries to uncover Area X but also the reality from where the biologist is actually coming from. And by and by one gets the feeling as if the biologist would start doubting her past as well. The outside and the inside of Area X seem both to be places that are not too trustworthy.
The book is never boring, every sentence is at the right place and one truly feels the disturbances through which the biologist has to go through.
Now some people say that the they are disappointed by the ending and that they hope to get more things resolved in the other two books, i.e. that Annihilation seen as a stand-alone novel is not satisfying. I disagree. The beauty of it is that it shows how the biologist (and all the others) try to make sense of the mystery but come to understand, that sense is a very limited, human perspective. There are explanations, but those are not so important here - it is more the feeling, the inner impressions that count. And with that I don't mean necessarily only the feeling of horror, but more that there is something utterly strange going on, something that escapes explanation, maybe even reason - something alien which is most confusing, which is a threat, which is intelligent but which also might not be meaning to do harm. We are left in a state of doubt and uncertainty and that is intended and transported perfectly.