Annihilation

I had long known of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, and while I had seen and enjoyed the film, I'd never read any of the writer's work. Indeed, while I read a great deal of science fiction when I was younger, I tend these days toward literary fiction. But something compelled me to dive into the first book of the Southern Reach series, and it did not disappoint. The writing is evocative and strong, painting an almost esoteric picture of a mystery equal parts science, psychology, anthropology, and societal. It is by turns intriguing and haunting.

This is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, but it also stands alone as a mysterious and haunting exploration of the way we attempt to navigate a world that is both familiar and alien at the same time.

Mysteries abound, and answers are elusive, but you can revisit Area X again and again and feel like answers lie just beyond the reach of your fingertips. 

I grabbed this book because I wanted to watch the movie adaptation, but I ended up finding my favorite book of the year, and the movie became a pale afterthought.

The dreamy quality of this book really grabbed me, making me intrigued to know the mysteries of this area the characters were exploring, but completely content to wonder about the aspects that went unresolved.

The imagery was striking and sometimes horrific; I read it in one sitting in a dark apartment alone and would highly recommend that atmosphere to totally immerse yourself in this world.

I love expertly-written, plausible-sounding, original sci-fi or other-worldly books, and Annihilation ticked all my boxes!

The story is related from the point of view of the Biologist, a variously-reliable narrator, as she enters a preternatural "anomaly" in an American coastal area. This story caused me to cling to the narrator as things got progressively weirder -  even though I knew my guide was mutating into something terrifying as she spoke and acted!

It's a brilliant, engrossing narrative I can't forget -  and one in a trilogy, so I'm heading in there again and again.

What can I say about Annihilation? It’s a novel where the reader isn’t quite sure what is going on, nor can any two readers agree on what they just read and that’s the amazing part about it.

Hypnosis, genetic deviation, and something utterly alien make this such an intense read. And that suspense is heightened because there is a level of mystery and weirdness in Jeff VanderMeer’s world, where things aren’t quite grounded in the reality that we are used to.

Annihilation is unique in a world of unique books. The story is keenly focused on the lives of its protagonists, yet none are ever named beyond their professions. They are sent into the unknown, an area of land that is in a state of ecstatic transformation, possibly under the influence of an alien virus. They are sent to solve a mystery—namely, what became of the teams prior to theirs, the last of which included the husband of the main character.

The story is, at its core, a psychedelic story about an exploration for some common truth, both internal and external,… show more.

Part one of the Southern Reach Trilogy, this hypnotic book explores a mysterious island with nightmarish qualities. Area X is cut off from everywhere, and nature (or a renewed but ultimately unknowable notion of what nature can be) has supplanted humans there. An expedition exposes a new kind of extra-terrestrial Eden, but mass suicides occur. Later, explorers turn on each other in violence and gunfire; others return not as their former selves and die of cancer. The mystery of the place becomes more powerful and metaphorical for remaining a mystery.

The narrative goes beyond mere storytelling to leave profound imprints… show more.

You can’t talk about weird, gothic science fiction, without mentioning Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. The first in the Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer’s novel is a complex, surreal, and terrifying tale of four scientists who brave the uninhabited, quarantined, and inexplicable ‘Area X’ in search of answers. Annihilation expertly blends science fiction with the terror and mystery of the gothic: fusing scientific inquiry (“Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements…The measurements do not lie”), with hallucinations, temporal ambiguity, and mind manipulation. The lush, sentient, and menacing ecosystem is the quintessential gothic setting, and the story, revealed through… show more.

Jeff VanderMeer is so well known for connecting Nature and the Weird that he has been called “the weird Thoreau.” This resonance with uncanniness, strangeness, and surreality can be seen throughout much of VanderMeer’s oeuvre, from the mushroom detectives of his Ambergris series to the blooming deer of the Southern Reach Trilogy (of which Annihilation is the first book). He’s so well-versed in the odd that Benjamin Robinson titled his excellent book on VanderMeer’s fiction None of This is Normal. 

Annihilation was my gateway into VanderMeer’s wondrous mind. It is mostly set in the liminal space known as Area… show more.

The first book of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is fascinating to me because of its treatment of natural environments. Uncanny elements found in decayed landscapes—frightening spaces that trouble the tales of Edgar Allan Poe—have been turned on themselves in a Southern Gothic world where ecological wounds are mysteriously disappearing. At the border of Area X, the land changes from postindustrial grotesquerie to a new posthuman freshness. Because of this expanding detoxification, the Southern Gothic landscape is not a source of horror but rather hope for our ecological future.