Annihilation: A Novel: 1 (Southern Reach Trilogy)

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It seemed important to make the distinction before our descent, even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state.

The book describes a team of four women (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor) who set out into an area known as Area X. I was impressed from page one, and before page 3 I was completely enthralled and helplessly captured. All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee, while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Perhaps she was reporting on how she was surrounded by idiots, or just setting out every moment of our morning discoveries. 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.

A competing sensation, as if I couldn’t breathe, or didn’t want to, was clearly psychological not physiological. In Annihilation , the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. Inside the lighthouse, the biologist discovers copious bloodstains and a large hidden pile of hundreds of past expeditions' journals, some detailing battles against a monstrous presence from the sea. I had thought a surveyor would always side with the idea of further exploration, so this opinion carried weight.One rule for an expedition into Area X was that we were to attempt no outside contact, for fear of some irrevocable contamination. Science is there to handle the uncanny, and the biologist's declaration near the end of the book – "Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish" – is anything but an expression of doubt. 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. The Crawler is a rapidly shapeshifting entity of blinding lights and shattering noises, which paralyzes the biologist in an agonizing loop of losing and regaining consciousness.

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. The Washington Post said that it was "successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future" [13] while The Daily Telegraph said that it "shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience.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). In Annihilation, the first part of an imaginatively marketed and beautifully produced trilogy (the other parts are out in May and September), the novelist and publishing entrepreneur Jeff VanderMeer sets out to create a lasting monument to the uncanny by revisiting – without embellishment, and with a pitiless focus on physical and psychological detail – some very old ground. 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. 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.

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. 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.Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if that was the signal to disband, we went back to our own quarters to be alone with our thoughts. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.