Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
For many years, Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent. The final remains of human civilisation have been reclaimed by nature. The first expedition reported a pure, Edenic landscape; the second resulted in mass suicide; and the third ended in a hail of gunfire as its participants turned on one another. The eleventh expedition’s participants returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, every single one of them had passed away from cancer. We join the twelfth expedition in Annihilation, the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Four women make up the group: our narrator, a biologist; an anthropologist; a surveyor; and the psychologist who serves as de facto leader.
Their goals are to map the area, keep a journal of all they see about one another and their surroundings, and, most importantly, stay out of Area X itself.
They expect the unexpected when they arrive, and Area X does not disappoint. They find a significant topographic anomaly and life forms that beyond comprehension, but it is the surprises they brought with them and the secrets the expedition members are holding from one another that change everything.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
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The story’s basic premise is intriguing enough: there is a mysterious Area X along the “lost coast” where a spectacular, strange, and incomprehensible event has taken place. Very little enters or exits Area X, and what does never quite match our expectations. At the beginning of the book, there are four people, but we only really get to know one of them—the biologist of an expedition into the Southern Reach, an abnormal region. This book is written from her point of view, much like a personal notebook or diary. Every time an expedition is dispatched into this region, terrible things happen—everyone is killed, there are numerous suicides, or people return profoundly changed.
Annihilation is a ghost story, although a very specific kind of ghost story. The novel, however, empties out the tropes and tactics of a specific type of supernatural fiction in order to give rise to something altogether new, as is frequently the case with the kind of literature that is grouped together under the nebulous (and contested) umbrella of the weird. The characters at its centre are slain or hollowed out and replaced by whatever lurks in the enigmatic Area X that lies at the centre of the three books, creating a sense of persistent dread and abjection instead of the supernatural hokum of a ghost story or a horror novel.
