I don’t read much in the sci-fi or horror genres. They just by and large do not appeal to me, particularly the latter. But I heard enough good reviews of this from enough sources, and holy wow am I glad I stepped outside my comfort zone to pick this up. It’s neither hard sci-fi nor hard horror, more a creepy, deeply unsettling exploration of a world similar to our own but entirely apart. A team of four women (a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a biologist) are sent on a mission into Area X, a mysterious zone that has developed in their version of our world. They are the twelfth expedition, meant to explore and catalog what they find in order to help build understanding of what is happening over there, a place that changed after a never-explained Event. The book follows what happens to the biologist, who (like her cohorts) is never named. She’s not who she seems to be at the beginning. Very little is what it seems to be at the beginning. It’s almost impossible to describe even vaguely the plot, because while Stuff definitely Happens it’s more about the vibes, which are impeccably created. It’s a deeply interior novel, and the biologist is a beautifully-realized character. At just about 200 pages, it moves quickly and it’s honestly hard to put down even as the sense of unease grows as you’re reading it. I’d recommend reading it mostly during the day, it was hard to get out of my head at night. One of the best books I’ve read this year. ( )

[n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.]

That VanderMeer takes a ‘less is more’ approach is embedded right from the moment the reader discovers that they will not learn the characters’ names. This sets out a ground rule—that you will barely get the amount of information you need, and not a comma more—and it reinforces the strange, strained relationships between the scientists, who will share a transformative experience without knowing anything about each other, and between their expedition and Area X, an intensely, compellingly weird landscape.

The story is a first-person narrative, the ‘I’ is a product of an isolated youth, an ‘expert in the uses of solitude’. This makes for an interesting point of view, especially here. The question of the reliability of the narrator naturally enough arises, but is more difficult to answer when events recounted never seem to amount to more than hints as to something else: the past, the future, a different interpretation.

The very first feature the four scientists encounter is the foot of a stone stairway that tunnels down into the ground, which the narrator stubbornly persists in calling a tower. The scientists are part of an official investigation into the ‘mysteries’ of Area X, but all they really discover, even those that survive, is that the mysteries are far more evolved than anyone expected. They entered the Area X territory in the hope of finding out about its mysteries, but three out of four do not survive their encounter with its unmediated reality. They arrive under instruction to record information about Area X but Area X seems, in its unexplained way, to be recording itself, keeping the scientists’ records as well as their remains.

By the end, the narrator has acknowledged the collapse of her "compulsion" to "know everything"¸and that even if she had clung to it, “[o]ur instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish." What makes this compelling is that it is an admission not of defeat but of a radically altered perspective of her role in relation to uncanniness, which, under the circumstances, seems the only sane admission to make.
VanderMeer pulls off the remarkable feat of presenting an immensely rich and immersive story in a narrative style that is elusive and ambiguous and a linguistic style that is reticent yet precise. This is a compelling combination.

“Area X” is a stretch of countryside (woods, marshes and coastline) where for the past thirty years something strange has been happening—supernatural perhaps, or something alien. It’s expanding too, its perimeter creeping outwards year on year.
    Like several other readers, this idea immediately reminded me of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic from the 1970s, and there the people who cross the Zone’s invisible but well-defined boundary are chancers, desperadoes going in illegally, alone or in pairs, looking to bring back out some of its strange (and valuable) alien artefacts, risking their lives and very sanity in the process. Here in Annihilation it’s teams of specialists, part of a covert government operation, and this novel documents the latest such expedition (supposedly the twelfth). Their task is to map, take samples and generally explore Area X—also to learn more about what may have happened to the previous expeditions. In other words, although all volunteers, they’re human guinea pigs too: a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and our narrator, a biologist.
    But have they been told the complete truth? Beyond the border things turn out to be “alien”, not in a Hollywood sense, but more in the way a dream is strange: the landscape itself doesn’t look particularly odd, yet nothing ever quite adds up or makes sense. Area X messes with your mind, and almost from the start this latest expedition begins to unravel.
    For me, this was one of those novels where I felt more might have been made of a good idea. Also, this is a rare example where I liked the film version more than the book (it’s usually the other way round). But then, this is only the first part of a trilogy, so I’m guessing the remaining two do take this a lot further (not sure I’ll be reading them to find out though). Much preferred Roadside Picnic. ( )

I really enjoyed this, as bizarre and unsettling as it is. The scientific expedition that sets out to explore a strange area with a barrier to entry and crazy phenomena inside. The hypnosis to make the team relax (or comply?), the way you can't trust what you see and everyone who has come before has never really returned, even if they physically did. I recall watching bits of the movie based off this, but I don't think I saw the whole thing. I certainly liked this book better than what I recall of the movie though. ( )

3.5 stars. It takes about 250 pages for this to get somewhere. The first chunk of the story is like if "liminal space" subtle dread meets Office Space. The last part of the book truly heats up and feels like classic VanderMeer. It was kind of a drag but those last 100-ish pages were 5/5, and the main reason I want to finish the series. ( )