"Annihilation" by Jeff VanderMeer

Lurking between the weird and the horror, there’s something beautiful about Annihilation. Area X is strange and unknowable; it’s surreal and beautiful and horrifying and dangerous and natural and parasitic. The characters in the book are a mirror of their environment: nameless, hostile, and unreliable as the weird world they’re stuck inside. In some ways, the anthropologist, the surveyor, and the psychologist are as unknowable to us (and the biologist) as the subject of their investigation.

Annihilation is a story of unknowable, unrelenting change. It is filled with a palpable and tragic sense of regret that leaves a sour aftertaste. It’s the feeling that things could have — should have — been different; it’s the feeling that something irreplaceable has been lost; the regret of lives fed into a meat grinder, only for it to spin faster. I’d hazard a guess that for some people, it’s a powerful read, and that for others, it is tedious. Little is explained, and what is is barely so — blurred connections and tepid conclusions spun together in a vain attempt to rationalize the unknowable. The point is, at least in my opinion, that there is not enough information, nor honesty, for anyone involved to come to any real conclusion or solution.

There are a lot of interesting observations to make about changes between the book and film — the latter is how I was first introduced to the story — but the one that will immediately stand out to anyone (and also isn’t a spoiler) is how the characters in the movie are named, and no one in the book gets anything but a title. In the book, the powers that be intentionally and explicitly dehumanize the characters while encouraging the characters to humanize the environment they’re being fed to.

I’m loath to talk more in the context of a review because I’ll start getting into major spoiler territory. I liked the book; while I don’t think it’s a masterpiece it does a great job with its premise and has fantastically compelling development for the biologist despite the short length of the novel. It is worth reading, and is more than worth a deeper and longer examination.