Another book club book! Our theme for this month was books that had been adapted into movies recently, and I was really excited to read this one because I was intrigued by the movie and had heard from my brother (who has read the entire Southern Reach trilogy, of which Annihilation is the first book) that the movie was quite different from the book. So I wanted to read the series first and then see the movie, even though both aren't in my usual genre wheelhouse. The movie looks quite scary, and that's not normally my jam!
Well. I don't know if I would describe the book as being scary, exactly, but it definitely freaked me out. There is an Area X in this world, that is blocked off from the rest of the world, and periodically there are expeditions sent there to do...something. Observe and record and report on...something. It's never quite clear.
The current expedition is made up of the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. We never learn any of their proper names, not even that of the biologist, who is our (fairly unreliable) narrator. The framing of the book is that she's telling the story of what happened to her after it happened, which is one part of what makes it unreliable--she is choosing when and how to reveal the information she does, and at times mentions casually that something will happen a day later in the narrative, but for the most part the structure of the story is chronological, with flashbacks or memories to her life before the expedition.
I had a sense of unease for the entire time I was reading the book. The reader is never certain what's going on, and it's unclear how certain the biologist is about what's going on, and how accurate her version of events is, for a number of reasons. Other members of my book club found it very frustrating that we rarely get clear cut answers to anything, but that wasn't my experience with it, I think in part because I didn't expect a first book of a trilogy to have a full explanation of anything. But I also thought that was missing the point, a bit. I think it's both a weirder and more subtle book than what they were hoping.
A comparison that kept coming up was the television show LOST, because there's a group of people in this strange place and no one knows where it is or what it is or why they're there, really, and there's definitely scary stuff out there but no one can explain what it is. But LOST ended up collapsing because the creators kept insisting that they knew where it was going and that there was a rational explanation for all of it. Annihilation never makes that promise, implicitly or explicitly. So the creeping dread of not understanding is part and parcel of the experience. I genuinely have no idea what will happen in the next two books, but I'm definitely going to read them now.
Grade: A
Well. I don't know if I would describe the book as being scary, exactly, but it definitely freaked me out. There is an Area X in this world, that is blocked off from the rest of the world, and periodically there are expeditions sent there to do...something. Observe and record and report on...something. It's never quite clear.
The current expedition is made up of the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. We never learn any of their proper names, not even that of the biologist, who is our (fairly unreliable) narrator. The framing of the book is that she's telling the story of what happened to her after it happened, which is one part of what makes it unreliable--she is choosing when and how to reveal the information she does, and at times mentions casually that something will happen a day later in the narrative, but for the most part the structure of the story is chronological, with flashbacks or memories to her life before the expedition.
I had a sense of unease for the entire time I was reading the book. The reader is never certain what's going on, and it's unclear how certain the biologist is about what's going on, and how accurate her version of events is, for a number of reasons. Other members of my book club found it very frustrating that we rarely get clear cut answers to anything, but that wasn't my experience with it, I think in part because I didn't expect a first book of a trilogy to have a full explanation of anything. But I also thought that was missing the point, a bit. I think it's both a weirder and more subtle book than what they were hoping.
A comparison that kept coming up was the television show LOST, because there's a group of people in this strange place and no one knows where it is or what it is or why they're there, really, and there's definitely scary stuff out there but no one can explain what it is. But LOST ended up collapsing because the creators kept insisting that they knew where it was going and that there was a rational explanation for all of it. Annihilation never makes that promise, implicitly or explicitly. So the creeping dread of not understanding is part and parcel of the experience. I genuinely have no idea what will happen in the next two books, but I'm definitely going to read them now.
Grade: A
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