Annihilation is a 2014 science fiction horror novel by Jeff VanderMeer and the first novel in the Southern Reach trilogy. Area X, a once lightly populated region, has been under quarantine for decades for unknown reasons, long since reclaimed by nature. There have been 11 expeditions into the region, most of them meeting bizarre and violent ends. The last expedition had all of its members return home under mysterious circumstances, mere husks of their former selves, before all succumbing to aggressive cancer. Now, the 12th expedition is underway, made up of four women including our narrator, the biologist, whose husband was part of the 11th expedition. They struggle to comprehend the phenomena they uncover in this hostile yet strangely captivating environment, the trust between them slowly eroding.

I’ve been interested in starting this series for a long time, especially after I saw the film adaptation for the first time back in 2018. I’ve known for a long time that the film is very different in a lot of ways, and I’d had enough experience with VanderMeer that I knew he likes to get weird, leaving me excited to see what this book would have in store for me. Though I wasn’t exactly surprised by the weirdness in this novel, I was taken aback by how much more nebulous the phenomena within Area X were, leaving me eager to continue with this series as soon as possible after this bite-sized appetizer of a read.

What helped to captivate me so much with this book was the fact that it is the biologist’s field journal we are reading. I’m a sucker for the idea of a story being actual media recorded in the narrative’s world, but I also really enjoyed how this had the story shaped by the biologist herself. On the one hand, we are treated to her expertise as she tries to study and comprehend what she encounters, studies, and experiences on this expedition. On the other hand, her point of view cannot escape being brought into question as she herself cannot avoid being contaminated by Area X. Though I wouldn’t characterize her as a typical unreliable narrator, there’s no escaping the sense that she’s been compromised somehow.

In this way, her ability to persevere under such unknowable, often harrowing circumstances made her an admirable character. Through references to her troubled relationship with her husband and the other ways in which she tells us how she struggles with connecting with other people, all the while seeming very capable when left to puzzle over things on her own and working in the field, there was a poignant sense that Area X is somewhere she was born to explore. I’ve been left especially with a feeling that, despite how quickly she became compromised by the place and continued to physically change in indistinct ways as a result, there is something indomitable about her drive to explore and understand the place as much as possible, leaving me with the perhaps foolish hope that her record of events can still be trusted.

For the most part, I found the vagueness of it all very tantalizing; we are presented with a lot of clues and information about what happened to past expeditions, but nothing definitive enough to really feel comfortable in any sense of understanding. This fed in well to an underlying sense of anxiety, as whether something is a past or ongoing threat, or even a real threat at all, is often brought into question. The terror of this situation was balanced by an uncanny sense of wonderment in me, making this work a particularly great balance of science fiction and horror; my sense of never wanting to be in such a place was equaled by my desire to understand it.

The only real snag I feel when I think about this book is that it does a great job of hooking me into continuing the trilogy, but this factor perhaps hinders it from being a great novel on its own, especially for how short it is. At no point did I mind how much it kept its mysteries obscured, as this enhances horror like this substantially, and I believe I would still have liked it as a standalone book, but I never had to worry about the story not continuing either; I already knew there was a sequel at the ready for me. It seems this was all a part of the plan, as it were, as the entire trilogy came out within the year 2014, but this book feels just a little bit stunted all the same. Maybe my mind will change once I see the complete picture.

Final Thoughts

Despite these small criticisms, Annihilation is a great science fiction horror novel that will almost certainly whet your appetite for delving deeper into the mysteries behind Area X and the clandestine Southern Reach organization that keeps sending these expeditions across its uncanny borders. If this brief outing is a strange as you’d like things to get, I believe it’s still a satisfying enough adventure to capture the imagination with incomprehensible biological horror, even if you’re left with a bit more questions than answers.

My Rating: 4 out of 5