…when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

Area X was an area cut off from the rest of civilization, reached only by an enigmatic process of crossing a border. Reclamation of the land by nature was erasing any evidence of previous human habitation. Mysteries spark curiosity, and several expeditions had been sent into Area X armed with supplies and the ongoing mission of “investigation of into the mysterious Area X, slowly working [their] way out from base camp”.

The first expedition came back with descriptions of an Eden. Mass suicide was the result of the second expedition.  And the members of the eleventh expedition returned as mysteriously as they left and soon after died of cancer.  Now the twelfth expedition is set to depart.  The four women who make up this expedition–a surveyor, an anthropologist, a psychologist and a biologist–are tasked with mapping terrain and documenting all that they see and experience, while somehow managing to avoid the dangers of Area X.

Jeff Vandermeer’s first novel in the Southern Reach Trilogy weighs in at 195 pages, but in those pages he delivers a tight, menacing tale that begins shrouded in mystery and progresses with revelations that serve to deepen that mystery while wrapping the reader in an ever tightening grip of suspense.

I have learned to expect the unexpected with Jeff Vandermeer. Even then, I didn’t expect this.  9/10 stars.

Continue reading Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer →