Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Four women – a psychologist, a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor – are sent into the mysterious Area X to investigate after the failure of eleven other expeditions. Shit gets weird.

Yeah, I just don't dig Weird as a genre, with the notable exception of Kelly Link. This book is all about what the Weird is about – infiltrating consciousness with inexplicable but somehow still meaningful memes – and I just . . . don't . . . care. Our narrator has been stripped of her name and parts of her identity; the book explores her personal isolation as it tells an entirely unresolved and unexplained story of the powers running wild in Area X, and how they eat people alive and transform them. All the expected moves are here: you've got your sudden deaths, your forebodingly inexplicable writings on the wall, your encounters with the still living but altered remains of former colleagues, etc. I don't know, for a genre so intent on the operation of the strange on the consciousness, the Weird is just so damn obvious.

I don't even need an explanation – the Weird can supply one or it can't, in my experience, because the explanation is largely irrelevant to the project of Weird. Which is, you know . . . being weird. This book doesn't supply a single explanation. There are two others in the trilogy that might, but . . . eh.




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