Annihilation

My latest book from the public library is Annihilation: A Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Here's a bit about it from Wikipedia ...

Annihilation is a 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer. It is the first in a series of three books called the Southern Reach Trilogy. The book describes a team of four women (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor) who set out into an area known as Area X. The area is abandoned and cut off from the rest of civilization. They are the 12th expedition. The other expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma. The novel won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. A film based on the novel, starring Natalie Portman, was released by Paramount Pictures on February 23, 2018.

I learned of the book when the trailer for the film came out. Here it is ...



I'm only a bit beyond the beginning of the book, but there are some differences between it and the film. So far it's both intriguing and disturbing. Here's the start of a book review from The New York Times ...

Futuristic Thrillers

A clandestine government agency called the Southern Reach has sent 11 mostly failed expeditions into Area X, where an environmental catastrophe has created a nasty new ecosystem that may be encroaching on our own familiar world. The latest group sent to explore the region is composed of four women known only by their disciplines: surveyor, anthropologist, psychologist and biologist. Acting as narrator, the biologist takes us along as they make their way down a tunnel whose walls bear enigmatic and frightening messages that sound like Cormac McCarthy at his most biblical. Although her companions are gradually eliminated, the intrepid biologist presses on alone, finally reaching a lighthouse that holds the remains of all those earlier expeditions. Fear-fed violence ensues, and as required in this sort of novel, the biologist must foolishly descend even farther into the tunnel’s depths to confront a monster, the Crawler, so protean she can’t describe it — though at times its face seems to resemble a photo she’s seen of the lighthouse keeper ...