Reviews

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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823sarah's review

adventurous challenging mysterious fast-paced

4.0

VERY interesting and confusing book. super ambiguous, don't expect to understand what's going on, but captures an eerie and unnerving energy very well

abandonedmegastructure's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

If you google the phrase "Scientists enter a zone", you will get results for Annihilation (well, the movie - which I now understand had no reason to exist except for that one good moment and giving us some pretty gifs). And yeah, this sure is a book about scientists entering a Zone!

The atmosphere is top-notch. VanderMeer slowly builds up a haunting world that blends seemingly pristine nature with uncanny otherworldly manifestations. The encroaching strangeness, which mimics Earth life yet irrevocably alters it, evokes alien planets and fairy realms of myth with equal aplomb. The threats from within the team, too, are memorably creepy. Some might call it cosmic horror, but I'd call it some other thing, some new genre, in dialogue with cosmic horror and with some interesting things to say to it.

The viewpoint character ended up being remarkably relatable to me in ways that surprised even myself, which I don't think was intended but am grateful for anyway. You, reading this review, may of course not be me (on account of being you, and not me) (unless you're me reading this in the future, in which case hi), so for you I'll simply note that she's complex, well-characterized, and undeniably interesting.

Even so, the first 150 pages didn't especially impress me. The plot felt somewhat wavering, too drawn-out, the balance of creeping unease and interesting revelation too far slanted towards the former. Some passages were great: the first descent into the Tower, the biologist reminiscing about her nighttime observations, basically any scene with the psychologist in it, but a little too often I found the story lingering when I wanted it to move on.

That said, the ending blew me away. In retrospect, that's kind of surprising for how unambitious it ultimately was. There's no grand revelations, no big guns-blazing action scene, no confrontation with a sneering villain - and yet it feels cohesive, clean, and memorable. After wondering for the longest time whether I was going to bother with the rest of the trilogy, it is these pages that assured me it would be worth my while.

So if the description of the setting sounds interesting, and 200 pages manageable - give this a read, and don't let anything deter you from finishing this once you've picked it up. It's great!

lindseyannd's review

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2.0

. Read because I saw the movie, which gave me so much existential dread. The movie lead to high expectations for the book that just weren’t met.

thomguttridge's review

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challenging mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

katyab's review against another edition

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3.0

Unsettling, mysterious, eerie and immersive. But if you're wanting answers to pretty much anything in the plot... well, not so great. Sometimes I like a book that indulges in its own mysteries and doesn't always play fair, but here I felt like I needed something more than what I got, and I don't really like it when the first book in a trilogy feels like a setup for answers later down the line.

VanderMeer creates atmosphere and environment brilliantly. A major encounter near the end of the book was an extraordinary and quite terrifying reading experience; I actually felt my body had been invaded. Love it when a book gives me that viscerally exciting feeling. It had a slowly building atmosphere of strangeness, and once the pacing stopped dawdling around at the start, it became more assured, even exciting. But there was something a bit robotic about it. Maybe it was the way the characters spoke – or the way they were recorded, as this is meant to be a journal – or the writing in general: the first-person narration seemed just a bit too eloquent that it started to seem stilted. What I really liked was the focus on language and the way the expeditions were connected through writing. It's an idea I'd have liked to break down in an essay, but again the lack of closure in the plot meant that I felt I didn't have enough closure on the theme of writing either.

I liked it, and yet I can't say that I loved it. It's really good, but there was something a bit too distant: either something about the book was distant from me, or I was distant from something in the book that would have made me enjoy it more. Can't quite put my finger on it. I don't think it's one I'll forget, though.