Annihilation
Going into this book, I had a lot of meta information. The author released the entire trilogy in one year. There's a movie coming out next month. It has an all-female cast. Weird shit happens. But I didn't know a ton about the book itself.
That ended up being a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would have picked this book up on it's own, or at least been as eager as I was to read it. I would have had all these preconceived notions about what it was and I would have shied away, always reaching for something else. As it is, I ended up enjoying this book a lot.
It wasn't until I was almost done with it that I made the connection to Lovecraft. When the biologist finally confronts the Crawler, I was very strongly reminded of the handful of Lovecraft stories I read several years ago. The eldritch horror that the mind cannot even comprehend was a signature of his, and I was excited to see it pop up again in modern literature.
It turns out that there's some of a resurgence of this sort of story lately, dubbed "weird fiction". It's that weird fiction that threw me off - I had no idea it was a subcategory of horror. So while I was expecting a science-fiction story, I got a very different one.
This book was excellently crafted, with a growing sense of dread throughout. There's a lack of characterization here. The narrator - the biologist - is the only one who feels like a complete person, and even she doesn't get a name. But that's clearly on purpose and done for a very specific reason that the author manages to pull off. It helps isolate the biologist, right from the beginning, and provides a logic to ever her strangest decisions. Of course, her unreliability as a narrator adds to that.
I get the sense that the rest of this trilogy is very different, and I'm excited to get some answers to the questions that this story raised. But even without the promise of those answers, this book is nearly perfect on its own. The ambiguity and mystery only add to the horror, and I can't help but wonder if drawing the curtain back will lessen that effect somewhat.
That ended up being a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would have picked this book up on it's own, or at least been as eager as I was to read it. I would have had all these preconceived notions about what it was and I would have shied away, always reaching for something else. As it is, I ended up enjoying this book a lot.
It wasn't until I was almost done with it that I made the connection to Lovecraft. When the biologist finally confronts the Crawler, I was very strongly reminded of the handful of Lovecraft stories I read several years ago. The eldritch horror that the mind cannot even comprehend was a signature of his, and I was excited to see it pop up again in modern literature.
It turns out that there's some of a resurgence of this sort of story lately, dubbed "weird fiction". It's that weird fiction that threw me off - I had no idea it was a subcategory of horror. So while I was expecting a science-fiction story, I got a very different one.
This book was excellently crafted, with a growing sense of dread throughout. There's a lack of characterization here. The narrator - the biologist - is the only one who feels like a complete person, and even she doesn't get a name. But that's clearly on purpose and done for a very specific reason that the author manages to pull off. It helps isolate the biologist, right from the beginning, and provides a logic to ever her strangest decisions. Of course, her unreliability as a narrator adds to that.
I get the sense that the rest of this trilogy is very different, and I'm excited to get some answers to the questions that this story raised. But even without the promise of those answers, this book is nearly perfect on its own. The ambiguity and mystery only add to the horror, and I can't help but wonder if drawing the curtain back will lessen that effect somewhat.
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