Bookish Thoughts

This is probably going to be one of those trilogies where I just pretend that the second and third books don't exist. I don't think either adds much to what was a near-perfect little horror story. Which maybe isn't the fault of the books or the author. This trilogy trades on disorientation and suspense, and it's really hard to maintain those for any length of time. That's why Lovecraft only really wrote short stories. Acceptance  tries to explain what happened both before and after Annihilation . And while it's interesting, it's pretty unnecessary. I'm glad the biologist made it to the island and found something like peace. She got as close to a happy ending as she was going to (before she turned into a leviathan anyway). The story of the lighthouse keeper was interesting, but, again, I don't feel like it added much to the story. Aside from the interlude into the biologist's story, this book sort of lost me in the middle. I had a hard time ta...

Authority  pulls back a bit from Annihilation  to provide a bigger picture and answer some questions. Not too many questions, though. Annihilation  was laser focused on an unreliable narrator with incomplete and occasionally incorrect information. Authority  adds more characters and shifts its focus to the organization that's been organizing the expeditions that were detailed in the first book. Albeit, it's also told from the perspective of an outsider, the new director who has only just arrived on the scene and is tasked with making sense of the mess that's been left behind in the wake of the last expedition. Like the first book, this one kept me off balance, which was definitely intentional. But it occasionally got frustrating. The book plays fast and loose with time, slipping into flashbacks and jumping forward only to loop back with almost no warning. It helps adds to the general feeling of paranoia, but it also felt a little cheap and obvious at times, and it ...

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...