Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation kicks off the Southern Reach series, which was a trilogy for 10 years until VanderMeer published a fourth book in 2024. A movie adaptation of Annihilation was released in 2018. The series, and this first volume in particular, are often described as classics and even appear on some all-time-best lists. It’s fair to say that with Annihilation, VanderMeer struck a chord with a broad reading public, and that the book has staying power — the version that I read was a new edition for its 10th anniversary with a specially written introduction. It does something for a lot of people. Just not me.

In the present, or perhaps in a very close future, something large and strange has happened on the Gulf of Mexico coast of Florida — probably between Apalachicola and where a line southwest from Gainesville would meet the coast, an area that has always been isolated and nearly bare of human habitation. Because Florida ranks third among US states in population and the images of teeming Miami or the vast sprawl around Disney World and Orlando dominate perception of the state, it’s easy to forget how empty and wild much of it remains. More than a third of Florida’s counties have populations of fewer than 50,000 people, and along the coast where VanderMeer sets his story no place for more than 200 miles has a population of more than 1000; it’s practically unpeopled.

Some kind of barrier has formed between the region, which has come to be known as Area X, and the rest of the world. Inside the barrier, uncanny things happen. The natural isolation of the region and the new barrier keep people out, while dimly described authorities have sent numerous expeditions into Area X, presumably to understand what is happening in there. Annihilation is the diary of a member of the eleventh expedition, the first to enter Area X in two years and made up of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and the narrator, a biologist. One of the rules of the expedition is that they do not use, or even know, each other’s names. The narrator says that they had supplies with them for six months, though as she describes the party’s hike from the border to the base camp set up by previous expeditions and does not mention any vehicles or pack animals, I do not see how that is possible. Right away, then, things are not as they seem, cannot be as they seem.

Part of the members’ training had been an expectation that Area X would affect them, but the trainers did not say exactly how. The record from earlier expeditions was unsettling.

The members of the last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in “premature dissolution of expeditions,” as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place. (pp. 4–5)

Later, much later, readers learn that the immediate previous expedition had included the biologist’s husband, nearly estranged by the time he departed, and that when he returned he had been physically present but mentally somewhere far, far away. The biologist does not relate whether this was a common fate for the people of the preceding expedition. What she does relate in the first chapter is that her expedition, too, would experience premature dissolution, and that she was the sole survivor. The novel’s narrative tension derives from these questions. What’s happening in Area X? Why is the biologist the only one who lives to tell the tale? Are the two related?

VanderMeer keeps readers unsettled.

In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a venomous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still, these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.
Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. … All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. (pp. 5–6)

One of the biologist’s ongoing worries is that Area X will colonize her, or that it already has. Early on, she breathes in what she thinks are spores from a fungus. Soon after, she finds that she’s perceiving her surroundings differently from how her colleagues are. Or at least how they say they are perceiving things. She’s already lying to them to hide the effects of the spores; have they been lying to her too? Are these some of the effects they are supposed to be researching?

Questions and uncanny experiences multiply. On the fourth day, the expedition finds a structure that the biologist instinctively and immediately calls a tower. But it’s a circular set of stones that mixed concrete and shells, some 60 feet in diameter, with a stair around its rim leading into the earth. They cannot see how deep it goes. “Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniformed and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there…” (pp. 6–7)

The book is full of moments like that, mismatches that seem to promise meaning, visions just on the verge of the numinous. There’s a dream logic operating, a solution just beyond reach. The structure of the book and the trilogy imply a grand scheme: the books have alliterative titles beginning with A, the chapters with I. Initiation, Integration, Immolation and so on — the sequence implies insight. The problem was that it never arrived for me, although that’s not quite my quibble. Annihilation reminded me of Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, another book concerned with a mysterious area that has unpredictable effects on people who come near it, a story that wrestles with the ineffable and ends without an explanation. I didn’t miss having one in Roadside Picnic, and I didn’t exactly miss one in Annihilation but I finished it nevertheless unsatisfied and without particular motivation to read the other two books. It may be that, having had the mysterious-area experience with Roadside Picnic, I didn’t find enough that was new to me to be really enthusiastic about Annihilation. Part of that will just be personal taste; some types of books I can read a great many of, like a good Bach fugue and many variations. Intimations of ineffability is not one of them, it seems.

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Doreen and Laura both read Annihilation when it was much newer. Doreen’s reviews of the first three Southern Reach books are here, here and here. Laura’s review of the trilogy as a whole is here; she was exasperated.