Annihilation ~ Jeff VanderMeer (Southern Reach #1)
★★★★★
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.
I loved this! It's so atmospheric and spooky! It doesn't really give you all (or any, for the most part) answers, but I think that added to the atmosphere tbh and I appreciated that. If it had attempted to answer literally everything, I think it would probably have fallen into the pit of parody like the Illuminae Files did for me. What this short book accomplished spectacularly for me is that it felt like a half-forgotten nightmare or a memory I've repressed. I felt, reading it, that I had read it before, but not in the sense that it was formulaic or overly predictable, or even that it was a blatant rip-off of something else. No, rather it gave me strong sensation of sensory discomfort and the idea that what is familiar is not familiar, that what is real is actually very much not real, which I believe was entirely intentional and marvelously well-executed. It felt like a video game, along the lines of Silent Hill 2 but with a survivalist, environmental-activism message thrown in there.
That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
The pacing of the spooks and the interspersed flashback scenes were all very well done and effective. I loved how the familial drama was done in this. A lot of high concept genre work tends to make the mistake of drama for the sake of it, unrelated to the narrative threat, and that is usually extremely boring and makes for dreadful fiction, in my opinion. But this book utilized its backstory and interpersonal relationships to further the plot and connect to the themes of the main narrative. It was so good! The characters themselves all felt real and distinct and I really just loved them all.
These things are real and not real. They exist and they do not exist. I remake them in my mind with every new thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are slightly different. Sometimes they are camouflage or disguises. Sometimes they are something more truthful.
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