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pastel's book readin 2025 - Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
2nd book of the year!! I'm currently on a short visit with my family back in Texas and let me tell you, the empty small town beset with overcast foggy weather here was the perfect setting for this book. I finished this all in one sitting and after closing the book at 3am I went to go get a snack and felt incredibly unnerved walking the short distance from the guest house to the main house in the misty fog. especially because we often have javelinas wandering about between houses at night...
anyway! annihilation. such an incredible book. I had seen people online posting about the movie and often preferring the movie to the book, but given my curiosity that just made me want to read the book and figure out what all the fuss was about. I really enjoyed it! it hooked me really well and, despite my usual dislike of super spartan "flat" writing, this book utilized it incredibly well and it worked perfectly to contrast against all the wild stuff happening.
okay, thoughts below, getting into spoiler territory ahead!
from sentence one, this book appealed to my interests. it sets up the mundane strangeness of Area X perfectly within a handful of sentences, and echoes the perspective we get throughout the rest of the book, with a heavy focus on the details of the environment from a biologist's perspective.
"The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats."
incredible. 10/10. no notes. I am deeply obsessed with detailed environmental descriptions like this, and Annihilation is lush with them. there is no end to the amount of detailed environmental descriptions, and as we progress through the book they get more and more warped as the main character - the biologist - uncovers the unknowable strangeness deep within Area X. along with this, we also get a few bits of her backstory and life outside of Area X sprinkled in bit by bit, and I love how the little pieces we get perfectly set up foreshadowing for plot points that get revealed later. I am not very good at picking up on foreshadowing - I've always struggled with media analysis in general, and it takes me a much more concentrated effort to pick up on things that may seem obvious to most others - but this book made me feel very smart for picking up on what was going on lol. many moments where something happened and I went "I knew it!!!" out loud to nobody. a very satisfying read in that regard.
the biologist's attempt to write in a completely objective, unbiased, and factual way but still inherently failing due to being a human with human biases was really fun to read, and led to some writing details that I love love love. she takes the time to detail out the physicality of her emotions at the time, and each detail is expounded on in a way that is so vivid and put me right in the pages. to borrow a quote that House of Leaves also borrowed, "I see feelingly" is a perfect description of how this character moves through the world. everything is tactile. no detail is small enough to be left out. it leads to the perfect visual experience in my mind through the whole thing, and very much amplified the horror of what comes later.
one specific thing I especially liked was the narrator's handful of moments where she writes to us directly - most of the book is written first person, I did this or I did that, but very occasionally the narrator will say "what would you do," or similar, and it disrupts the narrative in a way that makes you remember: this has all already happened. this is a recounting. we know from the beginning that the biologist is the only one to survive, nothing that we read can be stopped or changed in any way.
"Someone, too, had carved their initials into one of the tables: 'R.S. was here.' The marks looked fresher than the rest of it. Maybe you carved your initials when visiting a war monument, if you were insensitive. Here it stank of bravado to drown out fear."
^ this is my faaavorite example of this in the book, though it happens a handful of other times. it's in the middle of this incredibly tense scene, the biologist ascending the lighthouse to seek out the mysterious and rogue psychologist who she is sure is scheming up some nefarious plot, and as she explores the horrible ruin of the lighthouse filled with the remnants of violent slaughter - and all of a sudden we get this jarring reaching out through the pages through us. this is obviously more of a general "you," a turn of phrase, but there are direct references to Us The Reader as well, like in this later bit in which she finds out that there had not been just thirteen expeditions to Area X, but in fact thousands, all the evidence hidden from them until just now:
"Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you're staring at it now."
GOD it's so good. the subtle insinuation that we're yet another explorer doomed to her same fate, following in her footsteps unknowingly. just incredible.
the final confrontation with The Crawler as the biologist descends the Tower once and for all was so so riveting as well. I was crocheting while reading and I had to just put it down and focus on the book after a while because I could not divert any attention away from what was happening. there's a beautiful balance of the description of the horrors in Area X that contains both beauty and the grotesque, and the absolute extremes of it border on near-erotic at times (the biologist does describe the growing infection inside of her as orgasmic at one point...)
"In this new phase of my brightness, recovering from my wounds, the Tower called incessantly to me; I could feel its physical presence under the earth with a clarity that mimicked that first flush of attraction, when you knew without looking exactly where the object of desire stood in the room."
just incredible. and, to pull from House of Leaves again, I just love a character being compelled to the point of madness by an infinite spiral staircase.
I am just in love with all of it, beginning to end. I have a few other books in the queue right now (currently reading Lodore by Mary Shelley) but I do kind of want to eschew them and immediately get the next book in the series so I can return to the world. I am so so glad I read this, and I look forward to the rest of the books!! maybe I'll even check out the movie as well, who knows. overall, this would absolutely be a 5 star read for me if I were goodreads-ing it. still not entirely sure if I want a rating system on these things yet, but I didn't have a single moment reading this where I was unsatisfied or left wanting, so - 5 stars.
anyway! annihilation. such an incredible book. I had seen people online posting about the movie and often preferring the movie to the book, but given my curiosity that just made me want to read the book and figure out what all the fuss was about. I really enjoyed it! it hooked me really well and, despite my usual dislike of super spartan "flat" writing, this book utilized it incredibly well and it worked perfectly to contrast against all the wild stuff happening.
okay, thoughts below, getting into spoiler territory ahead!
from sentence one, this book appealed to my interests. it sets up the mundane strangeness of Area X perfectly within a handful of sentences, and echoes the perspective we get throughout the rest of the book, with a heavy focus on the details of the environment from a biologist's perspective.
"The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats."
incredible. 10/10. no notes. I am deeply obsessed with detailed environmental descriptions like this, and Annihilation is lush with them. there is no end to the amount of detailed environmental descriptions, and as we progress through the book they get more and more warped as the main character - the biologist - uncovers the unknowable strangeness deep within Area X. along with this, we also get a few bits of her backstory and life outside of Area X sprinkled in bit by bit, and I love how the little pieces we get perfectly set up foreshadowing for plot points that get revealed later. I am not very good at picking up on foreshadowing - I've always struggled with media analysis in general, and it takes me a much more concentrated effort to pick up on things that may seem obvious to most others - but this book made me feel very smart for picking up on what was going on lol. many moments where something happened and I went "I knew it!!!" out loud to nobody. a very satisfying read in that regard.
the biologist's attempt to write in a completely objective, unbiased, and factual way but still inherently failing due to being a human with human biases was really fun to read, and led to some writing details that I love love love. she takes the time to detail out the physicality of her emotions at the time, and each detail is expounded on in a way that is so vivid and put me right in the pages. to borrow a quote that House of Leaves also borrowed, "I see feelingly" is a perfect description of how this character moves through the world. everything is tactile. no detail is small enough to be left out. it leads to the perfect visual experience in my mind through the whole thing, and very much amplified the horror of what comes later.
one specific thing I especially liked was the narrator's handful of moments where she writes to us directly - most of the book is written first person, I did this or I did that, but very occasionally the narrator will say "what would you do," or similar, and it disrupts the narrative in a way that makes you remember: this has all already happened. this is a recounting. we know from the beginning that the biologist is the only one to survive, nothing that we read can be stopped or changed in any way.
"Someone, too, had carved their initials into one of the tables: 'R.S. was here.' The marks looked fresher than the rest of it. Maybe you carved your initials when visiting a war monument, if you were insensitive. Here it stank of bravado to drown out fear."
^ this is my faaavorite example of this in the book, though it happens a handful of other times. it's in the middle of this incredibly tense scene, the biologist ascending the lighthouse to seek out the mysterious and rogue psychologist who she is sure is scheming up some nefarious plot, and as she explores the horrible ruin of the lighthouse filled with the remnants of violent slaughter - and all of a sudden we get this jarring reaching out through the pages through us. this is obviously more of a general "you," a turn of phrase, but there are direct references to Us The Reader as well, like in this later bit in which she finds out that there had not been just thirteen expeditions to Area X, but in fact thousands, all the evidence hidden from them until just now:
"Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you're staring at it now."
GOD it's so good. the subtle insinuation that we're yet another explorer doomed to her same fate, following in her footsteps unknowingly. just incredible.
the final confrontation with The Crawler as the biologist descends the Tower once and for all was so so riveting as well. I was crocheting while reading and I had to just put it down and focus on the book after a while because I could not divert any attention away from what was happening. there's a beautiful balance of the description of the horrors in Area X that contains both beauty and the grotesque, and the absolute extremes of it border on near-erotic at times (the biologist does describe the growing infection inside of her as orgasmic at one point...)
"In this new phase of my brightness, recovering from my wounds, the Tower called incessantly to me; I could feel its physical presence under the earth with a clarity that mimicked that first flush of attraction, when you knew without looking exactly where the object of desire stood in the room."
just incredible. and, to pull from House of Leaves again, I just love a character being compelled to the point of madness by an infinite spiral staircase.
I am just in love with all of it, beginning to end. I have a few other books in the queue right now (currently reading Lodore by Mary Shelley) but I do kind of want to eschew them and immediately get the next book in the series so I can return to the world. I am so so glad I read this, and I look forward to the rest of the books!! maybe I'll even check out the movie as well, who knows. overall, this would absolutely be a 5 star read for me if I were goodreads-ing it. still not entirely sure if I want a rating system on these things yet, but I didn't have a single moment reading this where I was unsatisfied or left wanting, so - 5 stars.