REVIEW: Annihilation by Jeff VanDerMeer - a poignant and beautiful book about decay

When I get a book recommendation, I don't read blurbs. I don't read a synopsis, or a review. I go in blind. In fact, when I decide to read a book, I don't really look at the cover until after I have read it, either.

I was referred to Annihilation by Jeff VanDerMeer by proxy. A YouTube video was sent to me, and from there, an obscure reference to the lighthouse that features so prominently in this book allowed me to connect the dots.

And then, I got my grubby mitts on the book and I began a journey. A short, beautiful journey that is full of lush horror, vegetation, observation, perception, wonder, regret, hope, torture, and exploration.

Annihilation is told from the perspective of a character we only know as The Biologist. She is on an expedition within an area known as Area X. There have been other expeditions before, and they have all ended in disaster, ruin, or failure.

This makes Area X a book where, for the most part, there is no "big bad", beyond the very environment being explored, and the doubts that start to be drawn from the straws of trauma that the members of the expedition jointly experience.

Written in the first person, we see a convincing, inquisitive rendition of a world that requires and demands scientific explanation, from someone so fittingly qualified to do exactly that.

I want to tell you about everything that happens in this tale, the way it beautifully meditates on the most obscure details of regret, cellular structures, fungus, flowers, creatures, sound and even the damp Earth itself, but if I did, I would be spoiling it.

I do not want to do that. This book is short, sharp, to the point. Horrific.

It takes you by the shoulders, and holds you down, gnashing at something within your mind. It makes you keep turning the pages - not because there is a constant threat in its concise pages, but because you want to discover along with The Biologist as she herself discovers.

I must address the fact that the game that I thought was an original work (and it surely is, Clair Obscura: Expedition 33) - draws some significant inspiration (or convergence) from the themes explored in Annihilation. In Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 it is a tortured woman who is seen as the core of the dangerous, forbidden and deadly zone, and in Annihilation, it is the environment itself.

Everything dies, everything decays, everything returns to its elemental matter, to be reused by the environment; and Jeff VanDerMeer shows us, through The Biologist's eyes, so many beautiful and poignant examples of this. Examples that I can't share with you, because damn it, it will just poison the thrill of you going off and reading this incredible book yourself.

Which you should do. And then. You should see the film. That is great too. Then, go and read the rest of the books in this Southern Reach series, which is what I will be doing next, because I feel like there's more of a world that I want to explore.

Annihilation doesn't leave me with questions - it leaves me with a desire to explore, appreciate the little things while they are still around, and to not dwell too much on the past, but to recognise, that in that past, there may lurk some mistakes that ultimately, created the present.

Annihilation leaves me with a desire to discuss, not to question, and, through that discussion, explore the other ideas that people have about Area X.

You really must visit it to understand. I just hope that you will return from it unscathed.