I think I picked up Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer sometime around when the movie loosely based on it came out in 2018. For whatever reason, I didn’t read it then, but as it’s a short book I decided to read it a few days ago.
The novel follows a team of women sent to investigate a strange area known only as Area X. Previous expeditions have occurred, but usually some weird misfortune happens to the participants (in one, members killed each other, in another, killed themselves, in the latest, they returned to their loved ones a shell and died within weeks). The book is narrated by the biologist of the group. None of the women have names, they are referred to only by their profession (the others being the psychologist, the anthropologist, and the surveyor). When they arrive, they find a large structure that doesn’t appear on any of the previous maps, which the biologist is immediately drawn to.
I enjoyed a lot of things about this book. The writing style was interesting, and at times very poetical. I also enjoyed the character study of the narrator, her past relationship with her husband, the particular quirks of her personality, and discovering her motivations for going on the expedition. However, I didn’t much care for the central plot of the novel — there’s too many questions about the setting that we don’t really get any answers for. I typically don’t need all of the answers when reading a book, it’s fine to leave some things a mystery, but I felt like we didn’t get any answers and that left me feeling frustrated.
Overall, I think this was a well-written book that will appeal to some people, but it just wasn’t to my taste.