Written By: Emily Ballaine

A pristine wilderness. An environmental disaster zone. Both phrases describe the mysterious Area X that is the centerpiece of Jeff Vandermeer’s excellent new novel Annihilation, a psychological thriller that rejects the notion that a story must either be science fiction or literary fiction.
While the first expedition into Area X returned with tales of an unspoiled landscape free of human contamination, the succeeding expeditions all ended in suicide, murder, or disease. It is with this contradictory history of death and beauty hovering in the background that we are introduced to the members of the eleventh expedition, known only by their respective occupations: a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and our narrator, a biologist. Annihilation deals as much with each character’s competing feelings of revulsion and fascination with Area X as it does with the complicated group dynamic that arises when one is unable to detect the other member’s real motivations. Continue reading →