Annihilation

Awesome concept. Apparently part of an early 2000s speculative fiction movement that called itself the New Weird. I was not familiar but it's a fitting name, because this book is successfully weird. Four scientists are sent by some--government? organization? thing?--called the Southern Reach into Area X, an abandoned wilderness with strange, seemingly supernatural properties. These phenomena include mysterious disappearances, a tower/tunnel appearing out of nowhere, and plants forming the shape of words. This novel takes natural landscapes and makes them alienating, foreign. Actually, everything about this world is alien--the dialogue is cold and distant, the facts we're given may be unreliable, and we don't even know any of the characters' names. It's unclear if the story even takes place on planet Earth, elsewhere in the universe, or an alternate reality entirely. This is a book teeming with questions but reticent with answers. I would not recommend it to people who like closure or satisfying conclusions. About halfway through, I realized the book would not answer most, or any, of the puzzles it presented, and that killed a lot of its momentum for me. This is a pretty quick read, and it was definitely intriguing. I don't know if it was intriguing enough for me to read the three sequels. Maybe those have more answers. Major props, though, to Pablo Delcan, the guy who designed the cover, which was so cool I had to check out the book.