SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with this Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding--but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

Item Information Item Information

Format: TradePaperback
Author: VanderMeer, Jeff
ISBN: 9780374104092
Condition: Used
Dimensions: 7.50 x 0.60
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Year: 2014

Customer Reviews

Rating Snapshot

5 ★ 100%

4 ★ 0%

3 ★ 0%

2 ★ 0%

1 ★ 0%

3 Ratings

0 Recommendations

Review Images

Diverse and uniquely interesting

Haileigh B. - 10 months ago

The Psychologist, the Anthropologist, the Surveyor, and the Biologist are four nameless women tasked with exploring Area X. They have been prepared thoroughly and will hopefully not end up crazy, dead, or missing like the multiple expeditions before them. Area X isn't polluted, filled with nuclear mutants, or any sort of typical danger. As the plot progresses different dangers and duplicities present themselves in a way that makes the novel a suspenseful page turner that won't easily be put down. While reminiscent of Scott Smith's "The Ruins" Annihilation still manages to be diverse and uniquely interesting while capturing the same claustrophobia and pressure.
HPB Staff Review
Bizarre and mysterious

D N. - 3 years 4 months ago

From the beginning, we are dropped into this world, into this scientific expedition that's exploring a region called Area-X, and from then on, details emerge little by little on what's happening, the bizarre and the more bizarre. Pieces are woven together from the mind of a female biologist, trying to turn the incomprehensible into something that could be grounded in reality. This book is the first in the Southern Reach trilogy, so the answers are out there...
HPB Staff Review
Exemplifies the best modern supernatural fiction has to offer.

Aidan N. - 5 years 6 months ago

I don't often read horror but after reading Annihilation, I'm seriously inclined to start reading more - a lot more. It's a novel of elegant simplicity: a team of four female scientists are sent on a mission into Area X, an undisclosed area that, several decades prior, underwent a violent and unexplained transformation. Once the team arrives in Area X, it immediately becomes clear that something is very, very wrong. As the group descends into chaos and madness, we watch it happen from the agonized perspective of the team's biologist as she slips farther from sanity and humanity as the landscape literally transform her into something...other. As stories go, it's a little sparse on characterization, though this is a factor of design not authorial neglect. It is, first and foremost, an atmospheric novel and it's the foreboding and increasingly alien landscape that takes center stage as the 'character' that demands most of our attention. Themes of social alienation, the hope for a renewal of lost love, and the struggle between authority and chaos play out in the background to create a richly textured novel that is unique, well told, and utterly weird.
HPB Staff Review

Past Searches

Annihilation

Available Offers

Overview

Customer Reviews

Rating Snapshot

Review Images

Diverse and uniquely interesting

Bizarre and mysterious

Exemplifies the best modern supernatural fiction has to offer.