Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
196 pages
Published 2014
Read June 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I have the impression, nurtured from io9 lists and book recommendation threads and news of movie deals, that VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy is regarded as one of the hot new sci-fi properties of the present day. The blurbs on the back, all by au courant rising stars in the genre world, certainly don't stint on adjectives of wonder and transcendence and dread. Yet for me, while I found it an entirely adequate and engrossing little novel, this first installment lacked "the force of myth" that so struck Charles Yu. Much of the blame rests with VanderMeer's brisk, airport-ready prose, simple descriptives and declaratives tasked with hurrying us through a sort of bog-standard chthonic transformation horror. I may have mocked the self-serious youngauthorstyle of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Threshold, but at least that had presence.
Comparisons to Threshold are inevitable: Both books deal with intrusions of mind-bending horrors-from-beyond, take place (in whole or in part) in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle, and find thematic inspiration in various creeping marine invertebrates (trilobites for Kiernan, starfish for VanderMeer). The central characters of both books happen to be young female scientists, as well. Mostly, though, Threshold is the most recent of my limited encounters with pseudo-Lovecraftian jibber-jabber -- of course it's going to be the first thing I think to compare this to. Threshold tells a more emotional, impactful story with its characters, whereas the plot of Annihilation makes at least a modicum more sense overall, and is blissfully free of magical albinos. I think the two books average out to be equally enjoyable -- memorable, but perhaps not classics of the genre.
So why is Annihilation goddamn everywhere, snapping up sweet movie deals and generating constant internet chatter, while Threshold appears essentially forgotten? I suspect it's that airport-novel prose -- exactly the sort of thing primed to appeal to a large fan-base.
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