This was a weird one.

I only started reading (semi-)seriously earlier this year, but suffice to say, Annihilation was a new flavor for me. There's this detached and inevitable quality to the narration which I grew to appreciate, but it was a little off-putting at first. I guess that's what cosmic horror readers have come to expect as the sub-genre's grown, but again, I'm a new enough reader to not know for sure.

Even as I was still getting my feet wet, though, I got a lot of enjoyment out of the prose itself. Maybe it was a little spotty, but there are at least a dozen sparks of real poetry in this thing, and they were each a delight to read. Here's one of my favorites from the beginning:

"'This is impossible,' said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us that soon we'd have to use our flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I'd have been perfectly happy doing it in the dark."

Really incredible stuff.

As you might've gathered from the quote, each of the story's characters is nameless, instead referred to by their role in the plot. It's a detail that certainly added to the grim and gloomy atmosphere, but it felt increasingly forced as I kept reading. More on this in the spoiler section below.

Forced or not, I never felt like I needed names to follow the action. The events of the novella are largely isolated and are straightforward enough to allow for that unusual choice. They're also consistently engaging and tightly-packed; there was only one scene in the whole text that I found slow and/or boring, around the halfway mark.

You might be wondering, then, what gripes I do have with it. The truth is a boring one, but they're mostly thematic concerns.

I wouldn't call this book shallow, exactly. It knows what it's trying to say, and it says it loud and clear. But I actually think it understands and conveys its themes much too clearly. As I read, I kept waiting and waiting for that extra layer of complexity to unfold—for the near-cliche "deeper meaning" to come through, but it never did. There's a healthy literary dose in it, sure, but it felt more like a protein shake than a thanksgiving dinner. Which is to say, it lacks subtlety.

That allegorical ambiguity is something I really look for in a book and something I really value having on my shelf. So you can imagine my disappointment to find this well relatively dry. It was a strange mix of adult-level prose with YA substance. Maybe the word for it is "toothless."

But again, it's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. It's just not to my tastes.

- Lebenaut

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Spoiler Section

The book's action follows, primarily, a team of women investigating a strange, alien zone called "Area X." The members of this team have been instructed not to share their names with one another, because they would be irrelevant emotional distractions for the members of the expedition. I think that's a fair enough excuse; it provides a legitimate reason for why the protagonist doesn't use any names in her narration: she doesn't know any.

Except, the action is periodically interrupted by scenes from the narrator's past. These have pretty obvious and surface-level connections to the events unfolding in Area X, but most of them involve, in one way or another, her ex-husband. Obviously, her husband knows her name, and she his, but the prose conveniently ignores this, instead having the husband refer to the protagonist by a nickname ad nauseam.

It's a glaring enough inconsistency that it really challenged my suspension of disbelief. There are some secondary scenes—the ones from her childhood and research expeditions—that kept up the illusion with far fewer seams, which made it even more frustrating to dredge through the ones which didn't.

Also, the scene that I did find slow and poorly paced was the one in which she reads the journals in the lighthouse. There's an obnoxious level of detail provided for each action she takes, picking up, putting down, tossing, reading each little book. It could've readily been trimmed down and had her read the relevant passages directly in the prose. But hey, you've got to get to 200 pages somehow.