Book Review: Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer (2014)
The prompt to read this novel came from the excellent podcast The Bunker (not the one about golf). The guy who recommended the read explained that it was a great distraction for him at the height of Brexit madness, and so I turned to it as an escape from coronavirus lockdown. The genre is sci-fi/horror with a lot of suspense, and I found myself aggravated with the book, or myself, as I progressed through it very quickly. It stole several hours when I should have been sleeping, and then stayed in my mind after I switched the light out. The story revolves around bizarre happenings within an abandoned stretch of coastline known as ‘Area X’, which can only be accessed by crossing some sort of barrier. Missions made up of exhaustively trained recruits are sent into Area X to investigate what goes on there, and the novel is the account of a member of what was officially the thirteenth mission. This group consisted of four members, and it was encouraging to learn that they were all f...