“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective.”

Prior to reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, I had seen Alex Garland’s unnerving film adaptation and dabbled in Weird Fiction—the genre in which the author usually peddles—and so I was not quite prepared for the young adult fiction texture that marks most of the book.

Presented as the recovered journal of an unreliable narrator, this slim novel documents the expedition of four women into the mysterious Area X, an expanding swath of abandoned coastal terrain marked by a shimmering barrier and ecological aberrations. A place where Mother Nature has shed her nurturing instincts, within the bounds of which a person’s physical senses and mental processes become suspect. Are the walls of the unmapped underground structure made of stone or living tissue? Were the slimy fungi verses scrawled on the walls written there, or grown? Why are there dolphins so far inland, and why is there a familiar glint in that one’s eye? What about the few survivors of previous expeditions, who inexplicably arrived home dead-eyed and distant with no recollection of their journey? What is that tantalizing moaning in the night? Should I be worried about the spores that just got in my eye and make me impervious to the leader’s attempts at hypnosis? Wait, why are we being hypnotized in the first place?

While this intriguing premise does bear tangible fruit in the form of some vivid imagery and unsettling ruminations, it leaves the reader scrabbling for any point of contact. It is a struggle to connect to the nameless characters, the futile cataloging of seemingly subjective phenomena, or the slow motion nightmare atmosphere.

This cryptic approach still might have worked, however, the high concept that initially hooks the reader is too often pushed aside. Not for climactic, dread-inducing moments, or insightful commentary on the scientist’s altered faculties, or on the myriad existential horrors lurking on the periphery, but for sluggish navel-gazing and emotionless reflection. It moves forward in a dreamlike state, gently piling up mildly surreal occurrences without any reason to care, seldom squaring itself up with the metaphysical horrors inherent in its premise. It’s most effective when it considers the limits and burdens of human knowledge; when the characters futilely grasp beyond their areas of expertise or those very same bits of knowledge trigger screeching alarms when held against the uncanny phenomena they encounter. And isn’t the the crux of much modern discourse, that advances in scientific fields have coincided with a growing emphasis on our subjective experiences of reality?

It’s almost as if a brilliant short story was approved for watered down padding to get it to novel length in a lucrative market. Or, perhaps there is a single great novel hiding amongst this and its two sequels, and it was stretched out to make a trilogy. For my taste, it feels too much like Baby’s First Speculative Fiction, intending to throw the unwary reader off balance from the start and never let them recover. I was expecting meat and potatoes, but instead got mother’s milk.