This is the first fiction I read by Jeff VanderMeer; I had read and enjoyed his writer's manual Booklife, and when I saw this book as the i09 book club choice earlier this year I figured it was worth a look. I'm glad I did.

In some ways, this book is a slight throwback. It's told entirely from inside the mind of the narrator, a biologist discovering a mysterious area along with a handful of other women chosen for their backgrounds and their skills. It's mostly narration, like books from good old-time adventure writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard. Those stories tended to read like a newspaper account sometimes, but Annihilation reaches out and engages you right off the bat.

I highly recommend this novel for its depiction of a woman of science with attachment issues striving to understand how the place she explores is changing her, and questioning the nature of her mission and the people behind it. ( )

It took a while to get into, but I think I liked it more than the first ( )

An interesting concept. However, the characters seem to be consistently held at arms length, even to the point names are not given. There are timesI know I ought to feel… something… for the main character and it falls flat. I don't feel any need to continue with the series. ( )

A strong plot similarity to Lovecraft's "Mountains of Madness", in that the protagonist is a scientist describing an expedition into the unknown, where strange and incomprehensible horrors dwell that threaten with the possibility of swamping our world. It's an inherently interesting plot to me, and this book delivers well enough to recommend, though I have some reservations.

Rather than let the horror continuously build, VanderMeer keeps cutting into the action with flashbacks to the protagonist's earlier life, seeking to give us a better, more literary understanding of her, but her character just pales in interest compared to what's going on in Area X. Her thoughts also sometimes follow an incomprehensible logic, jumping from Point A to Point D with no evident clue of how D follows from A.

As the first in a trilogy, a lot remains unclear and vague after finishing the book, which is fine with me as I intend to read the next installment. The world building here is worth keeping on with to see how the nature of Area X develops and is revealed. And I'm eager to know, is the horror here something ancient, as in Lovecraft, or is it something newly created due to man's exploitation of the natural environment? Or a combination, like Godzilla? ( )

Such a frustrating 2/3 of a trilogy so far. If you're not a terribly great writer, but you have a strong idea for a story and you want to stretch it out into a multi-volume series, you really need to keep things of interest happening, propelling the reader along. Interesting characters also help. George R.R. Martin does this well. VanderMeer does not.

This second volume in the story of Area X moves outside of that great unknown to focus on the Southern Reach, the government agency tasked with studying it and finding out what in the dickens is going on there. The agency however is dysfunctional and becoming starved of resources. Into the situation comes "Control", an agent with a troubled background, who is being run by some higher up faction in order to test its own theories.

"Control" is as flat and dull a character as his moniker. Following up "the biologist" as a protagonist from the first volume, its clear that characterization is a major weak spot for VanderMeer. Unfortunately he spends a great deal of this book on it, so that compared to the first volume there is considerably less action and considerably more attempts at fleshing out a character. This does not succeed.

The writing itself... oh God.

A spiraling thread gone astray that might or might not be made of something else entirely - not even as scrutable in its eccentricity as a house-squatter of a snail that stumbled around like a drunk.

Um, yeah.

It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn't entitled to her memories. Perhaps no one was. But he pushed himself away from that thought, like an astronaut pushing off from the side of a space capsule.

No, it's not really like that at all.

But not everyone believed in the same versions. The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic, for example.

Logic, by essential definition, is the opposite of superstition.

The assistant director made Whitby embark upon a summary of hair-raising attempts at destruction...

... that described apparently failed attempts to kill a plant which was brought back from Area X. Burning, parasites, neglect, etc. "Hair-raising" to refer to attempts at killing a small plant, such as not watering it? Dear me.

Those examples end at page 120. I stopped keeping track at that point. Oh, and then there's the frequent use and misuse of the word "terroir". It's like when Martin suddenly fell in love with the word "nuncle" in, what, the fourth volume of his series? Stop it!

Still, I'm definitely going to continue on and read the concluding book of the trilogy. The ending promises more action, and there has to be, really. It is a good story, one just wishes it were told better. ( )