A "review" of Jeff VanderMeer - Annihilation

Packed in, all eyes turned in
No one to see on the quay, no one waving for me
Just the shoreline receding
Ticket in my hand, I'm thinking "Wish I didn't hand it in"
—Okkervil River

Ten years ago, I came across a profoundly dark and disturbing novel called House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. While it is not a horror novel per se it is a dense and uncompromising meditation on, among other things, a harshly unflinching study of mental health and a fear of the unknown. It set a bar that is nearly impossible to surpass and remains the gold standard of English fiction when it comes to its imposing sense of sheer existential dread and forboding.

It owes this power to its completely holistic, intricate design. House of Leaves is a masterwork of layered concepts interwoven and arranged with the care and precision of a watchmaker or the army of designers behind a sophisticated new Apple iGadget. Yet on its surface, there remain still the basic materials, the building blocks of a masterpiece: a house, a hallway, a rocky marriage, competing character motivations. Then conflict. And questions.

Questions about the unknown. Perhaps the unknowable.

But this is not a review of House of Leaves.

Leaving behind all the faces that I might replace
If I tried on that long ride
Looking deep inside
But I don't want to look so deep inside yet

If you make the best novel of a generation, there are bound to be a bevy of young Turks angling for their shot to dethrone you, and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation is a very good first salvo. From the first sentences of his story you are given enough detail to begin to worry, but not enough detail to know about what, precisely, is worrying you.

The plot can be distilled to its building blocks. Four explorers, experts in their respective fields, in what is effectively a nature preserve. Their mission is to explore it. Some authors build rich, elaborate worlds for their characters. Some construct whole planets of spice and sand, or galaxies or universes or intertwined multiverses that grow and clash with unfathomably vast empires who cross over all of time and space. VanderMeer needs no such infinities to be able to terrify. His sandbox is a comparatively small patch of land and lakes, a thatch of wooded terrain, a tower, a lighthouse. It is enough.

If H. P. Lovecraft's elder gods need stars and space and ages and eons to fill you with dread, VanderMeer is his antithesis. He's a minimalist, with a collection of effective, potent storytelling tools. He is no less a master watchmaker, though his product requires fewer moving parts. Many authors now rely upon the trope of the unreliable narrator, the guide you must necessarily follow, even if they prove themselves not worth the trust. The narrator of Annihilation, a trained biologist, is not exactly unreliable. Rather, she admits to herself, and thus to you the reader, that she is flawed, finicky, and all too human. She justifies her thoughts about as much as any of us do, asking not for your sympathy or your understanding, but simply stating her opinion of the matter and how it influenced her. Though you may not come to her same conclusions, she is not impulsive or whimsical. Her decisions fit her in the time and place she makes them. She is not asking you to agree, she is simply documenting the situation the way any good scientist would.

We sing "Is that marionette real enough yet
To step off of that set
To decide what her hands might be doing, ruining
The play to, in the ensuing melee, escape?"

The building blocks of Annihilation, though of many of the same shapes, form a much different design than House of Leaves. There still remains a rocky marriage, competing character motivations. Then conflict and questions. Where other authors say "the dark, distant infinite and unknowable is terrifying", VanderMeer turns this around and always simplifies, simplifies, simplifies. "The most terrifying thing about the unknown," he seems to say with this book, "is if it's right next to you, possibly even surrounding you, in front of you, behind you, beneath your feet, waiting. Confined, contained, but with no comprehension among any of you what is keeping you safe, or for how long you can stay that way."

The tower is a main character of the book, though it exists as only a physical structure. Even as an inert, immutable construct, it clearly holds a complex and possibly sinister personality all its own, and it poses the enigma at the heart of Annihilation. These explorers are following in the literal and figurative footsteps of several previous expeditions that explored and studied the same territory. If those earlier expeditions' notes never mentioned the existence of this building, conspicuously located where it could not be overlooked, then how did it get there and what is its purpose?

The explorers clash. They do research, they disagree with each other, the team dynamic dissolves and the biologist is so quick to point this out that it broaches upon insult to her peers. The story itself is blazingly short given the weight of its omnipresent, suffocating dread. Questions are raised, answers are posited, and the ceaseless sense of being watched and manipulated occupy nearly every page, yet by the end you realize that you've been lockstep following the biologist's narrative, minus her intimately humanizing background exposition, for only about a week. Her journaling is a blend of observation and confession as she performs her duties and, privately, questions precisely whom she is serving and to what ends her exploration will satisfy. You can follow the scientific method in the midst of life-threatening danger, but do you really want to?

We sail out on orders from him but we find
The maps he sent to us don't mention lost coastlines
Where nothing we've actually seen has been mapped or outlined
We don't recognize the names upon these signs

Annihilation may not be exactly about the explorers, or the nature preserve, or the unknown, or the impossible. Perhaps it's about the temporary, transient nature of things, the cyclical pattern of natural events, even of reality itself. It may not always be possible to get answers to all of your questions, but you will compulsively ask them because it is core to your character to seek to understand.

To understand even when, in the face of impossibility against all one's categorical nomenclature, every phylum, class, and genus of the plant and animal kingdoms cannot enlighten you.

Read an author-annotated version of chapter 1 of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation here: https://genius.com/3147796