Back in 2018, Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi horror novel, Annihilation, got the Hollywood treatment and was adapted into a pretty well-received feature film. It also starred the likes of Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It looked rather intriguing, but also like it might scare the poo out of me. So I skipped it. Recently, I’ve been seeing the title pop up on Hulu and I’ve been tempted to play it some nights, but I decided to give it The Haunting at Hill House treatment and read the novel first.
Let me just tell you that this novel gave me the willies! Compared to almost everything else I’ve read this year, this book was insanely short, yet didn’t skimp on any details. The book was sort of a journal that recounted the experience of a biologist who was on an expedition to a place known as Area X. This placed was closed off to the world a few decades prior and since then expedition teams have gone to explore the area. Only problem with that is no one ever made it back.
That was, until her husband did. Only, he didn’t seem like himself, so the biologist had him hospitalized and interviewed until a short time later he died of “cancer.” The biologist decides to take part in the next expedition made up entirely of females and included a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor. After only a couple days at camp it is clear things are amiss in Area X. The group first discovers an odd tower that has strange writing on the walls. Not much progress is made after that because the anthropologist is found dead in the tower the next day.
She appears to have microorganisms growing within her, or decomposing her maybe. The biologist is nervous that this might be her future because the day prior she inhaled some spores from the writing on the walls. When her and the surveyor get back from the tower this second time the psychologist is nowhere in sight. This coupled with the biologist’s knowledge of the extreme hypnosis the psychologist was using, has her convinced that she was responsible for the anthropologist’s death.
The biologist decides to head out alone to explore the lighthouse that sits in the distance from their camp. Once inside, she sees an abundance of carnage, supplies, and eventually, a mountain of journals. It’s clear they were hidden so no one could read about all the strange occurrences in Area X. She eventually comes across the dying psychologist who knows that the biologist is changing, and won’t give up much more information about prior expeditions or why she had the anthropologist killed.
Eventually, the biologist realizes she will probably never leave this place and decides to go back to the tower to find the creature responsible for the writing on the walls. She calls it the Crawler and eventually comes face to face with it. Then, in part because of the change in her body from the spores, gets mentally probed by the Crawler before it releases her. She feels she will die in this place and that is why she is writing her journal for the next expedition to find.
Whoa. This book was mind-blowing. It all felt so real even though it was very clearly fake! I liked the anonymity of the characters and that they remained nameless. Based on what the biologist managed to share about her personal life, I can understand why she would stay in this place forever. Also, if this book isn’t just one huge reference about how freaking shady the government is, then I don’t know what I just read. Either way, a very interesting book and if science fiction interests you then definitely give this book a shot!