Featured Image Via: Jeff Vandermeer’s Website
Go With Me wouldn’t be a literary magazine without our own book club. Our first pick on our #52BookChallenge is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer.
Here’s what we thought about the book. If you want to get involved in the conversation join us over on our Facebook group.
Without giving too much away, the book was a captivating read. Although I didn’t find the first 50 pages that intriguing, I found myself suddenly gripped only a few pages after.
The book is the first of a trilogy called Southern Reach Trilogy and describes a series of four women who travel into an unknown land named Area X; an area that is cut off from the rest of civilisation and is prone to, shall we say, very strange activity.
The women are group number 12 to venture on the expedition where previous ones have been subject to murder, suicide, vanishing and post traumatic stress disorder after returning back to the real world from their journey into the unknown.
The book successfully captures different stages of panic and how humans handle fear differently. We sometimes think we have the ability to handle the scariest of moments, but once put in that actual position, we may perform in the complete opposite.
I felt enraptured by the mystery of Area X portrayed through a ever shifting landscape, unreliable narration from the unnamed main character and the sprawling darkness at the heart of the novel. At all times while reading Annihilation, you feel like anything could happen to the characters, you sit poised on the edge of a precipice. In the book they do not know each others names, which is purposefully done for the expedition and then as a reader, we are kept in the dark about their motives and identities. They are merely known as the biologist, anthropologist, psychologist and surveyor.
The book is a contemporary masterpiece, a captivating work of art and the first volume of an extraordinary series.
Who’s the author?
Jeff Vandmeer is an author, editor and literary critic. Usually writing for the ‘New Weird’ literary genre, Vandermeer swapped over to more mainstream writing with Southern Reach trilogies. Born in Pennsylvania, he spent much of his childhood in the Fiji islands where his parents worked for the Peace Corps.
At the age of 20, Vandermeer was blown away by the words in Angela Carter’s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. He once said that he’d, “never encountered prose like that before.” Carter’s writing and fiction inspired him to be fearless within his own writing.
Buy the book here now. And join us next week as we read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Join the conversation on our Facebook group and let us know what you think.
