Let’s keep rolling with the apocalypse theme, this is fun! With the feature film coming out this month, it was time that we cross Annihilation off our list. A couple members have read it, some of us have wanted to but haven’t gotten the chance, and from what we hear, the book stands up better than the film adaption probably will.
This short intro from The New York Times picks at the elements that got this title on our radars:
“A clandestine government agency called the Southern Reach has sent 11 mostly failed expeditions into Area X, where an environmental catastrophe has created a nasty new ecosystem that may be encroaching on our own familiar world. The latest group sent to explore the region is composed of four women known only by their disciplines: surveyor, anthropologist, psychologist and biologist.”
Enjoy this first book in the Southern Reach trilogy. Members have said the others in the series don’t hold up but that the first one is a strange walk through the woods and worth our read.
Book of the Month: ANNIHILATION
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Available at Amazon, The Strand or your local books store
Annihilation opens in theaters February 23, 2018. Trailer here.
POST-READ THOUGHTS:
We thought Annihilation was a lot of fun. Part adventure, part horror, it was a unique and concise read. If you didn’t have the chance, I highly recommend it. I’m not sure that the big screen adaption will be able to be quite as personal so take the opportunity to read up now!
As I was reading, I couldn’t shake the similarity in tone to some of my favorite HP Lovecraft stories. Jeff VanderMeer is definitely influenced by Lovecraft’s style of first-person letter/journal writing and the way VanderMeer writes about encounters with nature reflect the same insights that Lovecraft’s narrators react in stories like ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth‘ (one of my all-time favorites), ‘He‘, and ‘The Horror at Red Hook‘. If you’re looking for some more shock and horror, I highly recommend the collection of stories The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. I’ve also attached links to each of these shorts above. While Lovecraft doesn’t have a lot of technical science fiction, it certainly has a certain amount of overlap. Would love to hear your thoughts on the stories above and always happen to chat about Lovecraft’s mythos.
