If J.J. Abrams and Margaret Atwood collaborated on a novel, it might look something like `Annihilation’, the first in an extraordinary trilogy.
For thirty years, Area X, monitored by the secret agency known as the Southern Reach, has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border– an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness. Eleven expeditions have been sent in to investigate; even for those that have made it out alive, there have been terrible consequences.
`Annihilation’ is the story of the twelfth expedition and is told by its nameless biologist. Introverted but highly intelligent, the biologist brings her own secrets with her. She is accompanied by a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, their stated mission: to chart the land, take samples and expand the Southern Reach’s understanding of Area X.
But they soon find out that they are being manipulated by forces both strange and all too familiar. An unmapped tunnel is not as it first appears. An inexplicable moaning calls in the distance at dusk. And while each member of the expedition has surrendered to the authority of the Southern Reach, the power of Area X is far more difficult to resist.
`Annihilation’ is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which will be published throughout 2014: volume two (’Authority’) in May, and volume three (’Acceptance’) in September 2014.
About the Author :
Jeff VanderMeer’s New York Times–bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy has been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. His other books include Hummingbird Salamander, Dead Astronauts, Borne (in development as a TV series at AMC), and The Strange Bird. VanderMeer has lectured at MIT, Yale, Vanderbilt, and Columbia. Most recently, he gave the John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. His Florida reporting has appeared in Current Affairs, TIME, the Nation, and Esquire. VanderMeer lives in Tallahassee.
Review :
Praise for Annihilation and the Southern Reach Series:
‘I’m loving the Southern Reach Trilogy … Creepy and fascinating’ Stephen King, author of The Shining
‘Hauntingly weird and brilliantly new … These are contemporary masterpieces and career-defining novels’ Guardian
‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A psycho-geographical tour de force, channeling Ballard and Lovecraft to instill the reader with a deep, delicious unease’ Financial Times
‘Haunting … Annihilation is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarization’ Daily Mail
‘Shot through with echoes of Lovecraft, Orwell, and Kafka … compulsively readable’ Entertainment Weekly
Creepy … an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out’ Washington Post
‘[An] altogether fantastic book … Annihilation is a book meant for gulping – for going in head-first and not coming up for air until you hit the back cover’ NPR
‘A strikingly effective chiller with a classically Lovecraftian premise’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘It's the novel's unbearable dread that lingers with me days after I've finished it’ The Paris Review
‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel’ SFX Magazine
‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller … A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards. I loved it’ Lauren Beukes, author of Bridge
‘Annihilation feels akin to isolated sci-fi terrors of Alien … teases and terrifies and fascinates’ Kevin Nguyen, author of My Documents
‘Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent’ Warren Ellis
