Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer
I read this because the movie was pretty great. It turns out that almost everything I loved about the movie isn’t in the book. Also, his prose style still bugs me.
What the movie took from the book: A group of female scientists, including a psychologist, venture into a mysterious area from which previous expeditions either didn’t return or came back changed. The protagonist’s husband was on a previous expedition, and returned in bad shape and unable to say what was there. When the women go inside, they find weird shit, a lighthouse, and accounts by previous expeditions, and mostly don’t survive. Nothing is really explained; it’s all about exploring the mystery.
What’s in the movie that isn’t in the book: Virtually all of the specific things they encounter inside the area.
What surprised me about the book: It’s a Cthulu mythos story. That is, Cthulu isn’t namechecked, but the book is very directly inspired by Lovecraft. The movie does have some Lovecraftian elements and themes, but the connection is loose enough that it didn’t even occur to me when I saw it, while it was instantly obvious when I read the book.
I had the same experience with this book as I’ve had with everything else I’ve tried by Jeff Vandermeer: it’s well-crafted, it’s clearly doing what he wants it to be doing, it’s intellectually interesting, and it's not my cup of tea.
The characters are unnamed in the book, by command of the organization that sent them and for unclear reasons; they go along with this partly, I think, because the psychologist has hypnotized them, and partly because they are strange, detached people. In fact they seem to have been selected partly on this basis. In terms of the effect on the reader, the lack of names and the affectless characters adds to the sense of weirdness and makes you read the book as if you too are a detached scientist/explorer; the characters feel like specimens to be studied rather than people to sympathize with.
They find a deep tunnel, which the biologist persists in calling a tower, in which someone has written a neverending sentence in living, growing fungus; the content of the sentence is the exact sort of creepy vagueness that Lovecraft protagonists write in their journals when the Old Ones drive them insane and/or turn them into eldritch abominations. When they descend, they find an eldritch abomination. Later there’s a trip to the lighthouse, where they find a giant mound of journals by previous expedition members, all of whom appear to gone insane and/or turned into eldritch abominations.
What do those of you who’ve read the book make of the tower vs. tunnel thing? Is it to suggest that part of what’s going on in Area X is our perceptions distorting until they’re literally inside out and upside down? That Area X itself is reality turned inside out and upside down? To create in the reader a feeling of the acid just starting to kick in?
I liked the ending and a lot of the scenes were cool and trippy, but overall Vandermeer isn’t for me. I’m really glad I got to see the movie, though, because I think it made me feel the way people who loved the book felt when they read it.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2191955.html. Comment here or there.
What the movie took from the book: A group of female scientists, including a psychologist, venture into a mysterious area from which previous expeditions either didn’t return or came back changed. The protagonist’s husband was on a previous expedition, and returned in bad shape and unable to say what was there. When the women go inside, they find weird shit, a lighthouse, and accounts by previous expeditions, and mostly don’t survive. Nothing is really explained; it’s all about exploring the mystery.
What’s in the movie that isn’t in the book: Virtually all of the specific things they encounter inside the area.
What surprised me about the book: It’s a Cthulu mythos story. That is, Cthulu isn’t namechecked, but the book is very directly inspired by Lovecraft. The movie does have some Lovecraftian elements and themes, but the connection is loose enough that it didn’t even occur to me when I saw it, while it was instantly obvious when I read the book.
I had the same experience with this book as I’ve had with everything else I’ve tried by Jeff Vandermeer: it’s well-crafted, it’s clearly doing what he wants it to be doing, it’s intellectually interesting, and it's not my cup of tea.
The characters are unnamed in the book, by command of the organization that sent them and for unclear reasons; they go along with this partly, I think, because the psychologist has hypnotized them, and partly because they are strange, detached people. In fact they seem to have been selected partly on this basis. In terms of the effect on the reader, the lack of names and the affectless characters adds to the sense of weirdness and makes you read the book as if you too are a detached scientist/explorer; the characters feel like specimens to be studied rather than people to sympathize with.
They find a deep tunnel, which the biologist persists in calling a tower, in which someone has written a neverending sentence in living, growing fungus; the content of the sentence is the exact sort of creepy vagueness that Lovecraft protagonists write in their journals when the Old Ones drive them insane and/or turn them into eldritch abominations. When they descend, they find an eldritch abomination. Later there’s a trip to the lighthouse, where they find a giant mound of journals by previous expedition members, all of whom appear to gone insane and/or turned into eldritch abominations.
What do those of you who’ve read the book make of the tower vs. tunnel thing? Is it to suggest that part of what’s going on in Area X is our perceptions distorting until they’re literally inside out and upside down? That Area X itself is reality turned inside out and upside down? To create in the reader a feeling of the acid just starting to kick in?
I liked the ending and a lot of the scenes were cool and trippy, but overall Vandermeer isn’t for me. I’m really glad I got to see the movie, though, because I think it made me feel the way people who loved the book felt when they read it.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2191955.html. Comment here or there.