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Annihilation

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About this listen

 ’A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian

THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC

For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border – an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.

The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.

Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.

 Adventure Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Technothrillers Thriller & Suspense Fantasy Thriller Technology Scary Suspense

Critic reviews

Praise for ANNIHILATION and the SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY:

‘I’m loving the Southern Reach Trilogy … Creepy and fascinating’ Stephen King

‘Hauntingly weird and brilliantly new … These are contemporary masterpieces and career-defining novels’ Adam Robert, Books of the Year, Guardian

‘This trilogy is a modern mycological masterpiece … Remarkable … Tense, eerie and unsettling … VanderMeer writes much better prose than Poe ever did … This is genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived’ Guardian

‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike … Annihilation shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience’ Sunday Telegraph

‘A lasting monument to the uncanny … You find yourself afraid to turn the page’ Guardian

‘VanderMeer’s novel is a psycho-geographical tour de force, channelling Ballard and Lovecraft to instil the reader with a deep, delicious unease’ Financial Times

‘What a haunting book this is, lodging deep in the memory in similar fashion to otherworldly classics such as David Lindsay’s A Voyage To Arcturus … Annihilation is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read it’ Daily Mail

‘Astonishing, frightening, spectacular … I hope the trilogy will come to be seen not only as the instant sci-fi classic it is, but also as Literature’ New Statesman

‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel … A major work’ ***** SFX Magazine

‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. 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

‘Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent’ Warren Ellis
All stars
Most relevant
I wanted to like this - it’s a story that definitely appeals to me, but unfortunately the narration by Carolyn McCormick is very, very poor. I was often completely pulled out of the story because she has no idea how to read out loud, and would voice sentences in such a confusing way - random pauses, inappropriate intonations, complete mispronunciations - that I had a hard time following the story at all. I wanted to enjoy this, but honestly, it was a relief when it was over.

Poor reading

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NB: If you want to be completely fresh going into the book, not even knowing what the genre is, or any element of the plot, then I say, yes it's worth it, go for it, but don't read the rest of this review. There are no specific spoilers, but I discuss general tone, which gives a lot away.

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This book owes more than a little to H.P.Lovecraft's Antarctic novella 'At the Mountains of Madness.' The pacing is similar, the tone is similar, the authorial voice is similar, at times the language is similar (though less gloriously purple) and the plot is similar. Similar enough that Lovecraft's novella could be considered 'spoilery' for this book. But that is not a bad thing. At the Mountains of Madness is a highpoint of the Lovecraft canon, in my opinion, and deserves to be mined for inspiration. Still, if you are familiar with the cosmic horror genre, there is nothing particularly novel in this book. Although I haven't read them yet, I get the sense that the next two books in the series do venture a little more from Lovecraft's well beaten path to explore more of the conspiracy theory hinted at in this book.

The writing is good, not brilliant. But neither the laborious overuse of rhetorical questions, nor the occasional clunky sentence, pulled me totally out of the story. The ending felt weakly plotted. The protagonist's final visit to the main location ended very disappointingly, not because it ended ambiguously (I love mystery and loose ends), but because all his carefully built tension was just left to evaporate. I got the sense that he needed to be somewhere else in the sequel, so just gave up on that part of the story. But on the other hand, there was a revelation in the middle of the book which I thought very cool, and I didn't expect. I definitely had fun overall.

The biggest problem I had with this audiobook, was the narration. At times you could be forgiven for thinking that a computer voice was reading to you, so common were her odd emphases. She often stresses completely unremarkable parts of the sentence and minimises its key point, as if she wasn't following the story herself, or hadn't thought about how to best communicate each line. A couple of times I noticed the writer had specifically emphasised a word by placing it in italic, but the narrator ignored that and chose a different word to stress. Often she leaves virtually no gap between paragraphs, making them indistinguishable from sentences. Her character voices were good, nicely distinctive, I felt she got the surveyor and the psychologist dead right: I wonder if she is more of an actor than an audiobook reader. So all in all I didn't enjoy the narration very much. But on the other hand it wasn't bad enough to be unlistenable. Before buying, I'd suggest you check out the preview: it is representative of the rest.

Overall I really enjoyed my time with this book. Perhaps a little hyped (probably not surprising with a film on the way), but science-expedition meets cosmic-horror is a fun story that I really enjoyed revisiting.

At the Coastline of Madness.

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Gripping, thought provoking, well written. I am going to read the rest of the trilogy now. Hope they and the film live up to this first book!

Brilliant

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This is a unique storyline, and would make an excellent and terrifying horror film. I actually really enjoyed this book and would recommend to readers who enjoy murder mysteries, thrillers or sci-fi.

A Mystery within a Mystery

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Finished this in 3 days, incredibly interesting writing style. Leaves enough to the imagination to be as creepy as you need it to be.

An enjoyable and well written piece.

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