Annihilation
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Annihilation
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Carolyn McCormick
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By:
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Jeff VanderMeer
About this listen
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.
Critic reviews
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
Poor reading
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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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Brilliant
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A Mystery within a Mystery
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Definitely my favourite from the trilogy.
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