Annihilation

There's something weirdly cool about the story Jeff VanderMeer tells in Annihilation, and like a bad accident on the highway, it's impossible to look away.

Weighing in at just under two hundred pages, the first in VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy reads like something between the Twilight Zone, Strange Tales, and Alien. It is the story of a team of explorers assembled to conduct research in an area known as Area X. The zone in the southern part of the continent is an area cut off from civilization. The reason for the quarantine, as well as the length of time since it was quarantined, is unclear.

The area affected by... well, whatever it is--it is slowly growing. Previous expeditions have met with disaster, no one who returns is unchanged, and as the story opens, the protagonist is aware that those expeditions often came to strange and occasionally deadly ends. There is a palpable sense that the team members do not trust each other, nor do they know or understand why the other team members have been sent or have joined the expedition in the first place.

As the researchers start making their various measurements, analyses, and determining where they are going to go first, things begin to get weird. It becomes questionable whether the narrator is trustworthy, or even fully aware, either. It's an eerie and strange tale, and I admit finishing the story without any real clarity about what was going on, except that things were not what they seemed. But VanderMeer's story works, and I liked it.