Annihilation

There’s something very Lovecraftian about the style of description of the foreign organisms, the idea that there are concepts that English has no word for, which I appreciated for a while until it was clear that I was really going to be left with no greater understanding of what the protagonist was trying to describe. The premise was intriguing, but by the end of the book nothing really seemed to have been revealed. I ended the book with almost exactly as much information as I had one third of the way in. And the style was simultaneously too robotic and too flowery? Like, robotically poetic. I dunno. I’d be curious to know more about what’s going on here, but probably not enough to read two more books—I might just look on Wikipedia. And I’ll probably check out the movie.

I contemplated giving this two stars, but I feel like I want to give it an extra star for effort, even if I didn’t really like the result. I liked what VanderMeer was going for, but I felt like it didn’t land, for me, in the end.