Area
X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed
the last vestiges of human civilisation. The first expedition returned with
reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass
suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another.
The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former
selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first
volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth
expedition.
The
group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist,
the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the
terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and,
above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They
arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises
that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members
are keeping from one another that change everything.
