Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here, what was still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of the evidence as we encountered it. Annihilation is a strange, disquieting and eerily beautiful novel which takes the reader on an expedition into Area X; where those who enter leave changed, if they leave at all. It is either a deliberate exclusion from our maps and thus known … and that is a message of sorts … or it is something new that wasn’t here when the last expedition arrived. You will find that you ultimately agreed with me about the best course of action, and that you felt quite confident about this course of action.

For weapons, we had knives, a locked container of antique handguns, and one assault rifle, this last a reluctant concession to current security standards. You do not know whether you have left this earth or crossed through an alternative dimension, or whether you yet remain in a strange forgotten corner of the world. I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably, becoming estranged from the expedition and its purpose.I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist interjected before we had discussed the tower much further. It seemed important to make the distinction before our descent, even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state. We knew that members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other. The Washington Post said that it was "successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future" [13] while The Daily Telegraph said that it "shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience. Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. During training, she had tended to ask questions more like “How calm do you think you might be in an emergency? But I am unsure whether it is because of the effect of the overall environment or the presence of the tunnel. Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. She escapes the Tower but decides to remain inside Area X, following the coastline to see what more there is, as her husband once did.I could not tell what it was, and after a while its disturbance of the vegetation ceased and I lost track of it entirely. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. It's been a long time since a book filled me with this kind of palpable, wondrous disquiet, a feeling that started on the first page and that I'm not sure I've yet shaken. With towers that spiral into the earth, strange cries in the night and creatures straight out of a fever dream, finding a way home might be the least of their problems. A stairway did indeed lead down, this time at a gentle curve with much broader steps, but still made of the same materials.

A team of four women (a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a biologist) are sent on a mission into Area X, a mysterious zone that has developed in their version of our world.There is a regularity to the circle, seen from the inside walls, that suggests precision in the creation of the building,” the anthropologist said.