A Review: Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)
Title of Work: Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Format:
Published: 2014
Started: 15-07-2026
Finished: 25-07-2026\
Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 3/5
This book came along on my traverse of the Olympic Range in Washington. I walked alone all day, usually more than 20 miles, climbing westward over mountain passes only to descend again thousands of feet to turbulent rivers far below. There wasn’t much else to do at camp after eating and setting up the tent, so I watched the sun sink behind serrated ridges in the distance and I read aloud to myself by headlamp while the blue twilight coolness settled.
The first night something startled me from a weird hypnosis and I realized half the book was already gone. If I finished too early, it would only become dead weight in my pack and the rest of the trip I would have no distraction from the noises that always began after last light. Living sounds of unknown origin called out from the dark forest surrounding my camp. Their sources were separated from my exhausted, vulnerable body by only the thinnest veil of ripstop nylon. The tent kept out rain and the night’s chill, but it would do nothing to stop claws or teeth. Anything curious – or hungry – enough to pursue the source of the unnatural lampglow or the foreign stench emanating from within would not be deterred by so flimsy a barrier.
I had to ration myself to 15 pages a day, which would allow this strange story of grotesque change and genetic corruption, Annihilation, to live on and stretch across six more days and nights while I walked, looking down over still alpine lakes and up to the towering crowns of creaking, ancient sentinels, among them Pseudotsuga menziesii and Thuja plicata, Douglas-fir and western redcedar.
These were the largest and oldest trees I had ever seen. I could hear their roots underfoot, always reaching, searching through the soft, moss-carpeted forest floor. They drew up sustenance to build themselves from the decaying remains of nurse logs that fell long ago and shook the earth before surrendering their flesh to beetles, worms, and fungi. I wondered if my awed pause, a sort of prayer while I craned my neck to look up, would be recorded as even a minor footnote in the ringed reams of their cryptic histories. A ridiculous thought – do I note in a diary when a lone ant crosses my bare foot?
Days later, nearing the end of both the book and the traverse, it was uncanny how the mental and physical destabilization of the main character, the biologist, within Area X paralleled my own souring fortunes in the heart of the Olympics. The more I tried to understand and catalogue that wilderness in my notes and on camera, the less comprehensible it became. I could estimate my progress crossing it by reading the map and by judging the accumulated wear on my body, but each day felt longer than the last and I couldn’t shake the feeling it was swallowing me.
I encountered three black bears, Ursus americanus altifrontalis, each during the day and uncomfortably close. But it was the smallest of the three that threatened me when I surprised him just before the Whiskey Bend Trailhead. He was thin and scarred with patchy hair, an adolescent with a gob of yellow pus leaking from where his left eye should have been. Surely, some recent battle that was none of my business. I couldn’t blame him for standing his ground when I raised my camera to take a photo. He huffed and hissed at me, advancing a few steps. I slowly put the camera back in my pocket without getting the shot and walked backwards down the trail until I was sure he hadn’t followed. Who was I to document his shame?
That night, atop Appleton Pass, it was warm and clear, and I left the rainfly off the tent. Branches and bushes cracked and rustled with the cautious movements of innumerable unseen creatures. When you’re alone in a tent in the dark in bear territory, every sound is a bear. I would drift off only to jolt up after a loud snap nearby. I cut the darkness with the beam of my headlamp and squinted, scanning until I met reflective eyes. Apparently, I had pitched my tent at the bustling epicenter of nightlife for the Olympic blacktail deer, Odocoileus hemionus columbianus. Hours later, I woke paralyzed in half-sleep, looking up into the inverted face of one of those nocturnal deer. It stared straight down at me through the mesh ceiling, unblinking. I have no idea if the visitation was a dream. Out there, alone and unable to move, what difference did it make?
I woke barely rested in the morning to a distant, rumbling thunder that echoed through the valley and over the pass. I broke camp quickly and got back on trail. The sky was clear and sunny, but dark clouds bloomed on the horizon, blowing in from the west to meet me head-on. I had meant the High Divide Trail, which rims the Seven Lakes Basin, to be the climax of my trek both aesthetically and in altitude, but by late morning the sun was hidden behind furious, purple storm clouds. Lightning split the sky and struck an adjacent peak. I raced to get down from the exposed ridgeline, and a cold rain pursued me down the mountain. It did not let up for the next two days.
I descended all afternoon, down and down for the final time into the lowland rainforest of the Bogachiel River. It was clear no one had gone that way in a long time and the untamed flora grew high overhead. Dense patches of Polystichum munitum, western swordfern, merged across the trail, obscuring it almost beyond detection. I bushwhacked, losing the old path and finding it again, circumnavigating the many blowdowns too large for me to scramble over. Every plant I brushed past dumped water down my legs and soaked my shoes. Thorny Rubus spectabilis and spined Oplopanax horridus, salmonberry and devil’s club, clawed at my clothes and snagged my skin until it was stinging from a fine, red crosshatch.
I had the eerie sense that the dense, tangled understory was conspiring to ensnare me, to keep me there. To make me part of it again. What more was I than an animated nutrient cache? If I fell there, alone, miles and miles from anyone, I would soon become soil. I would cease being man and again become substrate for roots and worms, food for that chaotic tangle of green leaves competing for access to scarce sunlight filtering down through the broad canopies of giants.