Finishing Annihilation

I've read books about subjects I could care less about that have somehow wormed their way into my subconscious and even if they haven't gotten me to love the subject matter, they have at least gotten me to appreciate it. Jeff VandeMeer's "Annihilation" is not one of those books, I'm sad to say. The book flip flops between being insanely interesting and utterly boring. VandeMeer seems to be an expert on biology, or at least interested in them. I follow him on Bluesky and he posts about plants every now and then, a subject I find dull and uninteresting. But the inclusion of some cosmic horror mixed in with the story and the fact that the book got a movie release, made me curious. I have to say that reading Annihilation was a slog. I didn't feel drawn in and I'm not sure if that's my fault or the writer's fault. The pacing is fine, the writing is good, and the mystery behind the story about a woman who's more in sync with a cosmic horror event than she is in real life is facinating. I can't put my finger on why I didn't like this story. I didn't hate it, but it didn't scratch the itch I was trying to scratch. It took two months of work to force myself to read this and I hate to say "force myself." It's not a bad book at all. I don't see the appeal of plants, ecology, and other things that breathe the same oxygen as me. I'm not going to blame myself though, there are people who life fish and those that don't. I'm one of those that doesn't find the taste of fish to suit my pallet.

The plot follows an unnamed protagonist who visits an area called Area X, as dubbed by the government. Throughout the treck into the "tower" (a spiral in the ground which the protagonist stubbornly names despite the fact that it's a tunnel) cause mahem and madness to explode within the expedition. The characters, all female, are part of a group that each fall prey to the monsters in the area or go insane. The mystery quickens with the inclusion of the protagonists (who shall remain nameless in an interesting aspect to the book) past with her husband who also made the trip to Area X and was changed by the experience. What happened to him there, besides the encounter of a doppelganger, is left unknown. What is happening to this land and the animals inhabiting it? What happened to the people that lived here? Why is the Area growing. All good questions that will NOT be answered. VandeMeer doesn't give you answers and I think that's a key to good Cosmic Horror. I applaud him for writing the book this way. We may never know the truth. But dangling so many mysteries in front of me makes me hungry for some kind of resolution. I suppose I could read the other two books, now three, in the series but my appetite for the strange has soured. I'll be reading a differnt type of cosmic horror next. 


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