The Blog In Yellow

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...

This one was a strange one because I quickly recognized the problem: the lack of Chekov's Gun. I'll get into that in a moment. The story follows two necromancers, Mmatmuor and Sodsma who travel to this land called Tinarath to practice their dark arts. Unfortunately for them, they are thrown out and head to the dead land of Cincor where they begin to raise the dead. One of the aspects that is common among Lovecraftian-style of writing is that the stories don't go into details of the spells. It's like the opposite of Harry Potter where each spell has a name and a purpose and a way to cast them. Here, the spells are intentionally vague. The pair resurrect a few dead on the way to the city of Yethlyreom and reanimate many of the dead, including the royalty. The two plan to conquer the land that threw them out when the undead emperor, Illerio, begins to recall his memories. Now here's where the gun doesn't come into play, Illerio consults with an ancestor named Hesta...