Details
Rent Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy, Book 1)
Author:
Format: Unabridged-CD, Paperback
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Published: Feb 2014
Genre: Fiction - Literary
Retail Price: $24.95
Synopsis
[Read by Carolyn McCormick]
If J. J. Abrams, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Weisman collaborated on a novel . . . it might be this awesome. -- Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died 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 months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. -- This is the twelfth expedition. -- Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist--the de facto leader--and a biologist, who is our narrator. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. -- They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life-forms that surpass understanding--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.
Reviews
This is the most interesting book Ive read this year. It was difficult to listen to at the beginning, but it ****** me in about the time the Biologist discovered the Psychologist was using hypnotic triggers to compel the team. One reason the tale is both intriguing and off-putting is its abstract nature -- no names, no real geographic cues, no sense of when all this happened, and initially no real history. Like the members of Expedition 12, the reader or listener has little reference for how one arrives in Area X. For a while, I wasnt even sure Area X was on earth. But the tale is thick and intricately woven, and gradually, through the Biologists first-person telling, the reader begins to understand. Its a risky narrative strategy that, in this book, works brilliantly.I will listen to the other books in the series, but unlike other series -- where I get hooked on the first one and queue up the next installments immediately -- the 2nd book will have to wait awhile. By the end of Annihilation, I was almost *burdened* with the weight of the book. A good feeling, but intense. Ill come back to it.