Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – a good book, but a rare instance where I preferred the movie adaptation

I watched the movie adaptation of Annihilation some years ago and it immediately ended up becoming one of my favourite horror/scifi movies. I didn’t get around to reading the book until recently, and wanted to share my thoughts.

One of my main takeaways from this book is that it’s really, really well-written from a prose standpoint, much better than what a lot of speculative fiction typically offers. Vandermeer is a talented wordsmith, and he really creates a haunted, foreboding atmosphere. And atmosphere is really the book’s bread and butter, because tbqh, I found it rather weak from a storytelling and character standpoint. Nothing much actually happens. The protagonist – the biologist – walks around Area X and experiences some weirdness. Her team members die or go crazy. And then it ends really abruptly.

There was, I felt, a sense of divide and detachment from the character that made it a little hard to ever get fully invested – although that may have been by design because we do learn throughout the narrative that the biologist kind of is a distant, unemotional person, even with her husband.

With that being said, the book does a great job of really just creating a vibe, a feeling of otherworldly weirdness. There’s some fantastic, creepy and unsettling imagery here – plants growing from people’s skin, the dolphin with the human eye, the Crawler’s words in the Tower, the lighthouse keeper’s face in the end. It all feels dreamy and off-kilter, like you’re not sure what’s real and what isn’t.

I also think the books depiction of the relationship between the biologist and her husband was…if not better, then definitely more interesting. The movie version felt a little bit more “typical”.

I think I enjoyed the movie more because it does a better job of creating a more compelling, exciting narrative. There are also two scenes in the movie that I think surpass anything in the book. The first is that goddamn skull-bear creature – one of the most horrific movie monsters I’ve ever seen – and the other is the weird alien mimic at the end. The characters I felt were better in the movie as well, because they felt like actual people.

All the same, I think these are two separate versions of a similar story and should be treated as such. The book is still quite enjoyable, and worth experiencing for the quality of the prose and the evocative atmosphere.

by Monkey-on-the-couch