Annihilation is a darkly complex novel from author Jeff VanderMeer, the first installment of his Southern Reach Trilogy. It seems to defy categorization: it is at once speculative fiction, science fiction, thriller, and horror, while also being regarded alongside Thoreau's "experiments in psychedelic nature writing" and Kafka's "epistemic pessimism" (Rothman). It is perhaps one of the foremost contemporary examples of the literary genre weird fiction. VanderMeer claims that the novel's inspiration came from a 14-mile hike through a wildlife refuge in Florida, St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge.
The novel follows a team of four women who make up the Twelfth Expedition into a supernatural containment zone called Area X. The primary characters are all referred to by their occupations (the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist, and the surveyor), leading to a unique distance between the narrative and the characters.
In 2018, Annihilation was made into a major motion picture of the same name from Paramount Pictures, directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman as the biologist. The film was lauded by critics but performed poorly in the box office, to the surprise of most involved. Critical reception to the book has been generally positive, and it won the coveted Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2014, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in the same year.
