Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

The individual details chronicled by the journals might tell stories of heroism or cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions, but ultimately they spoke to a kind of inevitability. No one had as yet plumbed the depths of intent or purpose in a way that had obstructed that intent or purpose. Everyone had died or been killed, returned changed or

Trying to find a key will neither enhance nor clarify the text. Nevertheless, two things do stand out to me as essential parts of this work.

Then, after a time, the boar faded into the backdrop like all else that we had passed on our way from the border, and I was staring into the future again.

It was impossible to tell if they were protecting her, changing her, or breaking her body down—just as I could not know whether some version of the anthropologist had indeed appeared to the surveyor near base camp after I had left for the lighthouse …

In my head, before we had crossed the border, I had seen so many things: vast cities, peculiar animals, and, once, during a period of illness, an enormous monster that rose from the waves to bear down on our camp.

I had never talked to the frogs; I despised anthropomorphizing animals. “So what has changed if we wouldn’t have liked each other as kids?” I asked. “Oh, I would have liked you despite that,” he said, grinning. “You would have fascinated me, and I would have followed you anywhere. Without hesitation.”

And I never did look back, for better or worse. If funding for a project ran out, or the area we studied was suddenly bought for development, I never returned. There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

Staring back at me amid that profusion of selves generated by the Crawler, I saw, barely visible, the face of a man, hooded in shadow and orbited by indescribable things I could think of only as his jailers.

I had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me.