Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

Hello has anyone else read Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer??
I recently finished it and I'm not sure if I want to keep reading the series or not, I just wonder if the series gets better??

Lori wrote: "Hello has anyone else read Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer??"

I read it last month, and didn't really care for it, but as a rule I don't really like horror, So not so surprising. I know a couple of other people here read it, and Ben in particular liked it a lot. (There also seems to be a strong critical consensus in its favor.)

My cavils were: The plot was basically weird, inexplicable & menacing things happen and then the story ended. Secondly, I thought the characters, including the narrator, clearly had more information about this mysterious Southern Reach and what's going on there: when it started, what public perception is, that sort of stuff... and yet it was deliberately withheld from the reader, I presume in order to make things weird.

I don't find randomness mysterious.

Dense, weird page turner in ego perspective. Exactly the right size, it felt more like an extended novella than one of those fat doorstoppers.
A bit of Lovecraft, a bit of Poe, some Grass, and some Little, Big in it.

I was happy to read it but I'm not curious enough to continue the trilogy.

More like 3.5 stars.

The sequels change perspective a bit, with Authority focusing on the Southern Reach bureaucracy instead of Area X. Personally I thought Annihilation was fantastic but if you weren't into it I wouldnt suggest forcing yourself through the rest of the series.

Thanks for the help everyone I was curious enough to finish this book but I don't think I'm going to continue the series.

Just wanted to point out that this one won the Nebula award.

All three books are from different points of view, but the stories do mesh together as the series ends. If you didn't really like the first book I would have to say there are plenty of books out there so give this one a rest.

I liked it a lot, and I'm going to continue on with the rest of the series. There's an obvious Lovecraft influence there and I'd agree with G33z3r that it's more of a horror novel than a SF one. Interesting that Vandermeer never tells us not only the location of Area X but also never specifies the time period. Readers are tempted to assume the story is set in the future, but all the technology used is yesterday's technology and I recall a comment in the story that suggested that Area X had faded from most people's attention after the initial occurrence. (By the way, I imagined the setting to be north coastal Florida, which a lot of people say is really southern Georgia.)

The biggest downside to the book is the relatively slow pacing. Although it was only 195 pages it felt like a novella that had been stretched a bit to be sold as a novel. There are a lot of descriptive sequences that seem to drag on, and a lot of speculating and rehashing of prior events. Not a huge detraction for me though.

Also - it's going to be a movie!! I loved the series so I'm excited/hopeful about movie

I don't ever go out to the movies anymore but if anything will get me to drag myself out to the cinema, its a movie based on a Jeff Vandermeer book, assuming the reviews are decent.