What is Area X? A nuclear fallout zone? The scene of environmental catastrophe as the Southern Reach agency insists? Or something much stranger? All our narrator, named to us only as “the biologist,” knows for sure is that it encompasses miles of Florida coastal wilderness. That it has been untouched for decades except for controlled expeditions. That it's a wholly unique ecosystem devoid of human-produced toxins. That her husband disappeared into it and what returned was not him, not even human. Now it's the biologist's obsession to penetrate the mystery that is Area X, and in the process unravel the timeline of her husband's final days. Deeply unsettling and psychologically complex, Annihilation is planted firmly within the weird fiction genre alongside classics like The Other Side by Alfred Kubin and The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers.
