Investigating a strange, quarantined area of apparently unspoiled wilderness might seem like a walk in the verdant park, but one doesn't exactly have to be clued in to genre tropes to know that this is the sort of thing that usually goes horribly wrong, with death and bloodshed to follow at the hands of aliens, genetic monstrosities or even the simple fallback of man's inhumanity to man as the whole thing goes Lord Of The Flies. Annihilation's doomed expedition du jour, however, has some notable peculiarities. The four female members do not have names; they have titles, denoted by speciality. Their entry into Area X is achieved under hypnosis, so they have no idea of what their point of entry was. Indeed the borders of Area X seem unclear, as is what exactly is going on in Area X, but eleven previous expeditions have foundered in various downright uncanny ways, including all the members of the previous expedition turning up in their homes with no idea of how they got there. If the lighthouse is so important, as stressed in their training, why is the base camp so far from it? Why is said base camp positioned so as to apparently ensure the discovery of an unmentioned, uncharted, unmapped structure that the narrator insists on calling 'the tower' even though it goes down into the ground?

So things rapidly go south for the employees of the Southern Reach. madness and secrets and strange transformations become a part of the landscape. The whole thing is like Lovecraft by way of House Of Leaves, all told in a terse, lucid narrative voice of scientific detachment that isn't as reliable as the tone would like you to think, just as the narrator's own detachment isn't as pure and objective as she'd like to think.

The nightmare comes into focus gradually, the hints and hauntings and mysteries and horrors taking gradual, but not complete shape. At the end of the book, we've been shown something that might be an outline of the problem. I expect the other volumes in the trilogy to plunge deeper into it leaving nothing unchanged.