You enter Area X with them, thinking the uncanny must lurk in some particular spot. They cannot agree about what they are seeing (a shaft? a tower? a throat?) and three of them are all the while half-aware of being hypnotically manipulated by their team leader. They cannot recall the moment they crossed into Area X, and they have no clear idea how they will leave. Their training and instructions are sometimes vague, sometimes misleading. Their equipment is either nonsensical, or inadequate, or antiquated. On the first page we are told that the women's enterprise is doomed. An unfurling of promiscuous alien biology. In Annihilation, the first part of an imaginatively marketed and beautifully produced trilogy (the other parts are out in May and September), the novelist and publishing entrepreneur Jeff VanderMeer sets out to create a lasting monument to the uncanny by revisiting – without embellishment, and with a pitiless focus on physical and psychological detail – some very old ground. "Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X." Sensitive readers will already have begun to feel their fingers prised loose from the edge of the swimming pool, when it turns out these explorers are unable to divulge their names. Into this place come the biologist and her colleagues: a surveyor, a linguist, and a psychologist. Area X is an abandoned and apparently unspoilt stretch of US coastline, held under strict quarantine by a mysterious government agency called the Southern Reach.
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