A delightfully creepy journey through a twisted world in Annihilation

From The Week of March 10, 2014

In life, there are few certainties. Seven-billion humans stuck on an unpredictable world that is largely governed by chance ensures that much. But one thing we can be certain of is the sanctity of our own minds. These sublimely tuned systems of pattern recognition sort reality from fiction, friend from foe, even wisdom from foolishness, so effortlessly, so reliably, that we're often barely even aware these assessments are taking place. Our minds are the gatekeepers of sanity, providing boundaries without which the world would not make sense. Remove the mind's capacity to make these distinctions, damage its ability to see clearly, and the world becomes a foggy morass of which nothing can be certain, not even the fidelity of our own thoughts. This is a truth chillingly explored in this first entry in a new trilogy from Jeff Vandermeer.

Located just off a stretch of unpopulated coast in one of Earth's more tropical climes, Area X is a deadly and torturous enigma. A place of undefined borders, it appears to be populated by some kind of organizing intelligence made manifest in the behavior of the animals residing there. And yet, but for a handful of chilling encounters, few have ever seen physical agents of this most hidden and pervasive power. Which is not to say that humans haven't felt its presence. Repeatedly, governments have dispatched expeditions to Area X, in hopes of learning its secrets, only to have these highly trained professionals returned to them in extraordinary disarray. For some, their memories are gone, others, their health. But one constant remains. None come back unscarred.

The twelfth and most recent expedition is no exception. Comprised of four women, a biologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and an anthropologist, they are given training, equipment and a mission, to investigate Area X, in particular, a tower that seems to shaft deep into the earth. At first, they seem to be making progress in understanding this twisted place, but then soon events begin to proceed out of their control and, beforelong, nothing will be familiar, not even their own minds. There will be no comfort in this place without rules.

As creepy as it is swift, Annihilation is an entertaining piece of weird fiction. Mr. Vandermeer, who rose to prominence with a series of stories set in the strange city of Ambergris, has channeled his talent for creepy fantasy and carved out a foothold for it on our own world. This proximity, this sense that the rot now exists in a place we hold dear, invests the work with anxiety and urgency, neither of which the author wastes as he marches the reader down into his dark, infested imagination.

Of its many accomplishments, Annihilation's most important achievement is the degree to which it teases the reader into accepting that the line between sanity and madness is whisper thin. The governor of this line, the mind, can be tricked and influenced in so many ways that it's rather surprising that madness isn't a more pervasive problem for society. After all, how could anyone function if they could not trust their senses? Their memories? Their actions? How does anyone distinguish what must be fought from what must be loved when there is no cognitive anchor to hold onto? When there is only Area X, its lies and its mysteries laid bare in the warped light.

Mr. Vandermeer has always excelled at presenting his characters with an environment capable of driving them mad, of tormenting them with things they cannot understand until they have no safe ground left upon which to tread. Annihilation is no exception. But where this volume joins those in its power to entrance, it fails to back that up with compelling characters. In some sense, this is intentional. For Area X leaves no more room for personal identity than it does for personal freedom, devouring all before its strange, expansive threats. However, the reader is left to quietly rue these omissions, as none of the human wills present here amount to much more than their archetypical foundations. Certainly, the creeping sense of otherness makes up for this absence, but only just.

More delicious than disappointing... Weird promises to be an exciting genre for some time to come, particularly with minds like Mr. Vandermeer to guide it. (3/5 Stars)

A weird, re-imagined American West in the universe of The Half Made World

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

We all have our masters, powers into which our service has either been captured or sold. They take many forms, of course, from the internal demons that drive our actions to the external forces that seek to puppeteer our strings, but the influence remains, a constant, guiding pressure that redirects us onto paths of another's choosing. Occasionally, these influences are positive -- the mentoring we receive from parents on our lives and luminaries on our careers --, but often they are negative, coercive pleas, from within and without, that entice us to surrender our money, our will, even our freedom. What we can do about this is unclear. After all, it is not as though these influences always make themselves known to us. But we must try to resist. For to do otherwise is to sell ourselves into slavery, to ourselves and to others, of a kind vividly illustrated in Felix Gilman's weird world of spirits and steam.

In an alternate 19th-century West, where the land is as unforgiving as the people are ruthless, the Great War is a constant, undulating vice that squeezes the hope from the humans caught between its two, thrashing sides. To the east is the Line, the relentless march of mechanized civilization captained by the ruthless Engines, a collective of conscious machines who have tasked themselves with bringing their relentless order to the world. The Engines are so oppressive, so pitilessly efficient, that they have largely rubbed out the spark of individuality that flickered in the hearts of their subjects, assembling them into a mass of amoral tools with which to act out their will. To the west, meanwhile, are the anarchic agents of the Gun, guerilla fighters endowed with extraordinary powers who regularly infiltrate the lands claimed by the Line, seeking to disrupt the schemes of the great engines who want them exterminated. Both are nearly immortal, causing the fallout of their unfathomable conflict to land on the very mortal humans attempting to live in the cracks between forces.

But after many years and countless skirmishes which have ground to dust several attempts at democracy and a more human order, the war might be at an end. For the last great general of a conquered republic may well have, within his shattered mind, a weapon capable of defeating both the Engines and the spirits of the Gun who have risen up to fight for control of the human world. The race to find the broken general and pull from him this terrible secret is fierce, as the victor will surely hold in their hands ultimate victory. But it may well be that the general is too far gone to surrender what he knows, leaving it to the will of others to find their way out of darkness.

Two fascinating entrants into an already crowded genre, The Half Made World and its successor, the Rise of Ransom City, are sweaty, gritty exemplars of the power of Weird. Hailing from the strange shoals of Steampunk, they are a playground in which Mr. Gilman can re-imagine our past, casting it in a far more archetypal light. The author dispenses with the restrictions of our grounded reality and, in their place, animates the cultural and economic forces that shaped the West, investing them with power and agency. The result is the creation of tangible gods who walk the earth, who guide human affairs, who fight and bleed and scream and plot, but who remain as alien to us as any god we can imagine. We do not know why they do what they do, only that they do it, only that they will continue, only that it is within their nature. These truths are so prevalent in Mr. Gilman's world that his people accept them without thought and, largely, without struggle.

Of the two works, The Half Made World is by far the more successful. The author gently introduces us into his brave new world by giving his first work the familiar-unto-trope structure of a small band of heroes racing to find the key to everything before the pernicious forces chasing them can seize it for their own wicked will. This customary plot is then fleshed out with powerful and beleaguered personalities who, in their own ways, are haunted by the demons that this world has bestowed upon them. Their hunger for absolution, for escape, for understanding, for purpose, is as mesmerizing as this world of living, breathing concepts is darkly vivid.

But where The Half Made World succeeds, its successor fails. Structured as an autobiography from a highly unreliable narrator, it is little more than a series of explosive bloviations that, though they advance the plot, do very little to capture the reader's interest. Rather than explore the strangeness of his weird world, Mr. Gilman, here, finds himself with little more than a paean to the literature of 19th-century America, a time in which the P. T. Barnum's of the world could largely get away with penning extravagant tales of their dubious exploits. Harry Ransom, the work's narrator, is a garish bore about whom it is exceedingly difficult to care, a reality that naturally drains the work of its impact and significance.

Notwithstanding the struggles of The Rise of Ransom City, Mr. Gilman has made a substantial contribution to the new and energetic world of the Weird. Superficially, the genre seems like little more than a lazy attempt to attenuate the familiar until its distorted form can produce some kind of entertainment. But this reading misses the way in which breathing actual life into otherwise inanimate concepts compels the reader to acknowledge both their power, in shaping our existence, and their excesses which, when unchecked, have the capacity to plunge us into a world of grit and smoke. In its fevered dreams, it asks us to reckon with what we are making of our world, questions that will linger long after the last page has been turned.

An engaging journey... (3/5 Stars)