If you walked along the beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look out to see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo. Inside the lighthouse, the biologist discovers copious bloodstains and a large hidden pile of hundreds of past expeditions' journals, some detailing battles against a monstrous presence from the sea.

As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the late afternoon of our first day at base camp. I saw that the letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism. In November 2015, Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez was in talks to co-star in the film with Portman. The stairwell appears to have been positioned at or close to due north, which may tell us something about its creation, eventually.Why do we see as strengths those things that are actually now weaknesses in ourselves as a sustainable species on Earth? 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. Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. The mere fact that anyone would choose to enter Area-X after so many deaths, so much insanity and horror, speaks to our mindset and culture today.

The Crawler is a rapidly shapeshifting entity of blinding lights and shattering noises, which paralyzes the biologist in an agonizing loop of losing and regaining consciousness. What did she mean by saying that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone? Nothing about its muzzle or broad, long face looked at all extraordinary, and yet I had the startling impression of some presence in the way its gaze seemed turned inward and its head willfully pulled to the left as if there were an invisible bridle.

Time to go,” the psychologist said, as perfunctorily as if we were in school and a class was letting out. Jason Sheehan of National Public Radio described the book as page-turning and suspenseful, saying, "about three hours later, I looked up again with half the book behind me and wondered how I'd gotten from there to here. Of all of us, I think she had best grasped the implications of what we had seen: that we might now be living in a kind of nightmare. Because it helped me fight the compulsion to keep reading, to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had read all there was to read. The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked, “Does anyone yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave?

With a strange smirk, almost as if judging us, the surveyor descended until we could only see her face framed in the gloom below, and then not even that. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed by the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. The chair had holes along the sides for straps; the implications of this raised a prickle of alarm, but by then I was set in my determination to reach Area X.Our unnamed protagonist is a thoughtful, analytical woman whose perspective of quiet observation and discovery make her an engaging character. But the other part of me thinks that the next two books might be as disappointing and confusing as this one. Then, after marking our location with a piece of red cloth tied to a tree, we began to walk forward, into the unknown.

Then, as I stared, the “vines” resolved further, and I saw that they were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the wall. I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic. The words bloom out of a fungal material along the wall, which the biologist examines closely, accidentally inhaling some spores.Perhaps the idea that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen, rather than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her.