He, too, is searching for answers among the closed doors and resistant crew of the Southern Reach, as well as among the piles of notes left behind by the Director. His label couldnâ€™t be more ironic, since from start to finish, Control has none. She wants answers, no matter the cost.Īuthority switches to third person in the POV of a character we know as Control, who has been brought in to Southern Reach to fill in for the missing Director. Her attitude of withdrawn hostility is the primary reason she was chosen for this missionâ€”that, and the fact that her husband was part of the 11th expedition, all of whom died of cancer six months after returning changed from Area X. I am taking a bit of a different direction in reviewing all three of these books together, instead of separately, because I think thatâ€™s truly how they should be read, back-to-back like one huge story.Īll of Annihilation takes place in Area X, and is seen from the Biologistâ€™s first-person point of view. The fight to survive is on, and there is no guarantee that any of them will make it out alive. But nothing could prepare them for what they find inside the barrier, when human rules no longer seem to apply, life forms defy description, and nothing is quite what it seems. They report only on Area Xâ€™s beauty and tranquility and claim they saw nothing out of the ordinary.įor the twelfth expedition, Southern Reach (Centralâ€™s satellite facility located just outside Area X) has pulled together an all-female team: a biologist, a surveyor, an archeologist, and a psychiatrist. Yet another comes back changed, shells of their former selves who remember nothing of their experience. Anotherâ€™s members turn their guns on each other. No one knows what caused it, or why eleven expeditions sent by the mysterious agency Central to explore and map it have failed so completely. Area X, a region of the Forgotten Coast cut off from the rest of the world by an environmental anomaly, has swallowed all vestiges of human habitation in its verdant overgrowth.

Area X by Jeff VanderMeer