Annihilation

Deep in the vegetative abyss of Area X, within the walls of a blood spattered lighthouse, a foreboding heap of forgotten journals lay moldering and unread, their owners long submerged into the ecology of the nebulous terrain. This journal is not part of that pile. This journal is my weak attempt to be different in a world where everybody already reviewed this series months ago.

WARNING! SPOILERS AND DEAD MOSQUITOES AHEAD!

INITIATION

Day 1: I downloaded the book, which I was not planning to read, the moment the librarian tweeted about a discount. I did not tell him about my purchase, for I had no real interest in the tale, and I wasn't sure I would complete it. My mission was simple: to objectively evaluate the story for entertainment value, despite everyone losing their shit over it. I thought I was impervious to the hype, but now I see that my position was already undermined.

These are my thoughts...

Day 2: I feel a strange giddiness about this book, for reasons I cannot identify. The language is leaden, dry, and the protagonist is laconic and aloof. The peripheral characters are little more than caustic paper cutouts, an unrealistic team for such an undertaking. I feel little sympathy for these people. Only an idiot would go into Area X under these conditions.

And yet, I continue to read. My mind keeps returning to underlying question: What lies hidden beneath all this buffed up descriptive imagery?

Day 2.5: The librarian found out that I'm reading this. I suspect the bartender told him. I'm withholding comment until I'm deeper in.

Day 3: I've hit a wall. You know that feeling you get when someone is describing a really weird dream they had the night before? The dreamer is swept up in the emotional tide of those details, but the words that describe those disjointed images have little impact on the listener. That's how I feel right now. The imagery is vivid, but there is no emotional pull.

So far, the anthropologist is a dead, gruesome corpse, and the psychologist is a manipulative hypnotist, yet the narrative focuses on the glow-in-the-dark slug graffiti— what I can only describe as the world's longest run-on sentence. I think the Crawler reads too much Lovecraft.

Day 3.5: I told the librarian that I had to stop reading due to descriptive imagery fatigue. He said I was just like the biologist in the story: curt and fungal.

I knew I couldn't trust him.

Day 4: Currently reading The World of Null-A. The protagonist is exploring a tunnel on Venus. 'It's a tower, not a tunnel,' I tell myself.

Shit. Wrong book.

This book has a way of colonizing you.

Day 5: I've returned to the book. I feel a sudden interest that I can only describe as a brightness. It keeps calling me to return, to acknowledge its existence.

Somewhere in my heart, I've begun to believe that there is no other book I would rather read.

I think I'm changing.

Day 5.5: It's past my bedtime but I've completed the book. The last half took only a few hours, instead of a few days, as if the book had contracted like Area X.

A few key moments have penetrated my guard. The shooting, the mysterious moaning organism in the reeds, the bearded lighthouse keeper in the tower. I'm creeped out, it's late, and it's raining outside. A giant flying ant attacked me from behind the bathroom mirror. I feel like nature is provoking me.

I need to sleep. I want to read more. I need to sleep. I want to read more.

Where lies the strangling book...