Area X

The Southern Reach Trilogy - Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance

De: Jeff VanderMeer

Narrado por: Carolyn McCormick, Bronson Pinchot, Xe Sands

If J. J. Abrams, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Weisman collaborated on a series, it might be this awesome.

This collection includes all three novels in the epic Southern Reach trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. Praised for its evocative prose, chilling psychological twists, and intriguing story arc, this series has amassed high critical and popular acclaim, with book one landing on the New York Times best sellers list.

Dive into the mysteries of Area X, a remote and lush terrain that has inexplicably sequestered itself from civilization. Twelve expeditions have gone in, and not a single member of any of them has remained unchanged by the experience - for better or worse.

©2014 VanderMeer Creative, Inc. Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Deeply unsettling!

Paranoia, unreliable narrators, temporal and spatial anomalies. This was right up my alley. If you're looking for a straightforward creature feature or invasion story, you'll be disappointed. This trilogy meanders around the central hook of an alien corruption to focus on intimate portraits of its characters.

meh

The story just felt like an indulgence almost the entire time and it didn't really wrap up because I don't think they could really get a hold on it.

Decent background noise

The trilogy is a long and winding story that provides far more questions than answers, and I do not mean that as a compliment.

The dialog is awkward, and the characters are not particularly likeable.

That being said, if you just want background noise while you do other things, this series is not especially offensive.

Academically written.Seemed to show off vocabulary

vocabulary for sake of vocabulary. Everyday language would've been more enjoyable. very little action, mostly inner conjecture.

Simply Amazing

Lovecraft meets Kafka. Hands down some of the best speculative fiction I've ever read. A hundred times better than the movie. Definitely going to read more from this writer

Great, weird, dark, beautiful

Amazingly weird eco sci fi/ horror that feels like China M doing an eco version of the thing

Two out of three ain’t bad

First two books were amazing and then I got to the third where they start doing this narrator swapping, and it ruined everything and I just can’t finish it. I find it to be terrible.

second person perspective, off-putting narration

Any additional comments?

The first two installments were great. I find the second person perspective and the performance of the narrator so off-putting in the third volume that I'm not sure I can finish listening at all.

Does not give the reader what they want.

Humans seek to understand. Or so is their seeming tendency. They grasp fervently anything, real or not, to gain security, a sense of control, to dispel the terror or at least discomfort of not knowing. This story, if you have it in you to allow it, can take that from you. So often the excitement of discovery is ultimately tarnished, cheapened by the final narrative reveal, and thus reeks of infestation by the relentless ravage of human dreams and fantasy. But like so much of our disappointing, unknowable reality that we deny with our desperate faith and self-deception, this story recaptures that sense of the dissatisfying, terrifying unknowable. And in that, it is great. But ymmv. And that’s okay. I am deeply appreciative of Jeff Vandermeer’s refusal to make garish something beautiful by giving in to the human hunger for narrative resolution which digests easily.

Descriptions of nature, suspenseful too

I read these books several years ago. Loved the audio version so much. Well done.