Shannon Turlington

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer is everything I liked about Lost, but much better executed. An expedition of four unnamed female scientists ventures into the mysterious Area X, and bad things happen. Area X, like the island in Lost, is a weird, unsettling, indefinable place where disquieting things happen that cannot be explained. Those who venture into it are irrevocably changed. The atmosphere in this book is thick and growing thicker. This is, in my opinion, a horror novel, and it is very effective at building disquiet in the reader, as well as a sense that reality is fundamentally untrustworthy.