2024 reads, 22/22:

“The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight, their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us. As a group, we felt almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training and preparation.”

Kind of funny that my last two books have been in the realm of “ecological sci-fi,” but here we are. However, Annihilation strips away any satire and comedy that may have been in Galapagos, and instead presents an anxiety-ridden atmospheric novel of four scientists who go out to explore the dangerous and unfamiliar “Area X.”

The descriptions of the flora and fauna of Area X are great, and the narrator writes with an unreliable tone while at the same time, sounding like writing a lab report. It’s kind of jarring, but VanderMeer captures the surreal and tense mystery through his Lovecraftian prose very well.

“I took samples as we went, but halfheartedly. All of these tiny remnants I was stuffing into glass tubes with tweezers … what would they tell me? Not much, I felt.”

However, while there was a plot, it didn’t go very far for me. And that’s okay, sometimes things don’t need to happen – I tend to really enjoy books that have no plot line at all. But for this particular brand of sci-fi, I wish for a little more. What might help with this, though, is not reading the blurb on the back of the book. Nothing is spoiled, but some things might hit harder without knowing ahead of time.

Will I finish the trilogy? Maybe. It’s not on the top of my to-read list, but I am curious to learn more about Area X and the world of Southern Reach. But if the genre of eco-horror sci-fi sounds interesting to you, you should pick this one up – and let me know your thoughts.

“You would love it here.”

#readingyear2024 #scifi #environment #spooky #book2screen

2024 reads, 4/22

“Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon.”

It may seem odd to spend over 600 pages on a book that was only three stars (maybe closer to a 3.5), but to be honest, this was a solid 4-star book until the last quarter or so. Overall, this was a good nighttime read: just a fantasy adventure of 12-year-old Jack Sawyer crossing the United States to get to the mysterious Talisman in order to save his mother. While there were monsters and horrors along the way, The Talisman was more adventure, and I guess I had expected an equal amount of each.

The text could feel a bit disjointed at times, likely due to the fact the there were two authors who wrote this (having read some Stephen King before, this didn’t really feel 100% like him). But honestly, you could read much worse, and this book does not deter me from wanting to read the sequel, Black House. Although I think my next few King books will be more focused on horror. Maybe Misery...

#readingyear2024 #spooky #audiobook #fantasy

"‘I haven’t given up hope of rational explanations, Susan. I’m hoping for one. Almost praying for one. Monsters in the movies are sort of fun, but the thought of them actually prowling through the night isn’t fun at all.’”

I may be entering my Stephen King era after this read. Back in high school I had read some of his shorter works, but I don’t think I was old enough at the time to appreciate his storytelling. As I currently contemplate whether I want to jump into his seven-volume Dark Tower series, I figured a good place to start is with one of his earlier and more well-known novels.

In the expanded edition’s introduction (which is well worth the read, by the way), King cites Bram Stoker’s Dracula as his source of inspiration – he wanted to explore what would have happened if Dracula appeared in 1960’s small-town America instead of 1890’s London. ‘Salem’s Lot also has many homages to Shirly Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You certainly don’t need to read either of these to enjoy ‘Salem’s Lot, but having read them, I felt I appreciated his novel that much more.

“Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town’s and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.”

In fact, much like The Haunting of Hill House, the further I got in ‘Salem’s Lot, the more I wanted to read – but for a different reason. Instead of just wanting questions answered and tension resolved, as I did in Jackson’s novel, there was more ‘action’ in this book that I wanted to get to; I constantly wanted to know what happened next. It was enticing, entertaining, emotional, and spooky all at once.

It’s also worth pointing out that the many childhood themes (e.g., guilt, fear, loss of innocence, the disconnect between children and adults) that permeate throughout King’s work start budding in ‘Salem’s Lot. I have not read It, but I’ve seen both the 1990 and 2017/2019 movies, and there are similarities between The Loser’s Club and the characters in this novel (specifically, Mark).

“Before drifting away entirely, [Mark] found himself reflecting—not for the first time—on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can’t get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but a