Annihilation is two things: it’s a close and personal character study of a biologist with a spider-silk connection to the rest of humanity that is slowly being severed, and it’s a deeply strange but structurally perfect story about a wilderness that infects and changes the people who enter it. Annihilation is weird and tense and pacy, and I’ve never before been made to feel as close to a story’s setting as I am to its characters. Reading VanderMeer’s prose is like wading into a bog. You sink and sink until you realise you’ve gone too deep and may never resurface.