'Annihilation' and the Eco-Horror Subgenre

If fiction serves to reflect society’s most pervasive anxieties, then perhaps this is best illustrated by the eco-horror subgenre – rendered vividly by films such as Godzilla, The Birds and The Day After Tomorrow. In these stories driven by ecological malevolence, the modern reader’s conscious or subconscious feelings about the destructive effects of climate change are writ large.

The subgenre is just as provocative in literature. My personal highlight would be the Southern Reach series of novels by American science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer. 2014’s Annihilation was followed by its immediate sequels Authority and Acceptance in the same year, and then ten years later by a new entry, Absolution. As an overall series, these novels are perhaps best described as belonging to the ‘New Weird’ movement first popularised in the 1990s: born of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and their ‘weird fiction’, the subversive storytellers of the movement use striking science fiction and fantasy elements to evoke existential fear. The first novel of the Southern Reach series, Annihilation, was the basis of a 2018 film adaptation directed by Alex Garland. It is also my favourite, perhaps because it extends far beyond the subgenre’s most basic form of extreme weather. In VanderMeer’s deeply unsettling version of our world, the environment is a far stranger enemy.

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allows readers to reckon with their climate anxieties in such a way that they are not required to voice them aloud. Instead, they are embalmed in fiction

The basics of the plot: four nameless women referred to solely by their profession (the biologist, the psychologist, the surveyor and the anthropologist) are sent into an ecological hazard zone which has been closed to the public for safety reasons. Known as Area X, a mysterious branch of government called the Southern Reach presides over these scientist-led missions into the foliage. Past missions went badly wrong; the most recent resulted in an aggressive cancer epidemic among its members. By far the most overbearing character in the story is Area X itself – in its biological impossibilities, it subjects the bewildered scientists to physical and psychological torment. In its insidious disregard for the characters’ physical and emotional health, Area X embodies the eco-horror subgenre perfectly: the land itself spawns the unrest at the story’s heart, and the characters caught in its trap are seemingly powerless.

The allegory at work here has been debated: one is that Area X serves as a metaphor for cancer, in its blind and unpredictable need to propagate itself. However, VanderMeer has spoken about how he was inspired to write Annihilation after hiking through St Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, as well as watching news reports of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He said that writing Annihilation was a reaction of sorts to the spill, and the resulting urge he felt to ‘protect’ the threatened coastline. In VanderMeer’s novel, Area X appears to personify a natural world which can fight back.

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By far the most overbearing character in the story is Area X itself – in its biological impossibilities, it subjects the bewildered scientists to physical and psychological torment

In hindsight, VanderMeer finding inspiration at a Florida wildlife refuge was perhaps apt, given the US government’s recent disregard for protective climate change policy. With the natural world under more human threat than ever, in the US and elsewhere, unstable environments and violent climate events become the new normal. Concurrently, eco-horror gains in popularity given its uncanny reflection of this destructive destabilisation. In Annihilation, Area X appears to represent an angered planet and a world changed beyond recognition – perhaps this allows readers to reckon with their climate anxieties in such a way that they are not required to voice them aloud. Instead, they are embalmed in fiction.