If you hadn’t already heard it around the interwebz, The first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s astoundingly creepy, and Nebula Award-winning, Southern Reach series, Annihilation, is set to be adapted into a film by acclaimed screenwriter and director Alex Garland, and apparently Natalie Portman is in talks to star!
It’s definitely been one of my favourite series of the last few years and a really great new take on cosmic horror that reminded me a lot of HP Lovecraft, with its sparse writing and internal characters. I’m also especially excited by the news because I just saw Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s latest film, and thought the creepy undertones and big-question topics of the film bode very well for Garland to “get” Annihilation and hopefully do the series justice. Watch the trailer for Ex Machina below:
We’re publishing new colourful editions of each of the books in the series in August as well, so if you haven’t already I recommend checking out this fantastic series:
Praise for ANNIHILATION and the SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY:
‘I’m loving the Southern Reach Trilogy … Creepy and fascinating’ - Stephen King
‘This trilogy is a modern mycological masterpiece … Remarkable … Tense, eerie and unsettling … VanderMeer writes much better prose than Poe ever did … This is genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived.’ -Guardian
‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike … The writing itself has a clarity that makes the abundancy of the setting more powerful. “Annihilation” shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience’ -Sunday Telegraph
‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel … The Southern Reach series will be a major work’ -SFX Magazine
‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards. I loved it’ -Lauren Beukes
‘Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent’ -Warren Ellis
