from the pen of icarus blake

Years ago, I saw a movie. An adaptation, I assumed, inspired by Lovecraft’s The Color from Outer Space — which is my favorite work by him for it’s relative lack of racism. Just a rock that changes everything around it, the living things in its vicinity taking its influence into themselves as an indescribable color until they’re broken down to dust. Mutated beyond understanding.

The movie itself takes terror and awe in equal measure, the Shimmer destroys through change without wanting. Any living thing passing its boundary takes the essence of the place within themselves and changes alongside it until they’re broken down to their smallest parts.

Annihilation.

It’s a lonely, thoughtful journey, the movie, with feats of creature design I still return to when trying to build something equal parts beautiful and terrible myself.

When I finally picked up the book, I expected the same story. Not so — the movie is not a pale shadow of the book, as so many cinematic adaptations are, but a true adaptation of the soul of the novel. The movie and the book cannot spoil one another, each catering to the strengths of their medium as visual vs literary, telling stories about two fundamentally different expedition teams and two fundamentally different soldier-scientists who enter Area X.

Have I talked about the movie before? The depiction of wild life, spiraling up and out into the universe as animals rapidly become plants and refract upon each other as though seen through kaleidoscope genes? I must have, its aesthetic sensibility influences my own approach to the unknown.

But the book, I read twice in a week. So intensely did it capture me, the recounting of the Biologist whose account of her time inside Area X was never intended to be found. A letter to nothing and no one, driven by a human need to process the unprocessable on paper. One narrator, one perspective, one single lonely journey into something entirely unlike the world she knows.

Read the book.