Annihilation (2015) by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation: Book One of the Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer: Interesting, cosmically horrifying ideas are relentlessly stripped of all horror and weirdness by the attenuated, flat nature of both characterization and description in this first, shortest novel of Jeff VanderMeer's double-named Area X/Southern Reach trilogy.

VanderMeer seems to be striving for the sort of vague horror of his Weird Fiction touchstone M. John Harrison, specifically in the vein of Harrison stories that include "The New Rays" and "Egnaro." Which is to say, the two Harrison stories included by VanderMeer in his massive and massively flawed anthology The Weird. Harrison's stories take place in places that seem contemporary, but vaguely so, with both time and place being disturbingly off-kilter.

So some time in the near future in the Southern United States, a research team of five women ventures into an area called Area X. They're the 13th such team. Or are they? Is this the near future or is this going on 'now'? Do the characters have names or are they only referred to by their occupations? 

Our Biologist narrator lost her husband to Area X. Just getting into Area X somehow wipes one's memory of getting into Area X. The whole place is a sort of mutated dimensional space caused by Something from Outside crashing into a lighthouse some time in the past. Or that's what it appears to be. To the lighthouse, then!

Ciphers squabble with other ciphers. No one figures much out. There's a weird thing in an underground complex. There are signs of bloody battle at the lighthouse. The narrator's husband nicknamed her Ghost Bird, a nickname that doesn't seem to apply much to our characterless main character.

VanderMeer throws around italicized words and phrases like August Derleth editing H.P. Lovecraft stories. Is that intentional? Because the set-up of Area X is pretty much the set-up of Lovecraft's 1928 classic "The Colour Out of Space," in which the titular something mutates and destroys a New England landscape and everything in it.

It takes a special sort of genius to make events and things as weird as are posited in this novel so boring, so enervating to this reader that there is no way I'm reading the second and third books. Your results may vary. It all feels like horror for people too refined for horror. Not recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.