The Cosmic Horror Brilliance of Area X

Placing our lives and our home planet in the broader scope of a vast, ancient and unknowable universe, cosmic horror, or the weird, tackles fear in a different way to other horror subgenres, by diminishing humanity into nothingness and letting us succumb to our own subjective, personal reactions to that new knowledge.

Despite focusing on incomprehensible, unknowable, unfathomable and nameless concepts… cosmic horror almost always positions some singular entity as a representative figurehead of the core theme – an ancient, omnipotent being humanity has no hope of overcoming, such as H.P. Lovecraft’s now famous god, Cthulhu.

But what if there was a different approach, something unique in the genre, drawing from biology, ecology, and nature, rather than the depths of space or distant aeons in time, which talks about the twisting of the familiar, and the unknowable nature of things we consider to be familiar, rather than playing more directly with unknown things that may or may not be out there? What if the source of oppressive, incomprehensible cosmic dread was not a single giant creature forcing its way into our lives, but was instead a book’s entire setting?

This is the brilliance of Area X, the setting of Jeff Vandermeer’s masterful Southern Reach series, and in particular its first entry – Annihilation.

Like many cosmic horror tales, Annihilation immerses its reader in the story by placing an epistolary novel directly into their hands, forming an authentic connection between the real feeling story, and the reader who is to engage with the unknowable source of dread at its core.

In a more unusual approach for the genre, the writer of this epistolary work is a biologist, commenting on the wilderness of Area X in a journal she has been encouraged to write by her superiors, the government organisation known as the Southern Reach.

Straight away this separates the story from other works in the genre – casting a character who not only has the motivation and skills necessary to understand her environment and the things she finds there, but who has been hired to do exactly that by an organisation equally interested in understanding, in a genre work that is supposed to be all about not understanding.

This shouldn’t work, but in fact, the dichotomy works perfectly.

The most immediate reason for this is the journal itself, and the kinds of observation our biologist provides. See, unlike other cosmic horror stories, the author does not wait until the very end to reveal an unknowable source of dread. In this story, the narrator arrives in this source of dread from the first word, and develops its uncanny yet unexplainable wrongness as we experience firsthand how it rends the mind.

Importantly, this is not the only journal relating to Area X. The biologist finds abandoned tents and equipment from prior expeditions who left their own journals behind – this further immerses the reader in the story, as if we are a new expedition into Area X, reading the biologist’s journal just as she reads the journals of her predecessors, both of us trying and failing to mentally compartmentalise all this weird commentary.

The biologist has a passion and a scientific curiosity about everything. And I mean everything. The setting, its inhabitants, the other characters. By her own admission, her companions are as fascinating to her as the subject she is actually here to study. This means we become invested in this character largely through her worldview, as we explore, alongside her, this unknowable landscape.

As a biologist, she naturally starts describing her surroundings, the plants, animals, terrain, in a formation she explains to us did not feel so natural – that there was something off about Area X she couldn’t relate to us.

It is a thought she has before us, and it leads perfectly into our own realisation with her arrival at the book’s biggest focus – a tower, close to the abandoned base camp, that is not supposed to be here.

This tower is the novel’s main source of cosmic dread in the same way Cthulhu and friends are in a typical piece of weird fiction. That cosmic dread will build over the course of the exploration, but its status is made clear right from step one thanks to the surreal combination of descriptors.

A superficially manmade structure – seen as a tunnel our narrator insists is actually a tower they stand at the summit of – supplanted into the soil as if it is as natural to find there as the den of a mole or the nest of a miner bee. A staircase, a wall, words written on those walls cement the idea it is not natural once again. But the walls breathe, a heartbeat can be heard, a draft comes from lower down. And the words on the walls are not written but grown, some kind of fungal colony that harbours a tiny ecosystem thriving inside this tower.

It is impossible for this tower to be here, and yet banana spiders have made their webs in the entrance. It must be natural – and yet perfectly cut stairs lead ever downward.

So, which is it? Natural? Manmade? Supernatural – preternatural? Vandermeer plays with the idea of Area X being all these things and more as the exploration progresses, contradictions abounding because those contradictions are natural to this space, even if our biologist’s mind can never consider it normal.

But the combination of elements when this happens is surreal, uncanny, and builds an incomprehensible sense of aversion that is just as strong as those evoked by Lovecraft’s paradoxically descriptive passages. It’s arguably as messy as nature itself, even when it might seem so distinctly unnatural.

It also brings to mind just how little we know of our real natural world – but ratcheted up to this cosmic level – an entire ecosystem and environment that can just appear, secluded off by a border it is impossible to witness with any clarity.

Nature is so often depicted in fiction as this perfect, pristine thing that works efficiently, but that’s not accurate at all, and Vandermeer understands this. It is a mess of many hundreds of species all working the same land, things thriving and others dying, some dying from others’ thriving, and others thriving in the death and decay of their surroundings. In any tiny space, multiple things are happening that we wouldn’t see even if we looked.

It twists the common cosmic horror nerd comment of eldritch gods seeing us as ants – what if the presence of ants, and hundreds of even smaller entities or symbiotic structures, are the real cosmic entity? And it is us who fails to see or understand that to our own detriment? What if instead of a vast cosmic creature invading on our world, we trespass, hypnotised, into a vast cosmic world?

This is the kind of commentary that so vividly thrives under our biologist perspective. A biologist who spent her childhood lovingly studying an unkempt swimming pool turned ecological paradise in miniature – trying to understand things she was not capable of understanding. Trying to understand that which no one else even looked at. And after she moved out of this house, she never looked back to see if the pool still harbours all this life or if it had been destroyed to fit its more manmade purpose – she couldn’t cope with the bleak fear of finding out the answer.

This is not only a perfect backstory but a perfect subversion of everything that happens both within cosmic horror stories themselves, and within literary discourse surrounding the genre. It takes the strategy employed by dozens of cosmic horror masters and twists it into a version of cosmic horror uniquely poised to unravel a biologist.

Thus, the tower.

The first significant development that takes place in this structure is that the cryptic, living poem on its walls, neither natural or unnatural, spurts spores into our biologist’s face. She keeps the interaction secret, but it will have an effect on her character, on her understanding of the cosmic danger, and our own relationship to both of these things.

The important detail for this essay is that the biologist becomes immune to all hypnotic suggestion from the group’s psychologist leader, and her senses become more finely tuned, both of which allow us more vivid interaction with the world being crafted – if only through the eyes of one weird biologist.

Which brings us nicely onto the next major aspect of this genre – paranoia.

Cosmic horror, by the nature of the types of fear it preys on, requires a psychological element. In the face of weird and uncanny cosmic forces, people can’t trust each other, and become increasingly distant from one another. Ramping up character distrust alongside the mounting danger of Area X itself escalates tension in tandem – the danger rises, the distrust rises, everyone becomes more vulnerable emotionally and psychologically, so the cosmic forces become more threatening, and the characters do increasingly risky, offputting and antisocial things, which further breeds distrust… and on it goes.

It's an excellent cycle of dread that a story like this one greatly benefits from.

Of course, there isn’t just interpersonal mistrust. We also have to account for the ambiguous mistrust of their superiors – the Southern Reach.

What really works here is that, as our biologist purposefully and passionately explores Area X, so too does she learn how much misdirection and misinformation the Southern Reach supplied her with, which raises her doubt and confusion. Every time we get to learn more about this cosmic entity it only raises more questions – and the incomprehensibility of Area X increases exponentially. It’s a unique and deep approach to this aspect of cosmic horror – the unknowable – coming at the characters and us readers in a diverse selection of ways that all interconnect with one another.

The Southern Reach can afford to experiment with information, experiment with building mistrust between expedition members – because they know few if any of these people will be coming back from Area X. This is a great way of bringing in that other important aspect of the genre. It is only cosmic horror if it cannot be overcome – since that is the only way humanity can remain insignificant by the story’s finale.

I can’t get into any more without spoilers, and I’m already conscious of letting people go into this series as blind as possible while still letting you know how worth reading it is… but there’s one major question all of this leads us to.

If the natural unnatural tower has these words that are made of real creatures – what kind of cosmic incomprehensible being is writing the words?

*There will be spoilers ahead*

So, I’ve talked about how the typical cosmic horror approach is to throw a vast, indescribable entity at the reader in the finale, to represent in physical form the philosophical ideas the genre is really built on. Annihilation is generally not like that – it instead draws on real biological and ecological and even psychological phenomena, blowing them up to a much more monumental scale and using that to create both the real cosmic dread people are so drawn to this subgenre to experience, but also leaning more broadly into fears relating to our natural world, our place within that world, changes taking place in us and in our loved ones, and the threat of extinction and environmental crisis.

This is a deep, versatile book that does so many incredible things in such a short page count.

Which is why I so love that it – almost – does the typical cosmic horror approach, and throws a vast, indescribable entity at the reader in the finale.

Crucially, the Crawler is set up throughout the novel – first with the words, then comparisons to other phenomena across Area X, hints at what is to come down those stairs, things left behind, things anticipated…

But here at the story’s culmination, Vandermeer hits us with the most awe inspiring piece of indescribable description I think I’ve ever read – a several pages long encounter with the Crawler, deep within the Tower.

The Crawler – writer of incomprehensible poems made of fungal colonies – is described with a bunch of metaphors drawn from all over – lights, colours, fabrics, animals, plants, people, music, whispers, invasions, deaths… I’m not even going to attempt to go over everything this passage does because it needs to be experienced firsthand to be fully appreciated. But once again, it’s that Lovecraftian tactic of throwing so many disparate descriptions at the reader that for all it’s not entirely ‘indescribable’ – it patently is describable in some sense if you can use all these words – the description creates so many images in the mind at once vivid and abstract, clear and ambiguous, that it is unimaginable. And something about that causes a fear response, especially when paired with other more overt horror experiences like suffocation, dragging bodies, a piercing sensation, being trapped, being paralysed.

There’s a suggestion our biologist can only withstand her interaction with the Crawler due to what Area X has changed in her, which may feel like a cop out, but I love this because of its implication – you and I haven’t been changed by Area X, so what unimaginably terrifying things could the Crawler do to us?

It’s not a cop out – it allows the author to have his cake and eat it too. We can have the indescribable creature that you couldn’t possibly withstand, but we can also experience second hand what it’s like to be assaulted by the Crawler because of our narrator. Our narrator who despite being able to technically withstand it, still has a nightmarish time doing so. Masterful.

It once again comes back to the idea of a cosmic threat being invincible. We cannot overcome the Crawler. We are too insignificant.

There’s so much inspiring writing and storytelling present in Annihilation that I haven’t spoken about at all here, but I’m cautious of spoiling this incredible work of cosmic horror too much even within this spoiler section. So instead, I’m going to delve a little bit into the next three books of the Southern Reach Trilogy. It definitely won’t be as in depth an analysis as the rest of this essay – but there are a few more important aspects of this story I want to talk about.

So one more time…

*There will be spoilers ahead*

Okay, if it isn’t possible for Area X to be defeated… what does it mean for Area X to win?

Does it want to win? Does it want to defeat us? Does it even have a concept of either of these things? Or is this another case of a cosmic threat seeing us as insignificant little ants? And perhaps the most interesting question – would it be so bad if Area X did win?

In Annihilation, it is stated that the border – the hazy and indistinct ‘perhaps’ gate the characters had to be hypnotised to pass through – is advancing.

This is a vital yet understated detail – because that’s exactly what the following books do.

These are not sequels in the traditional sense, but expansions to the concept, the worldbuilding. Where once the blurry outlines of a map read ‘here be dragons,’ with each new book, Area X expands. The map gets larger, more densely populated, sharper. But it doesn’t, I tell you now, answer any questions. It just makes us ask more questions, scrabbling deeper into the rabbit hole, a few chapters at a time. And if you’re a fan of cosmic horror – what more would you have wanted?

The second book, Authority, grants us access to the Southern Reach itself, the organisation trying and failing to control something they can’t even understand. It’s an inspired choice – similar to how the biologist wanting to explore the unexplorable was inspired, here a government organisation must control the uncontrollable, tackling a vast cosmic threat in the typical ways that are not going to accomplish the typical results for such an atypical subject.

The third and fourth books – Acceptance and Absolution – combine these elements, acting not quite as the separate ‘islands’ that Annihilation and Authority were, but instead colouring the edges of the map, adding just enough glimpses of past, present, future, to further deepen those questions as much as possible while still not giving any concrete answers.

Something important in all of this, is that no matter how much Area X advances – either within the story, or externally with the latest book in the series – none of the characters investigating this cosmic entity understood it. The Southern Reach know almost nothing, their employees can’t figure it out, their spin off groups can’t get to the heart of it, and each expedition only builds more anxiety.

But it’s also worth noting that the border needn’t advance – certain things may already be passing through it. Area X may already be reaching out in ways unforeseen. It is known that nobody returns from Area X – but they do return. They’re just not the same people anymore. Area X changes psychology, biology, ecology rather than destroying or killing in a more conventional horror sense.

One day, the entire world might be Area X.

Cosmic horror.

Or…

Is the whole world being changed and influenced by Area X a good thing?

Must a vast, incomprehensible cosmic force always bring with it dread, terror, horror?

Maybe in order to be truly effective, a cosmic entity cannot be only repulsive, it must also attract, fascinate, inspire, equally if not moreso.

It must be awful, and awesome.

We’ve all heard of cosmic horror, but what if something cosmic can instil other feelings, like euphoria, or simple comfort?

What if you want to stay in a place like Area X?