Books like Annihilation
What should you read after Jeff VanderMeer’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Jeff VanderMeer
- 2014
- Weird fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Annihilation
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchAuthority
Jeff VanderMeer
The direct sequel, and a deliberate anticlimax: VanderMeer swaps the swamp for a strip-lit government office and lets the dread seep in through the paperwork.
- No explanations, ever
- Dread without a monster
- Nobody has a name
- Office politics replace wilderness
Best for the answers you do getAcceptance
Jeff VanderMeer
The closing volume, and as near to resolution as VanderMeer is willing to come — which is to say the questions are given a history rather than an answer.
- Being changed by the place
- No explanations, ever
- A tower that goes down
- Read the first two first
Great matchBorne
Jeff VanderMeer
VanderMeer's other mode: biotech instead of biology, a ruined city instead of a marsh, and the same odd tenderness towards things that should not exist.
- Nature taking the place back
- Being changed by the place
- An unreliable field journal
- More plot, far more dialogue
Worth a look — with a warningThe Southern Reach
Jeff VanderMeer
The omnibus of the whole trilogy, which means you have already read a third of it. Useful if you want the sequels in one volume, and pointless otherwise.
- No explanations, ever
- A tower that goes down
- Dread without a monster
- Contains the book you just read
Best for the dreadThe Road
Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy reaches the same effect by another route: stripped sentences, an unnamed pair walking through a dead landscape, and no interest whatsoever in explaining the catastrophe.
- Nobody has a name
- No explanations, ever
- Dread without a monster
- Grief, rather than the uncanny
Worth a look — with a warningThe Martian
Andy Weir
The exact opposite temperament: a scientist narrating a hostile environment who solves everything and explains all of it. Read it as an antidote rather than a follow-up.
- An unreliable field journal
- Nature taking the place back
- Dread without a monster
- Everything is explained
Best for what the narrator won't sayNever Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro withholds the way VanderMeer does — a calm narrator describing an ordinary life while the real situation sits just outside the edge of the frame.
- An unreliable field journal
- Dread without a monster
- No explanations, ever
- No wilderness, nothing uncanny
Great matchThe Passage
Justin Cronin
A government project in the wilderness that gets away from everybody — your setup exactly, played as a big propulsive horror epic instead of a slow field journal.
- Being changed by the place
- Nature taking the place back
- Dread without a monster
- 766 pages, and a trilogy
Great matchThe Power
Naomi Alderman
Alderman also builds her novel out of documents and reports rather than scenes, and lets one biological change rewrite the world without ever apologising for the premise.
- An unreliable field journal
- No explanations, ever
- Being changed by the place
- Social satire, not horror
Great matchStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Mandel's collapse has the same quiet to it: the world ends, plants come up through the tarmac, and the prose declines to raise its voice about any of it.
- Nature taking the place back
- A marriage remembered in fragments
- Dread without a monster
- Hopeful rather than frightening
Best for dread without a monsterThe Fisherman
John Langan
Two men, a river, and something much older than either of them under the water. Patient horror that works by accumulation — the nearest thing here to Area X's atmosphere.
- Dread without a monster
- Nature taking the place back
- No explanations, ever
- Openly horror, not science fiction
Worth a look — with a warningThe Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi
Biology out of control on a much larger canvas: engineered organisms, collapsing ecologies, and a Bangkok that feels every bit as alive and hostile as Area X.
- Nature taking the place back
- Being changed by the place
- Dread without a monster
- Heavy on economics and politics
Best for rules you must not questionThe City & The City
China Miéville
Miéville's premise is as flatly impossible as a tower that goes downwards, and it is delivered by a narrator who treats the whole thing as ordinary municipal fact.
- No explanations, ever
- A tower that goes down
- Dread without a monster
- A murder plot to follow
What should you read after Annihilation?
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Authority by Jeff VanderMeer — the direct sequel, and a deliberate anticlimax: VanderMeer swaps the swamp for a strip-lit government office and lets the dread seep in through the paperwork.
If what stayed with you was being changed by the place, read Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer instead: the closing volume, and as near to resolution as VanderMeer is willing to come — which is to say the questions are given a history rather than an answer. Borne by Jeff VanderMeer is the other strong option — vanderMeer's other mode: biotech instead of biology, a ruined city instead of a marsh, and the same odd tenderness towards things that should not exist.
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