Annihilation

Four women cross the border into Area X: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor and a psychologist who leads them. They have no names, only functions, and they are the twelfth expedition. The previous eleven ended variously. One group killed each other. One walked back out months later, wrong, docile, and dead of aggressive cancer within a year, including the biologist's husband.

Area X is a stretch of abandoned coast, sealed by the government for thirty years, in which nature has taken everything back and is doing something else besides. The team finds a structure the biologist insists on calling a tower, though it goes down rather than up, with a spiral staircase and words growing on the wall in living fungal script, forming a sentence that keeps going and never quite finishes.

Something is further down. Something else is in the lighthouse. The psychologist has been hypnotising them all along, and the biologist has stopped being susceptible because she breathed in spores on the first day.

This is a horror novel more than a science fiction one, told as a field journal in a flat scientific register that makes the dread worse.

The biologist is the other reason it works. She is antisocial, happiest alone in a tidal pool for months at a time, and was a difficult wife, and her marriage is reconstructed in fragments that are sadder than anything in the tower.

Around two hundred pages, quick and profoundly unsettling, and it explains almost nothing. Two sequels follow and decline to tidy it up.

Best for readers who want cosmic horror written by someone who knows exactly what a tidal marsh smells like, and who can accept a book that ends without an answer.