Crossing the boundaries of the unknown with Jeff VanderMeer The monstrous fantastic and "abcanny" in Annihilation

Abstract

Annihilation (2014), the first book of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, is significant because it represents a new phase in our relationship with the monstrous. The book was made into a film in 2018 by the acclaimed director Alex Garland, with the same title and starring Natalie Portman. Following a cataclysmic event in a coastal town, the fear that the world beyond the town might also be affected creates tension, and a team of experts is sent to "the Area" to understand the reason behind the disaster. This paper firstly introduces the contemporary "weird" genre, and goes on to give a brief history of its progression to the present day. It then incorporates the weird visionary China Mieville's "abcanny" concept into the analysis, since the story is situated in the abcanny rather than the presumed "uncanny." The discussion is opened up to include Mark Fisher's distinction between "the weird" and "the eerie" by incorporating examples from the novel. But, most importantly, the paper relates philosopher Slavoj Zizek's concept of "inhuman monsters" to the extraordinary beast that VanderMeer creates, thus suggesting a new reading of the narrative as a moral tale of the need to move beyond the human-centric in the twenty-first century.