#maybe i ought to do my semi-annual reread.... NOW.

[mildmayfoxe]

Hi 👋 saw your annihilation post. Funnily enough I read the book about a week ago and had the same thought. I was wondering about your reasoning, if you don't mind :)

I hope you have good day!

oh man i mean where do i start. it's just such a huge tonal shift! the book has such a successful creeping sense of dread in such a lush and beautiful landscape; the initial peacefulness is off-putting! everything is uncanny but at first nothing is wrong. it's a book so much focused on the environment of the story, the sheer power and terror of nature to take back and alter a space. the scariness is almost gentle; nothing jumps out at you, there's no big monster coming to eat people up, it's just this strange surrealism of people and nature succumbing to mutation while you wonder what on earth is going on. nothing is real, everything is real. on the other hand, the movie goes for an extremely in-your-face approach in comparison, a real violence and baseness to incur terror. it wants you to be grossed out. cutting open someone's stomach to see writhing intestines is gross, the bear with half its face missing is gross. putting a monster fully on screen minimizes its effectiveness. the bear and the mood are heavy handed. more "the military wants to shut this down" and less "we want to study this and find out what's happening." granted there's military aspects of the novel too but you know american cinema. the only points at which it manages to even barely grasp the feeling of the novel are the big coral structure that used to be a person and the people who have turned into topiary, imo. those bits were ok. the big floating pulsing structure in the lighthouse is interesting. and like, adaptations don't have to be the same! but the feeling of the novel is so unique that it was such a disappointment to me to have the movie go in such a predictable direction, opting for "gross" over "surreal," which can go hand in hand but aren't the same. anyway i'm not a movie critic the book just really moved me when i read it for the first time, i reread the series every couple years. thanks jeff