Sweet pivot...

Thank you Jeff Vandermeer.  You have made up for the walk in the desert that was The Parasite and The Incrementalists.  Yes, I had Dust and the Madd Addam trilogy mixed in there, like oases.  But those two books were coloring my mood and willingness to read.  Despite inadvertently breaking my no unfinished series rule, I loved Annihilation.  It started out all Roadside Picnic (enough so that I wonder if one of the characters telling another to have a picnic was a reference).  Then it went all The Mist and Monsters.  And then it had a downright Cthulhu-esque vibe.  I read it through in a day.

The Incrementalists irritated the hell out of me when the characters got introspective and sexual.  Annhilation gets introspective and sexual.  The difference in the writing: the pace, the story, all of it - speaks to why I didn't mind in Annhilation and in The Incrementalists I wanted to reach into the book and meddle with the characters such that their brains were alpha locked and could never be unlocked and that the infinite loop destroying them would extend to the immediate text.  That's proof that I read the whole damn book.

I'm greatly looking forward to the next two books in The Southern Reach Trilogy.