Haunted By Genre: A Paranoid Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach

Zachary Gillan Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation builds to a question: “What does the border look like?” In a series full of striking scenery and uncanny doppelgangers, it’s a reminder that some of its most unsettling concepts dwell off the page and out of sight. Two books later, we get a kind of answer: that’s “A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.” The question comes from Annihilation’s protagonist, the biologist; when we return to it, uncannily, in Acceptance, the same scene is recounted from the expedition leader’s point of view, and the dismissal comes in her inner monologue. I open with this to emphasize two points: the thematic importance of borders, and the way the two viewpoints of the same exchange emphasize the unreliability and subjectivity of the series’ narrative. The Southern Reach series, almost certainly the most popular work of weird fiction this century, is typically read as an allegory for—or at the…