We had been cautioned to provide maximum context, so that anyone ignorant of Area X could understand our accounts. And this in the context, too, of not bringing with us the old "culture creatures" as Schama puts it in his book Landscape and Memory. My last view of the world above: the psychologist peering down at me with a slight frown, and behind her the trees, the blue of the sky almost blinding against the darkness of the sides of the stairwell.

You do not know whether you have left this earth or crossed through an alternative dimension, or whether you yet remain in a strange forgotten corner of the world. VanderMeer’s first foray into Area X is a beautiful, subtle and incredibly atmospheric read which resonates with a sense of the unknown and the unknowable. Many of the animals and vegetation that VanderMeer has seen on this hike over the past 17 years appear in the novel. com named it book of the week [11] while GQ Magazine recognized it as one of the top books for the month of February and said that it was "about an intelligent, deadly fungus [which] makes for an enthralling read. I’ll go first and see what’s down there,” the surveyor said, finally, and we were happy to defer to her.The Biologist's past makes her both the perfect narrator, relating her experiences and her past with scientific rigour, yet so personally and intimately entangled in the present and the past that we feel ourselves in a fever-dream along with her. Besides, we were always strongly discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and “anything personal should be left behind. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. In November 2015, Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez was in talks to co-star in the film with Portman.

I stared straight ahead as she said these words, and when she snapped her fingers I took my cue from the actions of the other two.Where lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. As for the others, I don’t know what they told themselves, and I didn’t want to know, but I believe they all at least pretended to some level of curiosity. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties.

But what could I tell them about the words on the wall except that they were either impossible or insane, or both? Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements,” the psychologist answered, with a slight frown. But I am unsure whether it is because of the effect of the overall environment or the presence of the tunnel. In Area X in the present time, the four women come upon an unmapped bunker with a staircase curving deep into the ground, which the biologist feels oddly inclined to think of as a "Tower". Thundering down the trail toward us … yet we still had time to think about what we might do, had drawn our long knives, and in the surveyor’s case her assault rifle.The discussion of the tower was, in a way, our first opportunity to test the limits of disagreement and of compromise. I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the late afternoon of our first day at base camp. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic. I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology.

The level appeared to be the same circumference as the exposed top, which again supported the idea of a single solid structure buried in the earth. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh.I pulled back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced a pinprick of escalation in the smell of rotting honey. When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. From this self-destructively objective vantage point, there can be no "us" or "them", no threshold to cross, no home to flee to when all's done. Perhaps the idea that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen, rather than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her. Entering, they discover cursive writing that begins "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.