Its circumference is ever-expanding, threatening the government lab erected outside of it. Imagine a dome that swirls with the same sort of light you see in a sunlit bubble or an oily rain puddle in a parking lot. Animal and human bodies that muck together in a kind of fungal bloom. Every character who enters Area X becomes a kind of bio-experiment, cross-pollinated with the fecund environment. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge in Florida’s panhandle, and his love for the location is infectious. VandeerMeer was inspired by the impossibly rich and diverse ecology of the 68,000-acre St. Setting is the principal character in Annihilation.
A CLASH OF KINGS AUDIOBOOK TOR SKIN
The Ruins offers plenty of thrills and scares, as vines darkly twist beneath skin and flowers bloom with blood, but it’s the inside screams-of these complicated, indelible characters-that continue to resonate so many years later. But the inside scream? It endures, echoing through the blood-lit chambers of your heart and mind, steadily poisoning you with its dread. The outside scream is cheap and fleeting it’s what escapes you when something leaps out of a closet or reaches from under a bed. There is the outside scream and the inside scream. And this is where the substantial work is done in any horror story. As a group, they’re trapped in the ruins-and then, one by one, they’re infected and consumed.Īt a glance, it’s a seemingly simple story, like A Simple Plan, but once again Smith masterfully explores the inner lives of his characters as they desperately struggle to survive. And everywhere, hanging like bells from the vines, were those brilliant bloodred flowers…” And this flora has a sinister appetite. “The vines covered everything… layer upon layer, forming waist-high mounds, tangled knoll-like profusions of green. They’re punished for their behavior when they stumble upon some Mayan ruins. They treat the country as their playground, disregarding laws, disrespecting local customs, and ignoring the very real dangers of the jungle, which makes them frat boy colonialists in the same tradition as Alex Garland’s The Beach. Here a group of reckless, pleasure-seeking twenty-somethings enjoy a vacation south of the border. Smith channels the same clean prose and ruinous characterization and steadily deepening dread into The Ruins, but replaces the frozen north with the sun-drenched tropical locale of Cancun. In it a plane packed with four million in cash crashes in snowbound Ohio, and the men who happen upon the wreckage slowly destroy themselves with their conniving greed. These elements upend the laws of biology, geology, physics they create chaos in the geopolitical theater they shake up the energy and weapons sectors and they-in a very Marvel-y sort of way-create a new dawn of heroes and villains.Īnd here are some of the stories-about dangerous plants-that seeded the growth of my own novel:Ī Simple Plan stands out as one of my favorite modern crime novels. The novels in the Comet Cycle are triggered by an age-old sci-fi concept: a comet comes streaking through the solar system, the planet spins through the debris field, and new elements are introduced to the world. Some of my favorite narratives rely on comets as a supernatural device, an instigator of change. I want to gobble up everything that might be in the same vein, because the critical comparisons will be inevitable, and I want to be in conversation with those who share the same shelf.
The stories that have, well, planted themselves in my brain and helped inspire The Unfamiliar Garden.Īnother author once told me they avoid all narratives that bear any resemblance to their own, because they want to avoid being influenced.
And then, of course, there’s the artistic research I chase.
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