The Horror of The Crawler | Annihilation 

Yep. Quinn's intro music is absolutely perfect for his channel.

🙏🏻, and his videos in general are amazing! I’ve watched them all multiple times. Im waiting for the three body problem series can’t wait for those. All the books he talks about I want to read lol

@@gamingclipz7309 I admit TBP is also the one I have been most expectant of, it would be amazing if Quinn did the audiobook for it.

It reminds me of Dr. Who.

This was a good take!

Which, ironically, is _exactly_ how humans and their civilisation behave, from the viewpoint of any other animal species.

@@carcharoclesmegalodon6904 Yes, exactly. I see this whole novel as mimicking the way humans have manipulated our own environment in unnatural ways to suit us.

@@carcharoclesmegalodon6904 I really dislike the separation between man and animal, as if we are somehow a completely different entity, and is if those very same animals would not act as we do if they had our intelligence.

@@EmeraldDreams7 not just humans animals in general, beavers build damns, ants domesticate aphids, boars uproot trees and destroy soil. I don't think its entirely limited to humans, I think the crawler is mirror to mother nature herself.

@@launcherx2044 no animal causes destruction on the scale we do

That's awesome. I didn't read the book as horror either.

Your story is powerful. Would you recommend the next two in the sequel?

The concept isnt something I find particularly terrifying either. I have always been fascinated by the idea of transformation and surrendering to a metamorphosis into something alien. I think part of that is because it represents a negation of the social contract, like you aren't bound by the things that the codify what human civilization is anymore because you are no longer human. It evokes a profound feeling of ambivalence. I like what I am as a human, but with that nature I have to engage with civilization which is sometimes hostile to my identity, and becoming something else could be a concession which is less painful. Like the biologists transformation is into something which fundamentally enriches her experience of reality, even if what she metamorphosed into is foreign and incomprehensible to what she was before. I was talking to someone about the movie and how it has a tendency to evoke different feelings in people. He was positing that the movie itself has a lot of symbolism about suicide, and people feeling about the movie are a reflection about their feeling about death. While I dont know if that is entirely true, as someone who has struggled with depression that resonated with me. Area X doesn't terrify me because at worst it represents death and at best it represents transformation. While I mostly have depression under control now, i feel depression can fundamentally alter the way you view death. I appreciate my life and what I have, but I dont view death as the worst thing that can happen. Ultimately the biologists act of surrender symbolizes all of those things possibly and that resonates with me in a deep way.

Never thought of it as horror either but more like mystery. After all, the thing changing the environment was somewhat alive and it made me question a lot of what alive even meant or what truly mind-boggling life forms could be out there...

@@HLDMAD1CK yeah the book is super literary and belongs more in the lit section of a book store than scifi or horror. I mean it was much about her relationship to her husband as it was about area x.

The fractal monster is amazing.

I liked the movie, a lot, but I didn’t even realise it was a horror.

@@pokerynia psychological/cosmic horror is different than traditional horror. For example have you seen requiem for a dream? That could be considered psychological horror, without any sort of normal horror element being present.

@@jackalope_hunter I have read and watched a lot of psychological horror that made me feel unknowable fear and uncomfortableness, the movie made me feel nothing of that.

The movie was terrible and the end was so stupid.

Made me very sad they chose not to include the crawler in the film but I think any attempt at adapting it would probably just be inherently disappointing because you can’t visualize the crawler and that’s what makes it so terrifying. But I’ve come to appreciate the film as a great standalone movie but a poor adaptation

@@jacobm6617 I prefer it this way, I can barely believe the crawler is so well represented in the books. In the movie it would not work but spoil the book in a way. I watched the movie first and I think is better this way. You get the visual aesthetics which are not that explicit in the books, at least until the third one. But you can still enjoy the books as they are not spoiled and have mystery to make you keep reading.

It's the spiritual descendant of HP Lovecraft's the color out of space, which he considered to be his best work, and Tiberium from the Command and Conquer Tiberium saga.

Well said all that and the fact that the book describes the crawler writing as looking like some weird vibrating motion.

It's a fabulous series. It kept scaring the pants off me and yet I couldn't put it down!

Aye. Its an art form to trick your brain into coming up with the most fucked up shit.

Yeah, the annihilation movie and color out of space are pretty great examples

Sure, talent. Drugs be a hell of a drug too tho, so....

@@sentientmicrowave259 is are drugs what made you sentient too?

@@RUIN-ingYourFavoriteSongs Soooo many

That bear and the fractal beast at the end were so otherworldly!

This is definitely one of those movies that got unnecessary hate. I loved it the first time and it was just as weird the second time around after a couple of years. Not a perfect movie by any means but it was weird in a good way and enjoyable (creepiest part for me was the found footage of the soldiers prior to them...the worms bro...those goddam intestine worms 🤮)

vandermeer has a thing for bears, it's kinda great.

Notice that the bear has a human face on the side of its face.

I was working nights when I tried to watch this movie. Put it on around 7AM, woke up to the bear attack.

Me too! A coworker let me borrow it and less than two days later I finished it. Something about the mystery and cerebral nature of its storytelling was almost hypnotic to me

I read it in one day as well! The weirdness pulled me in.

Is it even them that come back?

@@nunyabiznes33 they touch on this in the book but I don't want to say because it's a potential spoiler.

@@nunyabiznes33 Not really.

@@nunyabiznes33 Yes and no, at the same time. It'd be spoilers to say more.

There's an inevitability to the obliteration of civilization in that that is very satisfying. On a narrative level of course.

Yes!

He just read the first one so he doesn't know much or at all about the keeper. Pd: which analyst? Would like to check him out

@@unaif.2171 I forget which specific character, but Control was speaking to him in the second book. He mentioned that the writings inside the tower had a close pattern match to the Keeper's sermons.

@@FearlessSonSorry, I thought you meant some analyst in real life.

Like the monster from the midnight episode in Doctor Who!

It's incredible what the mind is capable of

I experienced the same thing!

Your a nerd

Its called imagination.

Read the rest of the serie, if you have not done soo already. The first book is great but it also an introduction to the ultra subjective story telling style that get more extreme in the later books. Jeff coaches you in the two first book and than really lets it rip in the last book.

Another interesting detail about the writing in the tower: Vandermeer literally came up with it during a fever dream. He was pretty sick with something-or-other, and those words popped up in his dreams. I don't know how he remembered them well enough to write them down once he woke up, but the effect is wonderfully creepy. Just when you think you're beginning to get the sense of it, it changes.

Yeah I like this interpretation. It's also implied that what arrived to earth wasn't a complete entity, having barely escaped the annihilation of its home world, so using a "native" being to complete itself and continue its purpose would make sense.

@@RingoLoadagain Hmm, I hadn't thought of it like that - thanks for the new idea!

the entity wouldn't understand english when it arrived here so most likely it's using the lighthouse keeper to translate it's thoughts into english which is why the writing is so similar to what the lighthouse keeper would say/write

@@Karin_Allen That's a bit like Samuel Taylor Coleridge waking from an opium sleep and writing down the incomplete but phenomenal Kubla Khan, which he dreamed.

It is an amazing series of books and I was surprised, that by the third book, the author does an amazing job of explaining some of the cool ideas he presents throughout the series and ties it up in a satisfactory way, in my opinion. I highly recommend his short stories called Ambergris as well.

Wow I didn’t even know it was a trilogy, now I gotta check out the other books.

What is a title drop? Could you elaborate?

​@@alexanderkulaev541the title of the book or movie said in the book or the movie

@@greatvaluecrunchynuggets6918 Okay, thanks!

“This is it, our annihilation” -John Annihilation. this was an absolutely chilling scene i literally cried after reading it

​@@logangant7732Bro annihilated all over the place. Truly one of the annihilations of all time 😭

The 3rd book does not have a real ending. It just stops. The 2nd and 3rd books were clearly rushed to meet deadlines that were set by the publisher. NONE of the questions that are set up get answered. NONE of the blatant mystery boxes have a payoff. We get it. “It’s a metaphor for cancer & human’s fear of the unknown, and we need to accept the unknown, hence the name of book 3.” 1. That’s Pretentious. 2. We didn’t need 3 whole books to make that point.

@@t.k.1319 that's a shame 😕

Strange fiction, or Lovecraftian fiction is extremely hard to pull off, but this author has more than proven capable.

@@t.k.1319 You're right that stuff doesn't get explained, but I still kept turning the pages and enjoying the ride the whole time, so I didn't mind so much. I only expect so much from a cosmic horror story; which among them has much of an ending? I don't judge all book series so easily. For whatever reason, I reacted to books like The Golden Compass series in much the same way you are reacting to these books. Maybe I was just more demanding way back when I read them, or maybe those books really did have a poopy ending (I remember thinking so for sure). But to each their own! Sorry you didn't like'em duder.

@@t.k.1319 I think folks will have different reactions to these books depending on their tolerance for ambiguity. For me, I was happy to get deeper and deeper mysteries without being given an answer. It made the whole series linger in my mind long after I read them. I savored the mystery, giving me answers would have spoiled it. The very end of book 3 made me tear up a bit, and I thought it was a great way to conclude the inconclusive.

I, too, enjoy my coffee with existential despair.

@@matthewkemp594 You should switch to the _perfectly balanced_ beverage that is tea.

I got good news for you - book four is in progress of being written.

Oh damn. Book four. Jesus

Quinn really writes a well researched essay each time he produces quality every time and I always see something new after listening to him!

FWIW, I read the whole trilogy before watching the movie, and I was *not* pleased with the movie. I feel like I would have loved it if I hadn't read the books already, but I ended up feeling like Alex Garland (whom I otherwise love) scraped the plot of the novel down to its bare bones and then draped an entirely new story over those bones. It made me a little angry, to be honest.

I've only watched the movie and felt like it was an absolutely shameless ripoff of the Strugatzkis Roadside Picnic with a bit of Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space and some mutated creature horror mixed into it. But that's a good hint of you, I might read the books now if they are so different from that nonsense movie.

The second book is hands down the worst book I've ever read. Nothing happens. It's pure office gossip and petty drama.

@@Karin_Allen Garland purposefully only read the book once and never consulted it, or read the rest of the series, when adapting the screenplay. I also didn't like it the film as I did the book (due to many choices, like making all the expedition members' reason for being in Area X be dependent on men), but I understand and respect his approach in wanting to make it his own.

@@RoboKestrel I have to disagree, although I can completely understand why it's not for everyone. It's almost a satire of bureaucracy. It's a story of the most structured organization trying to understand and apprehend unstructured chaos. It's an impossible task. Ambiguity is anathema to bureaucracy.

I really wish that series would finish

@@khthonik I know the feeling :( At least GURPS (A Tabletop RPG system) had a War Against the Chtorr book, so we can all get a kind of catharsis in beating the Chtorr (or not) with a nice game and some dice.

@@khthonik Sadly, I think Gerrold wrote himself into a corner with Jim's, let's say, "realization" about himself in book 5's excerpt, and he hasn't figured out how to reconcile it.

agreed!!

I'm reading Ambergris right now and god damn is Vandermeer an expert in tone and atmosphere. I'm both incredibly hooked and incredibly creeped out.

"The movie is a masterpiece" That is very debatable.

No

@@colin8696908Disagree. I'm tired of people not hearing out Alex Garland's particular brand of genius. He's one of the finest sci fi directors we have who doesn't simply make popcorn movies. I hear criticism of the acting but they're literally supposed to be confused as if they exist in a place beyond time (because they do). Any "weakness" you can find with the movie just works out in its favor imo

Authority became one of my favorites after I reread it. So much reveals itself on the second read of the series.

Weirdly I thought it was the most straightforward one of the trilogy.

@@Scimarad kind of a Spy novel.

The middle book is different, but it's got its own charm if you come into it with the right frame of mind. Personally, I like to think of it as something akin to the SCP Foundation or Control. How do you get a group of people to study something that is, by its nature, incomprensible to the human mind? What does that do to a person who studies it for long enough? What does that do to an organization of people? How do you even *begin* to figure out such an organization let alone the thing it was formed to study?

Amen! Sadly, a lot of people I know gave up on the series somewhere in the midst of Authority. I wish they'd hung on until things start to gel - and until the biggest creep-out scene I've ever read makes the hair on their necks stand up. And then that ending! Yeah, Authority is a mind blower in more ways than one.

could be he doesn't mean it literally it's more of a "mind crawler"

Quinn is a delight.

Sadly, a lot of people I know gave up on the series once they got into Authority. It *is* hard to read at first, but it's meant to be. The audience experiences what Control experiences, which is total confusion. I wish those people had continued to reach the part when Control figures out what the hell is going on - and the new goings-on that happen after *that*. Acceptance is amazing - and like you said, it does solve most of the mysteries. But readers can't understand it without the information Authority provides.

I was thinking the same thing

He did say he hasn't read the whole trilogy in this video. This review perfectly encapsulates the horror of the crawler as described in the first book.

I'm curious of which key scenes you're referring to. Quinn makes several inferences as to the nature of the crawler and its origin that are later explained in the sequels. These are great guesses, and I think that he hits the most important points of what makes the crawler so horrifying. Namely the lighthouse keeper suspended in time yet seemingly aware, the ever expanding Area X, and the strange 'doubles' that appear in place of their originals. I read the trilogy once in 2016, so I admit my knowledge is dated, and it's hard to remember exactly what is and is not explained in the first book. If you're being deliberately obtuse as to avoid spoilers in the comments, I do respect that.

Easilyy

If you stick with it, you'll see the Biologist again. As the book goes on, Control becomes increasingly certain that locating and meeting up with the Biologist is the key to unraveling the mystery.

First & second book come together in the third though. I get what you're saying but I'm glad I finished the trilogy. I don't want to spoil anything so I'll leave it at that

I couldn't agree with you more, I hated the second book. In fact, I put it down half through and didn't come back to start and finish again until a year later. I am glad I finished it, and then the third book, as this series is now one of my all time favorites. The second book is such a departure in every way from the first and third. It does start to get back to its spooky scifi fiction towards the latter half, and I can't recommend trudging forward enough, the third book is amazing. Upon my recent rereading of the series, I appreciated the 2nd book much more, and I was reminded how short it is.

@@HArryvajonas okay... I have the whole trilogy on audio and paperback. I like switching back and forth... Idk why. I'll give the second book another chance. I don't remember much from the second book except I didn't like it. I'll keep the fact it gets better and the third, Acceptance, is worth going through Authority. Besides, I'll probably enjoy reading Annihilation again. I really enjoyed the Biologist. She was a weirdo. Freaks tend to be more interesting than normies... ya know.

@Brian Andrews Have fun, the second book does start to go back to the spooky scifi of the first and third towards the end, and it is required reading for the third book ( one of the main characters is setup in the 2nd book). I do the same as well, for some hard to read books, having the voice of an Audible Narrator in your head helps. In Fact, I never enjoyed reading Lovecraft, until I found a couple great British Narrators on Audible of his work; ever since then, I read his stories in they're voice, and it just works.

Finish 3 body problem dude. Annihilation is great but having read both you'll be doing yourself a huge disservice if you don't finish 3 body problem for the sake of Annihilation.

The dark forest

I agree, Authority blossoms like the strange flower that is not for everyone to see. Borne by Vandemere is interesting as well, but not as fun to me.

Yeah, I don't know why people bounce off the second book. It might actually be my favourite.

@@Scimarad It's all context, I think...each book is a deeper dive than the one before IMO.

@Scimarad Well, it is mostly a political drama. It is a huge departure from the first book, and although I appreciated it more on second reading, more so as being a necessary setup for the third book. I don't think it compares to the first and third book. To each their own, if anything, it is a testament to the authors ability to write in different styles and genres.

@Gary Seven Very true, which is why I think the three books taken as a whole, might be my favorite series. It is very rare that an author is able to elaborate and expound on the first book in a series ( that usually has the most interesting ideas); more often than not, they end up contradicting prior facts, or go off in a direction that makes you realize how special the first book was ( Hyperion). I also agree, the second book adds to the overall story, even though I am not a fan of the change in story and presentation. If it isn't obvious, I appreciate stand alone stories, and I lement the now standard, multiple novels, that so many authors seem to be beholden to now.

The movie took a few key ideas from the first book and made them the focus. But the book is much... broader... than just the movie. There's more going on in the book, more ideas to contemplate, and it sets up a context that gets explored even further. The movie was smart to pair it down for adaptation, but the book... it's an experience.

@@FearlessSon Thanks for the info, there is a copy at my local library!

God decided people couldn't figure it out themselves, so a dimensional rift that humans couldn't stop was the logical choice.

the lighthouse keeper was a preacher, so it might be his mind translating something he dont understand into words he knwos

Was it really an inspiration for control? Huh, now you've said it, it makes so much sense... neat! That's one of my favourites of his too!

Same author did "Stalker" no? Which may have inspired this series

@@BoycottChinaa nope, the movie versions were by the same director, Tarkovsky, but solaris is by stanislaw lem and stalker(roadside picnic) by the Strugatzky brothers

@@matteodigallo561 ahhh right, but Roadside Picnic and later Annihilation have the same basic concept, no?

@@BoycottChinaa yes although stalker/roadside are more involved with the social and inner consequences of the surreal situation, especially the movie (which was also written by the Strugatzky bros)

I loved the first, somewhat enjoyed the third, and absolutely, furiously hated the second. Hard series to recommend to anyone, despite how good it is.

@@CorpsmanPrivateer same, I loved the first and third but didn't like the second at all, but I respect Vandermeer for trying to pull off such a weird change in tone.

It’s all good, you just can’t expect the same food in every course of the feast.