For this week there are two bodies of work I want to touch on, John Van der Meer’s Annihilation and a few stories by the famous H.P. Lovecraft. Annihilation first, so overall I think it has many cool ideas but it falls short on making those crazy ideas make sense in it’s own universe. It’s kind of like if when Lucas made Star Wars he made the force also allow people to shoot fire from their eyeballs, sure its easy to say that nothing should make sense in a world of lightsaber wielding telekinetic space wizards but the force is a magic system with its own rules, abilities and limitations and thus has its own logic. Annihilation feels like its said ‘HEY WHAT IF REALITY GOT REALLY HIGH ON ACID?’ and proceeded to fly higher than kites should, I’m gonna ride this metaphor a bit more and say it needed to ground its kite or find its own logic per se. The movie seems to have done this by reining in most of the craziness. I read Annihilation a few summers ago but in Dutch because my grandmother thought it’d be nice to give me a Dutch book to learn the language even though John Van der Meer is an American, and the copy she gave me was in English… But moving on to Lovecraft, I can say that his work is fantastic and hasn’t aged badly at all… I’ve reread A Color out of Space and Shadow over Innsmouth for this week and I’ll try to steer clear of Lovecraft’s racism just so I can talk about the sci fi. Color out of Space is a bit weird but its a solid horror story, despite being completely wrong about how the electromagnetic spectrum works. Shadow over Innsmouth scratches that Lovecraftian itch and does well with the horror of fish people up until the point where the main character becomes a fish boy himself. It’s got that same slimy feel to it as Call of Cthulu does albeit more self contained.
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