I can not quite pinpoint what I liked about this books, but I can say that I thought it was fun.

Annihilation is a novel in the Weird fiction vein, and has a lot of characteristics associated with that genre. There's a first person narrator, inexplicable occurrences, entities whose being is incomprehensible and whose existence threatens the sanity of normal human beings. It kind of reminds me of At the Mountain of Madness... if it took place in some Southern US jungle and if Lovecraft was a good writer.

VanderMeer here is actually a very focused and competent writer in this novel, which you normally do not see with Weird fiction. This is particularly appreciated towards the end as one of the incomprehensible creatures is seen and encountered. The reader is left disoriented, but in a good way... as if you had a brush with the creature and not like you are scratching your head wondering just what the writer means or what he is possibly hinting at.

The plot (and even the structure) is very reminiscent of the first season of Lost, with our character, the biologist, remembering her past at certain points in the story.

Annihilation serves as an intriguing introduction to Area X and its mysterious, tantalizing the reader with glimpses of what it is but leaving plenty of unknowns to explore in the next two books.