'Annihilation' Review: A Thrilling, Terrifying Surrealist Trip

Something strange is happening in science fiction. Such are the flora and fauna of what's now being called, rather neatly, the New Weird, the genre's version of the grotesque--though it's only "new" in the sense that it's finally rupturing, like miraculous sidewalk weeds, up through the literary cracks. That's thanks, in very large part, to a very small book called Annihilation. When it came out in 2014, the first in a three-part series, many people professed to love it. Perhaps a few of them genuinely did.