A team of four women – a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor – is sent on an expedition into Area X, a coastal region that has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades.

Little is known of what’s going on in the area: most previous expeditions have ended disastrously, their members either dead or reduced to shadows of their former selves.

The four find themselves immersed in a land entirely reclaimed by nature, in shapes both beautiful and grotesque. 

The biologist, who narrates the story through her field journal, accidentally inhales the spores of a local fungus; as a result, she becomes immune to the hypnotic suggestions she’d been subjected to as part of her training; she also starts experiencing what she can only describe as a “brightness” growing within herself, a transformation both psychological and fiscal.

The novel, much like Area X, is both beautiful and disturbing; the author combines visionary images and scientific jargon, mundane details and hints to phenomena that defy comprehension. 

The book employs some classical themes of horror and weird fiction, such as loss of identity, eldritch natural forms, eerie metamorphoses. What makes it really disconcerting and thought-provoking, however, is the ambivalence with which these subjects are depicted. 

Sure, Area X is a scary and mysterious place, that eludes comprehension in an almost lovecraftian way. It is, however, repeatedly described as idyllic, pure, pristine. The biologist, a solitary woman hardly ever at ease with other people, seems to even find some measure of relief in her objectively terrifying experience. 

The novel refrains from ever offering a satisfying explanation of anything it describes, instead suggesting that our need for a rational understanding may be inherently fallacious. It makes us question the relation between us human and nature, and the value we assign to out very sense of self.

It’s disorientating, in such a good way.