Annihilation

Four women, known only by their occupations of psychologist, anthropologist, surveyor, and biologist, comprise the twelfth expedition into the mysterious Area X. Each previous expedition has met with different fates. The first reported an Edenic landscape, the 2nd in mass suicides, the 3rd ended in a hail of gunfire, etc. With the psychologist as the de facto leader, our narrator is the biologist. They're on a mission to map the terrain, record all observations, and eventually report back. But what they find is initially odd, then gets stranger and stranger and more and more menacing. It's a cool, odd, story that kept me turning pages quickly. It's the first of a trilogy known as the Southern Reach. I'll continue.