Levatín Cabrera

Solid worldbuilding with excellent pacing, cool character design, beautiful animation, and women characters that aren't just sexy lamps with weapons. A miracle the werewolf/vampire feud storyline doesn't feel stale.

Fun and funny. Felt quite a lot like an homage to early 2000's romcoms, but with more thought and love put into the relationships. Anachronistic in a nonchalant sort of way that makes the world more approachable for modern audiences.

A disorienting and paranoia-inducing film. Great if you like dubious endings, unreliable narrators, and monsters that are inanimate and hungry. The gore is shockingly reserved, almost tasteful. A little convoluted, but less so than most of its contemporaries.

Don't let the first person perspective turn you away, this is well worth the read. What starts as a seemingly stilted, awkward narrator slowly becomes part of the eerie ambience that sneaks up on you along with the uncanniness of Area X. Things that seem arbitrary upon first glance become impactful as the story progresses. The rambling, distracted voice of the Biologist transforms into an narrative more like mycelium than linear plot. Vandermeer also doesn't fall prey to the beast that regularly eats authors writing women alive: forgetting that women are normal people, too. Only one sentence felt like an unnecessary "woman written by a man" faux pas, and it was (shockingly) silly rather than offensive. Pick it up if you want a grounded sci-fi that will slowly unmoor you.