I remembered this book being easy to read, but forgot how quickly things seem to happen.

We're introduced to our team of four women: The psychologist (who is leading the team), the anthropologist, the surveyor, and our focus character, the biologist. There was also a linguist who signed up for the expedition but didn't make it through the barrier.

Chronologically the first incident is the boar. While hiking out to their camp site, a boar catches wind of them and rushes at them from a hundred meters out, but it veers off before it reaches them. The biologist notes that there's something strange about its face and eyes. My book also has an illustration of a boar on the inside cover.

The biologist is much more interested in the Tower, a tunnel leading deep into the ground with some kind of landings inside and words written in living organisms lining the stair walls. She can't help but think of it as a Tower despite it being the inverse of our usual understanding of tower.

On their first foray into the Tower, the biologist inhales some of the bloom from the walls. That night the biologist learns that she is now immune to hypnotic suggestion from the psychologist.

The next day the biologist finds that the anthropologist is no longer with them. The psychologist tries to use hypnosis to convince them that the anthropologist decided to extract, but the biologist doesn't believe her. What happened to the anthropologist? We're down to three people on the expedition now and neither the surveyor nor the biologist trust the psychologist.

On their way into the tunnel once again, this time wearing breathing masks, the biologist and the surveyor find that the writing in the wall is becoming fresher the farther down they reaching. Something below them is making this writing, some kind of life-form writing in English with organic blooms. What's more, the Tower appears to be a living creature, as the biologist can feel it breathing. Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York meets a Sarlacc pit.

And finally, they notice an ascending bootprint among their descending bootprints. Who made the third set of bootprints?

For next week, aim to read another 50ish pages. In my copy on page 106, there's a break right after "Perhaps you're staring at it now."

Unless anybody else joins in, this will probably be the last book club month. For May, we'll be reading Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. This is the first book in the Area X Trilogy, and the book that Alex Garland's film was based on.

If you can pick it up before next Friday and read about fifty pages. It looks like there's a break on page 55 of my copy following, "At the time, we didn't think to look for more sets of boot prints," so I'll be be aiming for that.

I'll make a post next Friday with my thoughts, but as always, feel free to make a post with anything you find interesting or want to discuss. I've read this one before, but please do mind spoilers in case anyone else is reading.

We have three options for April’s book to discuss:

• dopearchery on YouTube recommended Junji Ito’s Frankenstein, a horror manga spin on Mary Shelley’s classic.
• I’ve been wanting to reread Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, a science fiction and horror novel and the first in the Area X trilogy
• A while back, I was recommended The Ballad of Black Tom, a cosmic horror novel following a black protagonist in the vein of Lovecraft Country.

Please let me know what book you’d like to read, why, and if you have any requests to add for June.

Meant to post this yesterday but forgot it was Wednesday.

https://youtu.be/9qC7dIq3Aho

Immemorial

This story and the next story both really show off the weakness of using short stories as chapters to me. I wish the events had been rearranged into more classical chapters so we could get to know Morgan and Adam before things happen to them.

We get more information about the dwindling population of the antimemetics division, Morgan pieces together information from clues laid out by Quinn, the antagonist shows back up again. We're told about antimemetics wars in the past, possibly multiple antimemetics wars that we've forgotten about time and time again. The end of the story sets up U-2200 who we'll meet later in this section.

Where Have You Been All My Life

Again, I wish we'd been able to meet Adam before this story, but I generally do like this story. Adam comes home to find that Quinn has forgotten him, her familiar Unknown having eaten memories of him. Adam has been able to piece together that Quinn is in the middle of an antimemetics war, one that she doesn't even remember fighting. A lot of the middle stories are about Quinn reconstructing information, I'm amazed she so rarely gets things wrong. Makes me kind of want an antimemetics Sherlock Holmes story. We get a little bit more information about the familiar Unknown "Sunshine." We also get to see Quinn as a junior agent, which is cool.

Case Colorless Green and Your Last First Day

I like these two story on their own, they remind me of the siege of Nerv in End of Evangelion. I'm unsure about how I feel about their placement in the 'novel.' We find Lee again following his appearance in Introductory Memetics. He's asked by Quinn to accompany her while she goes to check on U-3125, however in remembering U-3125, the war that Adam picked up on, and the things that we as the reader have seen building over the course of the novel, she invites the destruction of the antimemetics division and herself. The dwindling population of the antimemetics division is reduced to 30 people, then down to zero. Is the bomb she sets off a real bomb, or an antimemetics bomb like Hilton set off in Unforgettable, That's What You Are? Quinn is finally wrong in a big way, her reconstruction of information too grandiose for the reality she finds. Or will there be a later twist that she was actually correct, that what Hix built and what she finds here are somehow compatible?

Quinn's God

Again, the placement here feels odd. We've just seen Quinn presumably either killed or mindwiped by a bomb in the basement of UO Wyeleigh. Why are we introduced to the god of forgetting how to ride a bike now? It feels like this should have come between Immemorial and Where Have You Been All My Life. Maybe we'll get answers in a later chapter. I like U-2200's personality, urging Quinn to walk away from work for a while and unwind before coming back to the problem, and Quinn predictably refusing. I wonder if U-2200's "you can trust Adam" is more a message for us as readers than it is for Marie. Maybe Adam and U-0055 will find a way to undo the bomb from Your Last First Day.

Ojai

My big complaint about this one is just that it's clearly a transition story between sections 2 and 3, and not really strong enough to stand on its own. Once again we get introduced to a character who promptly dies or is taken over before the end of the story, James Bess with the memetics division. He comes to stop what appears to be a religious or cultish meme from spreading, but gets more than he bargained for when 'Red' turns out to have the dead lights from Stephen King's It inside of him. It seems like Red and U-3125 are working together, Red spreading the meme and U-3125 spreading the antimeme to cover up Red's traction. I thought they had opposite motives, Red wanting to take control of humanity, U-3125 working to invade our reality and destroy humanity. What is the endgame, if there is one?

It seems like section 3 will be the rest of the book, so aim to try to finish by next Wednesday.

Since the "chapters" are so short in this one, I didn't keep detailed notes like I did for The Red Tree.

U-0055 I like the way this mimics an SCP entry with the redactions and speculation. I'm a bit worried about U-0055 being introduced as a wild card so early in the "novel." Hopefully QNTM will do something interesting, but if it turns out to be a deus ex machina, I'll be a bit disappointed.

Induction We have our first recurring character, Antimemetics Division Chief Marie Quinn. I like this scenario as an introduction to Quinn, mnestics, and the Unknown Organization, but the pacing of each section is very fast. It reminds me of young adult novels I used to read, like the Alex Ryder books. Aiming for speed and action that sometimes gets in its own way. Who sent Levene, if anyone. Will we get more information on Levene later?

Introductory Antimemetics The way this story "lies" to the reader bothers me. I'm not sure if it's just having read a lot of post-modern stories or what, but I like it better when the characters "lie" more than the narrator. The pacing is also a bit funky, Lee is in a huge hurry, but has time to scroll through what appears to be a long entry on 7175. I don't have a lot to say about this one, I like the idea of this Unknown and the 'solution' to the problem makes sense to me, it's just the framing of the story that's ultimately unsatisfying for me. I'd love more time to be spent on set-ups and pacing within the chapters.

Unforgettable, That's What You Are I like this story a lot, probably my favorite so far. Andy and Marie's interactions are fun, and the anti-aging serum is a fun idea. We get a little bit more information about Quinn (nee Sheridan), and the history of the Antimemetics Division. Andy is the founder of this Antimemetics Division, but there's been at least one previous, now forgotten, Division. We're introduced to what I assume is going to be the primary antagonist, the Unknown that appears when you know about or remember it, then erases your memory of it once its out of sight. We also get our first hint of the staffing issues for the Antimemetics Division, only about 200 people now? What happened to the rest of them? I wonder if the solution to 7175 is foreshadowing for the antagonist.

The Ones Who Walk Very Slowly This one was sad. Feels like a parallel to the ecological destruction we're experiencing outside the fiction. I like the 'twist,' it's so subtle I didn't get it until the end. I'm not sure if I need to keep the part about observing antimemes as doing damage to them in mind as foreshadowing or if this is standalone.

Aim to get through Section II for next week. I'll post next Wednesday, as always feel free to comment about anything that interests you in the meantime.

Nobody's voted, so I'm making an executive decision. For April, we will be reading There is No Anti-Memetics Division by QNTM. If you can, pick it up before next Wednesday, 4/8, and aim to have read the first approximately 70 pages or up to the start of section II.

I’ll make a discussion post next Wednesday with my thoughts but, as always, feel free to make your own post if there’s something that jumps out to you as interesting or something you want to talk about.

And so we come to the end of our journey

We have three options for April's book to discuss:

• dopearchery on YouTube recommended Junji Ito’s Frankenstein, a horror manga spin on Mary Shelley’s classic.
• There is no Antimemetics Division by QNTM, a science fiction and horror novel originally published to the SCP Wiki
• I've been wanting to reread Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, a science fiction and horror novel and the first in the Area X trilogy

Please let me know what book you’d like to read, why, and if you have any requests to add for May

We're starting to see some payoff for the setup of the chimeras that Amanda made. In the short story that Sarah doesn't remember writing, "Pony," we have a sighting of a Pony-woman that scares the main characters in equal and opposite directions, the Sarah stand-in creating artwork of the creature and the Amanda stand-in wanting to become the creature.

Later, Sarah comes across discussion in Harvey's manuscript of werewolves. I had forgotten the story of Ames' wife being accompanied by a large wolf, so I'm glad it was revisited. There's apparently a history of wolf-people chimeras around the red tree. Constance seems to see a 'coyote' or maybe a dog around the house.

Later still, we get the story of Olney, whose lost love is apparently tortured by dire wolf-people in a cavern beneath the red tree.

And somewhere in there, Sarah has a dream about Constance as a Constance/Amanda/Wolf chimera.

We also have another recurrence of the spatial warping from Sarah and Constance's 'lost picnic' when Constance gets lost in the basement. What should only be a small space in the corner of the basement gives way to a seemingly large cavern or "abscess" as Sarah calls it. Sarah wanders into the space, and Constance somehow appears behind her.

As the final section wraps up, Sarah's spelling starts to suffer, using the wrong form of here, to, you're and your, etc until the passage comes to an abrupt end.

I want to mention the Olney story, as I think it's going to be important to the ending, but it seems out of place among the other happenings. We seem to have a pattern with Ames, Harvey, and Sarah losing their partners and then coming to the house and beginning to unravel with Harvey and Sarah taking their own life. Where does Olney's story of dire beings beneath the tree holding his lost love hostage and forcing him to commit murder come from? Did Harvey commit murders that we haven't found out about yet? Has Sarah been murdering people between journal chapters?

For next Sunday aim to finish the book.

We have a new character and a lot more plot this time around.

Constance appearing with her own ghost story. She talks about people with great pain or great emotions kind of warping reality around them, like the woman with the revolver. Later the tree seems to warp reality around it as well. Is Sarah somehow warping reality with her grief? Is the tree a kind of nexus for reality warping?

The 'lost picnic' incident, the 100 yards between the house and the tree somehow taking almost an hour to traverse, the tree never getting closer one way, the house never getting closer the other way. Reminds me of House of Leaves or the podcast Tanis. Why doesn't the tree want Constance to see it?

Another dream from Sarah, this one about Constance, but Constance talking to her as Amanda. Is there some kind of cosmic transference going on between Amanda who is no longer alive to Constance who is? The woman at the gas station sees Constance, so it's not likely that Constance is a ghost or an imaginary friend. Is this transference cosmic, or just Sarah subconsciously superimposing her old love on her new crush?

On page 201 of my copy, Constance says she's much better at taking rejection than finding four leaf clovers. But Sarah said she was the one who was bad at finding four leaf clovers in a previous section, that Amanda had been great at finding four leaf clovers. Constance mentioned she was bad at finding shooting stars. Continuity error, or intentional?

Finally the story, "Pony." Sarah doesn't remember writing it, but it appears to be her writing. The editor has similar misgivings about the manuscript for "The Red Tree." "If it is a forgery, it's a good one." Is there a second Sarah somehow writing for her, completing the manuscript and delivering it to the Editor, drafting the short story for her? Sarah supposedly delivered Dr. Harvey's manuscript to Constance, but Constance received Sarah's short story instead. Is Dr. Harvey's manuscript somehow changing to fit the artist who finds it? Is the Red Tree targeting artists and academics?

I'll make another post next Sunday. For next week try to read 100ish pages or up to Chapter eight.

Typing up my book club notes

On the Title Page, the authors are actually Sarah and Harvey rather than Caitlin, which I thought was cool.

There's a question of whether Sarah is a reliable or unreliable narrator. The Editor takes a trip out to verify the information that Sarah wrote, implying that her writings are accurate from corresponding information, the tree, the carvings, the description of the house. But Sarah herself says she has an unreliable memory, tells a tall-tale to Amanda when they first meet, and writes that she's just using childlike metaphors when she describes her dream.

I thought it was interesting that the editor makes a 'pilgrimage' to the farmhouse before she can publish the book, where Sarah has to take a journey to the underworld to retrieve Harvey's manuscript. Both characters have this weird trade they need to make with the world.

Sarah refers to her epilepsy as madness, adding onto the question of if she can be believed or not.

The 'ghost story' or the Kelpie story or the Selkie story - Sarah sees a naked woman in the water who then disappears beneath the water. She relates her to a painting of a kelpie. Foreshadowing for what's going to happen with the red tree? Suggestions of things lurking beneath the surface?

Sarah hears a story about 'the previous tenant' in town. The stranger is willing to tell her that there is a secret, but not what the secret is. Foreshadowing?

Sarah relates Amanda to a demon indirectly - "recorded for future demonologists"

Sarah calls her dream about Amanda "a child's alligorical, symbolic horror."

Sarah and Amanda meet on Friday the 13th

Amanda suffers from night terrors, which she later passes on to Sarah

Amanda symbolically makes chimeras, which Sarah calls "sublime, grotesque, and beautiful"

I wrote in my notes "the typewriter and tree as symbols of continuity" and don't remember what that was about. Continuity between Harvey and Sarah?

Suicide

The horse-shoe above the passage in the basement becoming an hourglass symbol that's then connected to black widows - I like that it's an effective warning sign for Sarah that she nevertheless ignores.

I wrote in my notes "dreams being true and untrue in superposition" and don't remember what that was about.

Sarah relates her epilepsy to tarantella, the dancing sickness. I get the feeling it's less elegant.

There are a bunch of examples of Sarah sensing ill omens, but choosing to continue anyway, but she doesn't accompany Amanda into the tunnel. Guilt leading to self destructive tendencies?

What do you all think? Anything you find interesting or compelling?

Next week aim for page 205, or the page before "Pony" starts? I'll make a post next Sunday.