Victor LaValle: Me and my wife have taken to throwing dance parties during dinner. We do it just to keep our kids interested in the meal. Halfway through the night I tap the iPod and we let the kids down from their seats. Lately they’ve been bopping around to De La Soul. Seeing my three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter go wild for “Eye Know,” “Potholes in My Lawn,” and “Oodles of O’s” does a child of the ’80s good. 3 Feet High and Rising came out in 1989. That same year saw Done by the Forces of Nature by the Jungle Brothers and Road to the Riches by Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo; the Beastie Boys put out Paul’s Boutique. A damn good year. Because of the music in the house I was in a blissful state when my two books for this round arrived. I felt primed to appreciate mastery. Jenny Offill and Jeff VanderMeer did not disappoint. Rejoice, you motherfuckers! 2014 was one hell of a year for books.

Victor LaValle is the author of four books, most recently The Devil in Silver. He lives in New York City with his family and teaches in Columbia University’s creative writing program. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Ariel Schrag is a former student and we remained in touch after school. Marlon James is a very good friend. I blurbed Roxane Gay’s novel under consideration. Tony Doerr is a friend, former coworker, and he blurbed a previous novel of mine.”

Dept. of Speculation is a master class in economy and artful detail. Offill’s short, mesmerizing novel concerns an unnamed woman who narrates her life from about her mid-20s, single and adventurous, into early middle-age, when she has become a published writer, a writing teacher, a mother, and a wife. Offill has been praised, rightly, for her depiction of motherhood and marriage, and the joys and failures of both. She writes movingly as well about the effort of trying to be a writer when your world demands a wife and mother instead. Still, for me the novel was most compelling for its depiction of a woman navigating the seas of daily life in the leaky boat of her troubled mind. The portraits of a writer’s life and family travails are wonderfully done throughout, but it’s the narrator’s troublesome mind that creates a real sense of mystery. It’s the thing I don’t understand and want to understand. It’s a great mystery to her as well. She often seems baffled by her brain. Before she publishes her first novel, before she marries, before she becomes a mother, she is a young woman living alone in Brooklyn. One night, without warning, we get this:

I felt a sudden chill and pulled the blanket over my head. That’s the way they bring horses out of a fire, I remembered. If they can’t see, they won’t panic. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.

This stricken state recurs throughout the book. Many of the life choices the narrator makes are attempts to combat this anxiety, and her almost cosmic loneliness. As a young writer she posts a note over her desk: “WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.” But after she does publish her first book she finds herself no happier. Publishing is no salvation. So what does she do? She marries. Has a daughter. All this, in part, to avoid really being alone with her mind, but it doesn’t work. “There is still such crookedness in my heart,” she says later. “I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”

Something is wrong, the novel suggests.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation seems like a very different novel at first. Four women, designated by their jobs rather than their names, have been sent into a place known as Area X. As the jacket copy states: “Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization.” Imagine a game preserve hidden behind a force field and the preserve is harmful to human life. The biologist, who narrates the novel, states her team’s job this way: “Our mission was simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X…”

The team treks through Area X—a gloriously vivid rendering of northern Florida—and quickly discovers the entrance to a tunnel, a spiraling pathway leading deep underground. The biologist becomes obsessed with entering the site. Other party members are violently opposed. There’s a feeling of mounting dread in this novel, right from the start.

If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

I read Dept. of Speculation before Annihilation but it didn’t take long before I felt both books were, in effect, saying the same thing to the reader. Something is wrong. In this way both novels felt like they were offering a tantalizing mystery. If you suggest that something is wrong, then I yearn to find out what it might be.

In the Offill, the mystery revolves around the narrator and her uneasy mind. In the VanderMeer, the mystery revolves around the narrator and the uncanny landscape. If I found myself trying to gather clues, then both books worked hard to upend expectations of simplistic solutions. Offill and VanderMeer are just too fucking good to pretend there will be easy answers. That said, one of them did find a way to offer a conclusion, if not a neat ending, and it was this that helped me make my decision between two formidable books.

In Annihilation the biologist does make it inside the winding tunnel structure in Area X. There she discovers words written on the walls, a long half-nonsensical phrase that continues farther and farther down the walls of the spiral pathway. Soon it becomes clear the words are fresh: Someone—or something—is writing them even now. The novel draws you forward with the promise of discovering that being. The biologist calls it the Crawler. The reader hopes that meeting the Crawler will finally clarify what, exactly, has gone so wrong in Area X.

Similarly, Offill’s narrator struggles through the trials of her marriage, the struggles of mothering, an infestation of bedbugs, the disdain of her childless friends, and eventually the anguished steps taken to start her writing career again, but throughout all of this her oldest accomplice—her clearest enemy—never leaves her side:

So she takes the pills the doctor gives her. Her hands stop flapping. She is less inclined to lie down in the street. But her brain is still buckling. In the parking lot of a store two towns over she cries like a clown with her face on the steering wheel.

I began to think of this narrator’s mind much like the Crawler in Annihilation: both just around the bend of a deep, mysterious pathway, both outsized in their effect exactly because they evade direct confrontation for so long.

But eventually the biologist will have an encounter down in that tunnel. When it happens the scene is overwhelming, illuminating, baffling, troubling. It’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for, but it’s nothing I could’ve anticipated. The moment—I hesitate to even call it a meeting—solves nothing neatly but does bring the novel toward a conclusion. All the mystery, all the dread, that’s been building for 175 pages finally crystallizes. I understand the biologist, and Area X, in a way that feels profoundly new, and yet uneasy. I remain off-balance but still immensely satisfied. It’s an incredible thing to pull off and VanderMeer does it with such grace.

Offill’s narrator, or more precisely her novel, never afforded me such a shift. Certainly things change for the narrator by the end of the novel—there’s a wrenchingly beautiful last page—but in the end, callous as this may sound, I never worried for her marriage or her daughter or her career the way I worried for her. Offill just does such a bang-up job of depicting a brilliant person whose greatest enemy is a force abiding within her. It’s extraordinary. Really none of her other struggles could compare. By the end of the novel it was this situation that I was hoping to have illuminated in some way. I wasn’t looking for some medical diagnosis, and I certainly wasn’t looking to see her cured or having a breakdown, but at the end I felt as if the novel had decided not to turn that last bend on the path, not to encounter the final ugliness it had been promising me. This was a shame, because I would’ve followed that woman anywhere. In real life people can spend their entire lives avoiding the Crawler, but in fiction the reader, at least this reader, is begging to see.

(As a little side note: In 2010, my second novel got to spend some time in the Tournament of Books. After a fun opening round win I lost to Marlon James’s excellent The Book of Night Women. I remember distinctly wanting to kick the judge in the nuts for that decision. So if Jenny Offill wants to kick me in the nuts for this one, I can’t blame her.)