If the hallucinatory feel of Dr. Mallory’s river—his quasi-messianic push upstream with Noon while reality seems to shimmer around the water’s source—hooked you, you’ll love the biologist’s descent into Area X in Annihilation. That same sense of the environment as a mind-bending presence pervades every page, with field notes turning uncanny and the expedition’s goals eroding into obsession much like Mallory’s quest for the headwaters he “created.”

Mallory’s feverish first-person account of birthing a river and then chasing its source—convinced of his own providence—echoes Marlow’s journey to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. You’ll find the same hypnotic river passage, unreliable testimony, and a narrator who may be revealing as much about his own unraveling as about the land and people he describes.

If Mallory’s accidental ‘creation’ of a river—and the way factions, militias, and a TV crew swarm to exploit it—gripped you, The Water Knife channels that same ferocity. In a drought-strangled American Southwest, water barons, fixers, and journalists fight over flows with the same brutal realpolitik that shadows Mallory and Noon along the banks, showing how scarcity corrodes ethics and inflates messiahs.

If Mallory’s self-ordained role as benefactor—founding a river and assuming he knows what a community needs—challenged you, The Poisonwood Bible is a bracing companion. Like Mallory’s fraught dealings with locals and authorities along the river, the Price family’s mission in the Congo exposes the harm born of hubris and cultural blindness, and how “help” can mask control.

Drawn to how Mallory mythologizes himself—the creator chasing his own miracle upstream, dragging Noon and others into his private vision? The Magus delivers a similarly seductive psychological maze. As Nicholas Urfe is lured deeper into Conchis’s staged realities, you get the same intoxicating mix of charisma, self-deception, and the dangerous pull of a story a man tells about himself.