Shriek: An Afterword (Hardcover)

by Jeff VanderMeer (Author)
Key Phrases: flesh necklace, motored vehicle, gray caps, River Moth, Mary Sabon, New Art (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. World Fantasy Award–winner VanderMeer makes a triumphant return to Ambergris, the fungus-shrouded metropolis he first chronicled in City of Saints and Madmen (2001), in this masterful if difficult fantasy novel. Janice Shriek, a failed gallery owner and journalist, has ostensibly created an afterword to The Early History of Ambergris by her brother, Duncan Shriek, a talented if unconventional historian who finds his career in shambles after his controversial theories concerning Ambergris's founding and the genocide perpetrated against its nonhuman inhabitants gain public disfavor. Worse yet, he's caught in a love affair with one of his students, Mary Sabon. A tragic, brooding figure, Duncan makes repeated journeys underground, into the world of the alien gray caps, and is eventually transformed into something both wonderful and inhuman. Ambergris is a city of magnificent, decaying architecture and multiple baroque religions, where publishers fight wars for control of civilization and authors of obscure historical texts can be major bestsellers at the Borges Bookstore. Fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Angela Carter and Borges will be well rewarded. (Aug.)
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From Booklist
World Fantasy Award winner VanderMeer introduced Ambergris in City of Saints & Madmen (2001), five intertwined tales set in the paradoxically disturbing and wondrous urban domain. Framed as an elaborate afterword to The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, this novel-within-a-novel is narrated by the sister of the guide's author, famed Ambergris historian Duncan Shriek, who is also the obsessed victim of a failed love affair. With frequent sardonic asides (in brackets) by Duncan himself, the story line ambles through the Shriek clan's scandal--ridden past while unearthing the minutiae of Ambergris' haunted, eccentric history. Here we meet the elusive, subterranean gray caps, who yearn to transform the city with a -mushroom-based technology. Ritualistic monks rub elbows with the mercantile heirs of the city's embattled founding fathers. The result is a compulsively readable collection of odd anecdotes, character studies, and inventive, pseudohistorical detours that place Ambergris on the literary map beside both Gotham City and the Emerald City as one of the most memorable metropolises in speculative fiction. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (August 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765314657
• ISBN-13: 978-0765314659
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #942,751 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, engrossing 2006 novel: very highly recommended, August 1, 2008

By	K. W. Schreiter (Conshohocken, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Shriek: An Afterword (Paperback)

This outstanding novel is set in the fictional town of Ambergris. The narrative is in the form of a typewritten manuscript by Janice Shriek as an afterword to her historian brother Duncan's "Early History of Ambergris". The reader learns that Duncan later finds Janice's manuscript and adds his handwritten reactions and objections within the text. VanderMeer separates the dual narrators by enclosing Duncan's words in brackets: this seems confusing but is ultimately successful, adding another layer to the story.
Below Ambergris dwells a mysterious race of mushroom-like "gray cap" beings that were the town's original inhabitants and may be responsible for a later genocidal event. Meanwhile, Ambergris' citizens face two literally warring rival merchant conglomerates and a militaristic foreign invader. After some initial publishing success, Duncan grows increasingly obsessed with the gray caps and their potential threat to Ambergris while a liaison with a student threatens his university teaching career. Meanwhile, Janice opens a highly popular "New Art" gallery but soon succumbs to massive substance abuse. The amazing story is part biography of the Shrieks and part account of Ambergris' troubles.
Though it came as a trusted recommendation, I was still inhibited by the book's "fantasy" genre label and did not immediately warm to the opening. I was engrossed after a few dozen pages and powered through the remainder on a relaxing summer vacation. I'm excited to read VanderMeer's other Ambergris works: the 700+ page "City of Saints and Madmen" collection and soon to be published novel "Finch".

9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Strange Pleasures of Fruiting Bodies, November 9, 2006

By	Jonathan K. Stephens (Stoney Creek, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Those who read more than just a few books a year will know well the mixture of trepidation and excitement that comes with receiving a new book by a favored author. Will it be up to snuff? Will it live up to the joys of previous books? As we all know, there are good books, bad books and then there are those rara avis that transport the reader so fully into a world that the interface between printed word and imagination is seamless. Shriek: An Afterword is such an artistic triumph. Not only stylistically brilliant, not only a cracking good yarn, but also a terrific meditation on themes of love, of family, of fame, of the human condition as a whole.

Shriek: An Afterword relates the histories of Janice and Duncan Shriek of Ambergris (VanderMeer's imaginary city which is so well drawn that it's 'history' seems as `real' as many contemporary cities around the world - Think of The Arabian Night's 'Bagdad'). These characters have come into play in small ways in VanderMeer's previous tales "The Transformation of Martin Lake" and "An Early History of Ambergris" but here they come into full blossom. The story is told via flashback, as Janice relates the specifics of her rise and fall in the artistic world of Ambergris and Duncan's exploration of the mysteries of the inscrutable `Grey Caps', Ambergris' original inhabitants, Masters of Fruiting Bodies and other applied fungal technology. The Grey Caps were thought slaughtered during their historic conquest, but there have been disturbing hints of their continued malign existence echoing down the ages.

In the best tradition of James' Turn of the Screw, Janice Shriek is a most unreliable narrator. Described in VanderMeer's Award Winning Novella, "The Transformation of Martin Lake" (available in "The City of Saints and Madmen") as a " a severe, hunched woman with calculating, cold blue eyes...a slick blather of nonsense that Lake despised and admired all at once...A failed painter and a budding art historian" , in Shriek: An Afterword, we quickly find that traumatized at an early age by the sudden death of her father (at the peak moment of happiness in his life), she has become a drug addicted, failed suicide who has supposedly fully recovered from her descent into madness (*Whew!*). Janice is consumed by her accent to social prominence and subsequent fall from grace. She views, with horrified fascination, her former celebrity status; despising, yet desiring it again at the same time. Her main redeeming feature is her deep love for her brother, with all his warts, and her accompanying morbid curiosity in Duncan's eventual transformation.

Stylistically speaking, this would be a tough act to pull off, but VanderMeer has upped the ante considerably by having the `first' person to read Janice's account be her brother, who adds his own annotations to the text with which we are presented. Now the editorializing of an author in their own work is hardly original, going back at least to Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", and the device of adding additional commentary by another character over lapping the first was also used by George MacDonald Fraser, but solely for comic effect in "Flashman's Lady" (featuring a waspish commentary by a religious spinster to selections of the air headed and promiscuous Elspeth Flashman's diary), and although the comic angle is aptly used (one's toenails curling in sympathy with Duncan's anguished comment of "Delete, Delete, Delete' after reading Janice's graphic retelling of one of his steamy sexual encounters), VanderMeer's also uses this device to underline family sympathy, and point out lacking in Janice's text. For in Duncan's estimation Janice is a poor writer in many ways.
VanderMeer has shown in the production values of The City of Saints and Madmen (using different fonts, writing styles and illustrations to convey an entire world) that he is an artist of the first rank, and Shriek: An Afterword confirms this admirably.

One can point to this book and say; It's Fantasy, while somebody else says no no it's science fiction, while yet another will say No its written in the same surrealistic mode of Rushdie's `Satanic Verses', all points being valid at the same time. Wisely, this book is being published sans any genre identification, for in the final analysis, it's not just literature: it's a work of art.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For VanderMeer, It's Almost Conventional, May 1, 2007

By	Daniel H. Bigelow (Cathlamet, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Jeff VanderMeer's previous works are experiments with form that organize around a setting and a few central characters or concepts. Basically, Veniss Underground and City of Saints & Madmen are both short-story anthologies in which all the stories are set in a particular imagined city (in Veniss Underground, Veniss; in City of Saints & Madmen, Ambergris). Veniss Underground did, obliquely, tell the story of the fall of the city, but mostly, both books were about setting and mood, and VanderMeer created mood not only with his writing style but by experimenting with font and format.

City of Saints & Madmen introduced its audience to the lush, mysterious city of Ambergris with stories disguised as travel guides, the scrawlings of institutionalized madmen, and even bibliographies; with Punch-like cartoons featuring minor characters; and even with short stories attributed to characters from other stories in the book. Compared to that, Shriek, VanderMeer's second book set in Ambergris, is almost normal. It's the novel-length autobiographical afterword Janice Shriek, an art gallery owner we first met in Saints & Madmen, writes for a book authored by her mysteriously vanished historian brother Duncan - with annotations from Duncan, who reappears after Janice disappears when she completes the afterword. For most of Shriek's length, it reads basically as Janice's biography with italicized comments from Duncan. Compared to Saints & Madmen, this makes it practically ordinary.

But nothing about the city of Ambergris is ever completely ordinary, even in what is to a great extent merely the fictional autobiography of an important figure in the arts. VanderMeer's creepy details include a healthy dose of body horror - the story is replete with fungal invasions of people and even societies - along with the alien designs of the bizarre Gray Caps who live under the city, and even the prosaic (but increasingly common) horrors of urban war. Still, VanderMeer's real distinction as a writer is not so much in the fantastic elements of the story as in the tone he can give to his works, a tone weakest here and strongest in Veniss Underground, of impending doom. VanderMeer gives a Masque of the Red Death flavor to everything he does, and that adds poignancy to his relatively simple story of the rise and fall of the Shriek siblings.