Shriek: An Afterword [Hardcover]

Jeff VanderMeer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 8, 2006

An epic yet personal look at several decades of life, love, and death in the imaginary city of Ambergris--previously chronicled in Jeff VanderMeer's acclaimed City of Saints & Madmen--Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies.

Narrated with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions by ex-society figure Janice Shriek, this afterword presents a vivid gallery of characters and events, emphasizing the adventures of Janice's brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a secret that may kill or transform him; a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever; and the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies who have been waiting underground for their chance to mold the future of the city.

Part academic treatise, part tell-all biography, after this introduction to the Family Shriek, you'll never look at history in quite the same way again.

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (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: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,266,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I knew I should have taken that left on Rue Manticora, May 24, 2010

By 

Jess Gulbranson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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

Not to put too fine of a point on this, but "Shriek" is a modern masterwork. Immediate comparisons to Gene Wolfe, China Mieville, and Umberto Eco are unavoidable, and like those authors VanDermeer has done something that I feel is a necessary reinvigoration of literature, irrespective of genre: challenge the reader. Don't expect to be brought up to speed about the world that the characters live in, as 'current events' will be chronicled faster than you can process them, blending with childhood reminiscence. It is highly rewarding, though. This book lives and breathes- or rather, hacks and wheezes with lungs infiltrated by magickal fungi. The layered epistolary conceit- that of an artist's afterword to her brother's fictional history book, with the brother's annotations and their mutual editor's actual fictional afterword, is surprisingly fluid. One more item I must point out- I am very jaded as a reader, and unlikely to be shocked. In the midst of the protagonist's tale of life in war-torn Ambergris, there is a death scene so abrupt and unexpected that it literally jolted me.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Love it or hate it ..., April 13, 2011

By 

Lichenthrope - See all my reviews

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

... I'm afraid I fall in the latter camp. I begrudged this book every page yet slogged my way through to the end in the hope that it would live up to the potential atmosphere. I then put it in my compost bin to moulder away, which I thought was rather apt. This is the only time I recall actually destroying a book I didn't like.
Best wishes to the author and those who like it. It just didn't work for me.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a magnificient, vicious city, March 11, 2010

By 

gonzobrarian - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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

In both setting and character, Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris is an enigmatic destination. It's just fantastical enough for the reader to suspend their belief in the existence of the murky and unnerving gray caps, while just as believable as an obscure and unstable, equatorial locale reminiscent of perhaps a newly colonized (relatively) New Guinea. Either way, Ambergris is an immersive epicenter of weirdness that's completely engrossing as depicted in VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword.

The story revolves around the lives of a pair of siblings, Duncan and Janice Shriek, and their absorption into Ambergris, particularly its academic fabric, as told by means of memoir and revision. The stories are of their successes and failures in a time of warring academics set within a warring city known for its tendency to inexplicably implode. On the surface, it is a city possessing a magical element that lends an unnerving flavor to its mystique. When the annual and oft-terrifying Festival of the Freshwater Squid is in repose, the battle for both literal and literary dominance of the city is viciously fought through scholars and their powerful publishing houses. Beneath the surface, the ever elusive, cryptic and unfathomable gray caps are waiting.

VanderMeer superbly creates a multidimensional depth for all his characters while clearly delineating the protagonists from the antagonists. The only drawback was his over indulgence with Duncan's relationship with the character Mary Sabon; more time could have been spent on the relatively peripheral but intriguing characters of Sybel and Sirin. Otherwise, his pacing between the emotive narrative and the omniscient description (especially of all things fungal) is flawless. His movements between the mysterious, mundane and the insanely horrific are precisely paced as well. Shriek: An Afterward is a thrilling and frightening work of modern weirdness and quasi-steampunkery.