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.
