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Ambergris #2
Shriek: An Afterword
From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic An Afterword.
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 and Madmen— 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 the 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.
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 and Madmen— 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 the 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.
482 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 8, 2006
137 people are currently reading
5091 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Vandermeer
243 books16.7k followersNYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.
VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.
Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.
VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.
Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 304 reviews
November 8, 2018
Updated review after a re-read in November 2018.
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Jeff VanderMeer has imagination in spades, that’s obvious the minute you crack any of his books open. Every story set in the city of Ambergris has a wonderfully dark, dirty, gritty, almost oppressively gothic atmosphere – something that I absolutely love. He clearly has this city, every alley, mansard and pavement, deeply etched in his brain, and he shows just enough to make me shake the book and yell: “More! Tell me more!” It would only be a mild exaggeration to say that I am obsessed with Ambergris: it sticks in my head long after I put the book down and I find myself longing for more stories set in that strange and twisted city, which is as real and as vivid as any character created by VanderMeer.
“Shriek: An Afterword” is a stylistic work of freaking genius. Famous (and controversial) historian Duncan Shriek (yes, historians, artists and writers are the rock stars of Ambergris, and that alone is enough to make me want to move there, sentient mushrooms or not) disappears under mysterious circumstances, prompting his estranged sister Janice to write a biography of him – as an afterword to his own final book, “The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris”. But then, the missing brother somehow comes back and annotates his sister’s work with his perspective and corrections… So the book is the parallel narratives from two very different points of view, about the same person and the same events.
This unusual method of storytelling tells us about Duncan’s rise to fame and subsequent fall from grace (due to his wild theories about the original inhabitants of Ambergris), his torrid entanglement with his prodigy student Mary Sabon and the unavoidable consequences of this affair, his escapades in the eerie underground world underneath the city and the mysterious creatures who dwell there – as well as documenting the many strange events taking place in the city of Ambergris itself: the war between the two great commercial houses of Hoegbotton and Sons and Frankwrithe and Lewden, as well as the slow, vengeful return of the grey caps…
Through that, you get up close and personal with Duncan – and with Janice too, really. The sibling love and rivalry is ever present through scandals, successes, loss and mutations; and while neither character is very likeable as a person, their downward spiral is very engrossing. VanderMeer created a very interesting dynamic with his narrative device, because it illustrates quite realistically the way siblings grate at each other’s nerves endlessly, but never quite enough to override their close bond.
There is this weird sense of suspense and Lovecraftian horror (the unknown and utterly alien creatures lurking around the corner that will do… something… when they take over…) that keeps you turning the pages and twisting your brain into a pretzel to try and understand what the fuck is happening here! The world you dive in is intricate, detailed and yet elusive and scary, and you are in for a mindfuck as soon as the weird Gray Cap related events start taking over the plot.
VanderMeer’s ideas are convoluted and wonderful, and I love them. The only reproach I can make about his writing is that he occasionally favors style and format over content. Don’t get me wrong: I still really enjoy his work, but sometimes, I wish he would stop showing off how clever he is, and just tell me a story. But this was a much bigger problem with the “Area X” trilogy (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) than with “Shriek”. Here, the prose is so gorgeous, ornate and lush that I can’t dock a single star off my rating: he conjures up a very atmospheric tale, where the textures, the quality of the light and the play of shadows are perfectly captured, making this a rich reading experience. All this is also laced with unexpected and often rather biting humor – which is something that makes VanderMeer stand out from other New Weird writers, who often take themselves a bit too seriously.
Without having read “City of Saints and Madmen” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), some things in “Shriek” are hard to understand and picture (many references to historical events and figures that have been explored in the first book pepper this one rather generously), but while the patchwork format of “City” was fun, “Shriek” is more cohesive and easier to be invested in. But to be honest, it is hard work: you have to be alert and awake to make your way through this book, because you will feel as if you are sitting between Duncan and Janice while they each bicker in one of your ears about what happened. It can get overwhelming.
The effort is definitely worth the rewards, but do not pick it up thinking this will be a light read – or if you hate postmodern narrative structures. Reading “Shriek” is a commitment that readers who enjoy a challenge will be delighted with. For fans of China Mieville, certainly; but also for anyone who enjoys New Weird, unreliable narrators and complex urban fantasies. Probably VanderMeer’s best work to date.
(A note of editions: I own a brand new edition of this book, circa 2017, and I found, to my frustration, that Duncan’s additions to Janice’s text were printed in the same font, simply separated from the main narrative by brackets. I knew to look for them and how to interpret them, but for someone diving into this book for the first time, this might be a big hurdle. I seem to remember my older edition had the two voices in different fonts, making the distinction between the two unambiguous, so if you are looking for a copy of “Shriek”, I’d recommend hunting down a copy of an earlier edition.)
---
Jeff VanderMeer has imagination in spades, that’s obvious the minute you crack any of his books open. Every story set in the city of Ambergris has a wonderfully dark, dirty, gritty, almost oppressively gothic atmosphere – something that I absolutely love. He clearly has this city, every alley, mansard and pavement, deeply etched in his brain, and he shows just enough to make me shake the book and yell: “More! Tell me more!” It would only be a mild exaggeration to say that I am obsessed with Ambergris: it sticks in my head long after I put the book down and I find myself longing for more stories set in that strange and twisted city, which is as real and as vivid as any character created by VanderMeer.
“Shriek: An Afterword” is a stylistic work of freaking genius. Famous (and controversial) historian Duncan Shriek (yes, historians, artists and writers are the rock stars of Ambergris, and that alone is enough to make me want to move there, sentient mushrooms or not) disappears under mysterious circumstances, prompting his estranged sister Janice to write a biography of him – as an afterword to his own final book, “The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris”. But then, the missing brother somehow comes back and annotates his sister’s work with his perspective and corrections… So the book is the parallel narratives from two very different points of view, about the same person and the same events.
This unusual method of storytelling tells us about Duncan’s rise to fame and subsequent fall from grace (due to his wild theories about the original inhabitants of Ambergris), his torrid entanglement with his prodigy student Mary Sabon and the unavoidable consequences of this affair, his escapades in the eerie underground world underneath the city and the mysterious creatures who dwell there – as well as documenting the many strange events taking place in the city of Ambergris itself: the war between the two great commercial houses of Hoegbotton and Sons and Frankwrithe and Lewden, as well as the slow, vengeful return of the grey caps…
Through that, you get up close and personal with Duncan – and with Janice too, really. The sibling love and rivalry is ever present through scandals, successes, loss and mutations; and while neither character is very likeable as a person, their downward spiral is very engrossing. VanderMeer created a very interesting dynamic with his narrative device, because it illustrates quite realistically the way siblings grate at each other’s nerves endlessly, but never quite enough to override their close bond.
There is this weird sense of suspense and Lovecraftian horror (the unknown and utterly alien creatures lurking around the corner that will do… something… when they take over…) that keeps you turning the pages and twisting your brain into a pretzel to try and understand what the fuck is happening here! The world you dive in is intricate, detailed and yet elusive and scary, and you are in for a mindfuck as soon as the weird Gray Cap related events start taking over the plot.
VanderMeer’s ideas are convoluted and wonderful, and I love them. The only reproach I can make about his writing is that he occasionally favors style and format over content. Don’t get me wrong: I still really enjoy his work, but sometimes, I wish he would stop showing off how clever he is, and just tell me a story. But this was a much bigger problem with the “Area X” trilogy (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) than with “Shriek”. Here, the prose is so gorgeous, ornate and lush that I can’t dock a single star off my rating: he conjures up a very atmospheric tale, where the textures, the quality of the light and the play of shadows are perfectly captured, making this a rich reading experience. All this is also laced with unexpected and often rather biting humor – which is something that makes VanderMeer stand out from other New Weird writers, who often take themselves a bit too seriously.
Without having read “City of Saints and Madmen” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), some things in “Shriek” are hard to understand and picture (many references to historical events and figures that have been explored in the first book pepper this one rather generously), but while the patchwork format of “City” was fun, “Shriek” is more cohesive and easier to be invested in. But to be honest, it is hard work: you have to be alert and awake to make your way through this book, because you will feel as if you are sitting between Duncan and Janice while they each bicker in one of your ears about what happened. It can get overwhelming.
The effort is definitely worth the rewards, but do not pick it up thinking this will be a light read – or if you hate postmodern narrative structures. Reading “Shriek” is a commitment that readers who enjoy a challenge will be delighted with. For fans of China Mieville, certainly; but also for anyone who enjoys New Weird, unreliable narrators and complex urban fantasies. Probably VanderMeer’s best work to date.
(A note of editions: I own a brand new edition of this book, circa 2017, and I found, to my frustration, that Duncan’s additions to Janice’s text were printed in the same font, simply separated from the main narrative by brackets. I knew to look for them and how to interpret them, but for someone diving into this book for the first time, this might be a big hurdle. I seem to remember my older edition had the two voices in different fonts, making the distinction between the two unambiguous, so if you are looking for a copy of “Shriek”, I’d recommend hunting down a copy of an earlier edition.)
December 13, 2011
We book lovers can’t help speaking of authors as “the next ....” We’re always keeping our eyes open for the next Jane Austen or the next Ernest Hemingway or the next Salman Rushdie or the next Ursula K. LeGuin, and we gleefully trumpet their arrival in our reviews. Of course, what we really ought to be looking for is the first China Miéville, the first Lisa Moore, the first Neal Stephenson, the first Iain Banks, the first whomever. When we find those authors who are truly themselves, we’ve really uncovered gold.
There is a comparison that is valuable, however. It doesn’t place impossible expectations on burgeoning authors; it doesn’t reduce the work they are doing; it simply places them in the context of literary history and points us in the direction of their progenitors. What I am talking about is authorial inheritance. There are some authors who, for whatever reason or in whatever way, have “inherited” a technique or a focus or an obsession from an established author and somehow built upon what came before.
In this case, I am thinking of Jeff Vandermeer and how he is the truest descendant of JRR Tolkien.
Tolkien’s world building, especially linguistically, is legendary. He knew everything there was to know about the races, religions, languages and histories of Middle Earth. It remains a world of immense richness, and Fantasy authors of every generation have aspired to create worlds that match Tolkien’s genius.
I don’t think Vandermeer is one of those authors, at least not consciously. I don’t think he’s sitting down with his scribbled maps and booklets of backstories and rules of behaviour, aspiring to be the next Tolkien.
Yet what Vandermeer has done is create a world every bit as alive and teeming as Tolkien’s, and he has done it in a way that is unique to his time and personal experience and place in the world (a Pannsylvanian born, Fiji raised, Floridian).
Can you imagine a world where the grey skinned alien invaders people fear come from below, not from above, and are living, breathing fungus beings? Jeff Vandermeer can. Can you imagine a world where historians and artists are the venerated celebrities of the day, rather than actors and athletes? Vandermeer can. Can you imagine a world where weapons of mass destruction are fungal weapons that alter the world in a fearful burst of steampunky modernity? Vandermeer can.
But Vandermeer doesn’t stop at these peculiarities. He produces artifacts for reproduction, like a fungus rotted page from Janice Shriek’s Afterword, complete with Duncan Shriek’s annotations, and reproduces it in Sirin’s Afterword to her Afterword. He offers us photos of Janice’s mushroom overrun typewriter, the key artefact of her writing process, the green, glowing keys she writes about as she writes about her brother and Mary Sabon and Ambergris and herself.
And Vandermeer doesn’t stop there either. He invites bands into his world to write soundtracks for the works he’s writing. He hints at characters whose roots might be our world, madmen trapped in Ambergrisian madhouses. He offers histories of commerce and religion every bit as alive as the creations of any other world builder. And there’s more, so much more. It's in City of Saints and Madmen. It's in Finch. It's in Vandermeer's mind.
Vandermeer lives and breathes Ambergris and cities and nations it competes with, and all its environs, and his world is always expanding, always becoming. In its own way, Vandermeer’s world is as alive and important as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and he has one leg up on the old master. He’s still alive, still working, and Vandermeer’s world can continue to grow.
Read Shriek: An Afterword, and you will discover the first Jeff Vandermeer. He's worth the time and the effort.
There is a comparison that is valuable, however. It doesn’t place impossible expectations on burgeoning authors; it doesn’t reduce the work they are doing; it simply places them in the context of literary history and points us in the direction of their progenitors. What I am talking about is authorial inheritance. There are some authors who, for whatever reason or in whatever way, have “inherited” a technique or a focus or an obsession from an established author and somehow built upon what came before.
In this case, I am thinking of Jeff Vandermeer and how he is the truest descendant of JRR Tolkien.
Tolkien’s world building, especially linguistically, is legendary. He knew everything there was to know about the races, religions, languages and histories of Middle Earth. It remains a world of immense richness, and Fantasy authors of every generation have aspired to create worlds that match Tolkien’s genius.
I don’t think Vandermeer is one of those authors, at least not consciously. I don’t think he’s sitting down with his scribbled maps and booklets of backstories and rules of behaviour, aspiring to be the next Tolkien.
Yet what Vandermeer has done is create a world every bit as alive and teeming as Tolkien’s, and he has done it in a way that is unique to his time and personal experience and place in the world (a Pannsylvanian born, Fiji raised, Floridian).
Can you imagine a world where the grey skinned alien invaders people fear come from below, not from above, and are living, breathing fungus beings? Jeff Vandermeer can. Can you imagine a world where historians and artists are the venerated celebrities of the day, rather than actors and athletes? Vandermeer can. Can you imagine a world where weapons of mass destruction are fungal weapons that alter the world in a fearful burst of steampunky modernity? Vandermeer can.
But Vandermeer doesn’t stop at these peculiarities. He produces artifacts for reproduction, like a fungus rotted page from Janice Shriek’s Afterword, complete with Duncan Shriek’s annotations, and reproduces it in Sirin’s Afterword to her Afterword. He offers us photos of Janice’s mushroom overrun typewriter, the key artefact of her writing process, the green, glowing keys she writes about as she writes about her brother and Mary Sabon and Ambergris and herself.
And Vandermeer doesn’t stop there either. He invites bands into his world to write soundtracks for the works he’s writing. He hints at characters whose roots might be our world, madmen trapped in Ambergrisian madhouses. He offers histories of commerce and religion every bit as alive as the creations of any other world builder. And there’s more, so much more. It's in City of Saints and Madmen. It's in Finch. It's in Vandermeer's mind.
Vandermeer lives and breathes Ambergris and cities and nations it competes with, and all its environs, and his world is always expanding, always becoming. In its own way, Vandermeer’s world is as alive and important as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and he has one leg up on the old master. He’s still alive, still working, and Vandermeer’s world can continue to grow.
Read Shriek: An Afterword, and you will discover the first Jeff Vandermeer. He's worth the time and the effort.
August 16, 2020
I've never seen a writer waste words like VanderMeer. This is a short novella transformed into a novel by the author's lack of respect for the reader's time.
An exercise for a repeat reader(two words that could function as the title): count the number of times you hear the phrase "flesh necklace", "golden threads", or "BDD". Add to it the paragraph after paragraph of "foreshadowing" where the basic events of an upcoming scene are pretold and retold before agonizingly being told. Don't forget all the rambling pseudo-insight of VanderMeer's narrators. Also, all the annotations that amount to "Janice's view" and {Duncan's nuh-uh}, less those needed to establish character, motive, the framing device, and actual plot points. To this growing pile, put all the duplicate data drops, all the characterizations for personalities that end up irrelevant and poorly characterized, all the scenes that add nothing but padding, all the mawkish, risibly overwrought pinings of the dual leads, all the events described so vaguely as to lack literary utility. Subtract from this pile the useful, the witty, the clever, the insightful, the original, and the genuinely dramatic and plot-relevant.
What is contained in this pile is almost the entirety the text. Worse, the repetition is so severe that the husk containing only shucked waste-prose and bloviating self indulgence would be better than the book as published.
There are things VanderMeer does well here -- establishing mystery, setting tonal ambiance, maintaining consistent narrative voice. However, these are flame decals on a golf cart -- the story is so leaden and sluggish that the flourishes only serve to remind you how poor the overall experience is. Every time he glosses over what could be an exciting and interesting scene to laboriously describe a much more boring one, I would start to realize how long it had been since the book immersed me, or even interested me. I spent a lot of this book wishing for the end, and now that it's here, I can only be glad.
An exercise for a repeat reader(two words that could function as the title): count the number of times you hear the phrase "flesh necklace", "golden threads", or "BDD". Add to it the paragraph after paragraph of "foreshadowing" where the basic events of an upcoming scene are pretold and retold before agonizingly being told. Don't forget all the rambling pseudo-insight of VanderMeer's narrators. Also, all the annotations that amount to "Janice's view" and {Duncan's nuh-uh}, less those needed to establish character, motive, the framing device, and actual plot points. To this growing pile, put all the duplicate data drops, all the characterizations for personalities that end up irrelevant and poorly characterized, all the scenes that add nothing but padding, all the mawkish, risibly overwrought pinings of the dual leads, all the events described so vaguely as to lack literary utility. Subtract from this pile the useful, the witty, the clever, the insightful, the original, and the genuinely dramatic and plot-relevant.
What is contained in this pile is almost the entirety the text. Worse, the repetition is so severe that the husk containing only shucked waste-prose and bloviating self indulgence would be better than the book as published.
There are things VanderMeer does well here -- establishing mystery, setting tonal ambiance, maintaining consistent narrative voice. However, these are flame decals on a golf cart -- the story is so leaden and sluggish that the flourishes only serve to remind you how poor the overall experience is. Every time he glosses over what could be an exciting and interesting scene to laboriously describe a much more boring one, I would start to realize how long it had been since the book immersed me, or even interested me. I spent a lot of this book wishing for the end, and now that it's here, I can only be glad.
August 27, 2007
A review on the back of this book name-checks Nick Cave and "Hitchhikers Guide" -- please ignore the back of the book. I can't imagine anything less like Douglas Adams than this book.
If I had to write a review of this book based primarily on name-checks, my list would include: Mervyn Peake, Edward Gorey, H.P. Lovecraft, China Mievelle, and Tom Waits. VanderMeer's Ambergris setting has echoes of Gormanghast's crumbling antiquity, but with more of Amphigories twisted, Gothic humor thrown in (think "The Insect God"). The entire wold is spun over a shadow background of an unknown, violent horror lurking beneath the surface of things (see: Cthulhu), and the Waits I have in mind is less "Romeo is Bleeding" than "The Earth Died Screaming" (I will admit that the Nick Cave reference is accurate if what the reviewer was thinking of was "The Carney").
I picked this up mainly because I absolutely LOVED City of Saints and Madmen and this is the only other VanderMeer I've found in my multi stops at B&N since finishing that book. It was good - as well conceived and developed as CoSaM - but something about the premise seemed to drag a bit when stretched over the length of an entire novel; perhaps had it been 50 to 75 pages shorter it would have carried the same punch-to-the-gut as its surreal predecessor. At first I was worried about the premise being too clever: the text proports to be an afterward to Ambergris historian Duncan Shriek's "History of Ambergris," written by his sister Janice Shriek, but discovered and edited with notes by Duncan himself. However, this conceit is very well executed, and the two voices play off one another very nicely without intruding too much into the text -- the result if very "Pale Fire," but successful to an extent that surprised me.
The reason I gave it three rather than four stars is simply that something about the book struck me as somewhat false, or distant, as if the book was part of an elaborate in-joke that VanderMeer only partially let the reader in on. I can't really explain it, as it was just a vague sense of unease or detachment that set in from time to time. Whole chapters would be utterly gripping, but then there would be some bizarre detail that left me cold, almost as if he was writing an allegory and I was missing the cultural basis to understand the elaborate symbolism, or that if I was one of his college buddies I'd get how he'd cast their least favorite professor as the head of a church. Think of the wonderful stories you've told a small child, working their friends and family and neighborhood into the narrative, and later you realize with a slight disappointment that no one other than that child would really appreciate the story. I felt like that from time to time (if this makes sense to anyone other than me).
Still, 90% of the book was great, and the restrained use of senseless and utter violence brings this books an edge of urgency and horror I've seldom experienced outside of Mieville. Well worth reading for those who like weird-fiction.
If I had to write a review of this book based primarily on name-checks, my list would include: Mervyn Peake, Edward Gorey, H.P. Lovecraft, China Mievelle, and Tom Waits. VanderMeer's Ambergris setting has echoes of Gormanghast's crumbling antiquity, but with more of Amphigories twisted, Gothic humor thrown in (think "The Insect God"). The entire wold is spun over a shadow background of an unknown, violent horror lurking beneath the surface of things (see: Cthulhu), and the Waits I have in mind is less "Romeo is Bleeding" than "The Earth Died Screaming" (I will admit that the Nick Cave reference is accurate if what the reviewer was thinking of was "The Carney").
I picked this up mainly because I absolutely LOVED City of Saints and Madmen and this is the only other VanderMeer I've found in my multi stops at B&N since finishing that book. It was good - as well conceived and developed as CoSaM - but something about the premise seemed to drag a bit when stretched over the length of an entire novel; perhaps had it been 50 to 75 pages shorter it would have carried the same punch-to-the-gut as its surreal predecessor. At first I was worried about the premise being too clever: the text proports to be an afterward to Ambergris historian Duncan Shriek's "History of Ambergris," written by his sister Janice Shriek, but discovered and edited with notes by Duncan himself. However, this conceit is very well executed, and the two voices play off one another very nicely without intruding too much into the text -- the result if very "Pale Fire," but successful to an extent that surprised me.
The reason I gave it three rather than four stars is simply that something about the book struck me as somewhat false, or distant, as if the book was part of an elaborate in-joke that VanderMeer only partially let the reader in on. I can't really explain it, as it was just a vague sense of unease or detachment that set in from time to time. Whole chapters would be utterly gripping, but then there would be some bizarre detail that left me cold, almost as if he was writing an allegory and I was missing the cultural basis to understand the elaborate symbolism, or that if I was one of his college buddies I'd get how he'd cast their least favorite professor as the head of a church. Think of the wonderful stories you've told a small child, working their friends and family and neighborhood into the narrative, and later you realize with a slight disappointment that no one other than that child would really appreciate the story. I felt like that from time to time (if this makes sense to anyone other than me).
Still, 90% of the book was great, and the restrained use of senseless and utter violence brings this books an edge of urgency and horror I've seldom experienced outside of Mieville. Well worth reading for those who like weird-fiction.
May 20, 2009
I've been waiting for Jeff VanderMeer to write a novel set in Ambergris since City of Saints and Madmen.
Thoughts from the halfway mark: The first half of the book is Janice Shriek telling the story of her brother Duncan's multiple successes and disgraces, from being a successful historian, to a pariah, to a successful teacher, to his fall from grace for a torrid affair with a student, as well as her own rise to being a player in the art world until her own fall. All the while, she alludes to Duncan's travels underground and his study of the Gray Caps, the strange denizens that live beneath Ambergris. The account is frequently punctuated by Duncan's own interjections, clarifying or refuting things his sister has written. Everything is leading toward something called The Shift. No idea what The Shift is at this point in time.
The first half of the book is good. It has an underlying weirdness that generally gives one the willies. Duncan has clearly seen things beneath the ground that continue to obsess him but struggles with living a relatively normal life above ground. The writing is good and doesn't have nearly as much of the "Look how clever I am" vibe I got from certain parts of City of Saints and Madmen.
The End: The second half of the book deals with Duncan's fall from grace,the war between two merchant houses that eventually involves The Kalif, the aftermath of the war, and Mary Sabon's career. More of the secrets of the Gray Caps are revealed. Duncan continues his transformation and Janice gets a glimpse of things to come.
The second half was as good as the first. The only complaint I had was that the Shift was never really explained. The ending was open to interpretation, which is appropriate for a book of this kind.
I'd recommend this any fan of the new weird. This is what I wanted City of Saints and Madmen to be.
Thoughts from the halfway mark: The first half of the book is Janice Shriek telling the story of her brother Duncan's multiple successes and disgraces, from being a successful historian, to a pariah, to a successful teacher, to his fall from grace for a torrid affair with a student, as well as her own rise to being a player in the art world until her own fall. All the while, she alludes to Duncan's travels underground and his study of the Gray Caps, the strange denizens that live beneath Ambergris. The account is frequently punctuated by Duncan's own interjections, clarifying or refuting things his sister has written. Everything is leading toward something called The Shift. No idea what The Shift is at this point in time.
The first half of the book is good. It has an underlying weirdness that generally gives one the willies. Duncan has clearly seen things beneath the ground that continue to obsess him but struggles with living a relatively normal life above ground. The writing is good and doesn't have nearly as much of the "Look how clever I am" vibe I got from certain parts of City of Saints and Madmen.
The End: The second half of the book deals with Duncan's fall from grace,the war between two merchant houses that eventually involves The Kalif, the aftermath of the war, and Mary Sabon's career. More of the secrets of the Gray Caps are revealed. Duncan continues his transformation and Janice gets a glimpse of things to come.
The second half was as good as the first. The only complaint I had was that the Shift was never really explained. The ending was open to interpretation, which is appropriate for a book of this kind.
I'd recommend this any fan of the new weird. This is what I wanted City of Saints and Madmen to be.
March 18, 2016
He said: "A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror." I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.
"Some things should not be articulated. Some words should never be used in exact combination with other words." My father said that once, while reading a scathing negative review of one of his essays. He said it with a tired little sigh, a joke at his expense. His whole body slumped from the words. Weighed down with words, like stones in his pocket.
A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan's journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully...
Let's start with some George Orwell, shall we?
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
This is, appropriately enough, the opening of a rather savage critique of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, worth reading in its own right just for sentences like "Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight." (Warning for homophobia at the link, but few people do scathing like Orwell.) But I digress. And maybe it's rather pompous to pull a real world quote into the review of a fantasy book. Even though there is not a single other quote in the world that better captures this book. Not even this one:
You'll doubt me now, dear reader, even if you didn't already, even though this is all true. I doubt myself. I doubt the evidence of my eyes. Doubt was a great friend to my father. To Jonathan Shriek, it was the Great Ally. "Doubt," he would say, raising a finger, "is what will see you through. It is a great truth." Dad doubted every word he'd ever written. He told me so once, in the living room, at the end of a long, exhausting day. Every word. I thought he was joking, but now I can see that he wasn't.
Let me start over. This is a fantasy book. Some people read fantasy for escape. (Nothing wrong with that!) Most of the time, I read it for what is true. All books are ultimately constructs, all books are ultimately fictions; sometimes you can get closer to the truth by making a whole world a fiction, by constructing the whole reality from scratch. Sometimes you can see more clearly who and what we really are if the real world isn't getting in the way. The city of Ambergris (the real protagonist of this series) can tell us the truth better precisely because it is a fantasy.
We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.
No, that's not right either. After all, this is not just a fantasy book. It's an afterword to a fantasy history, "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris," written by Duncan Shriek and published in City of Saints and Madmen. The author of this afterword is Duncan's sister, Janice, who also wrote some art criticism of her own, "A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading," for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition, snippets of which were published in "Martin Lake," also in COSAM. I am only mentioning this to say 1) you should probably read COSAM before you read this book, and 2) VanderMeer is here attempting some literary derring-do: taking a rather unlikable character from the first book and making her the historian of the second book. Fortunately, he did not leave her on her own, and Duncan will be there to grouse at her the whole way. And she will need a lot of grousing. In ostensibly relating the story of how her brother came to write his history, she feels compelled to pour out all their failures, all their disgraces. (And still almost manages to leave out her nadir!) Can you love a snitch? Can you love an addict? Can you love a vain, self-centered, shallow and bitter woman? Can you love a teacher who seduces a student? Can you love an innocent who becomes an unrepentant racist through sheer cowardice? (I know I'm forgetting several venial little things here, but you get the idea.) I can't say it will work for everyone, but I love them. That's the point.
Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together… When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain…every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal.
Or maybe it's not. Maybe I can begin again. Janice and Duncan and their lives (and the lives they connect to) are but the window (maybe it's a door) into the end of Ambergris. Or the rebirth of Ambergris. (I'm not sure which at this point. The story is not perfectly clear.) Ambergris is a city founded on a xenocide, followed by what was assumed to be a retaliatory genocide. (The story of both can be found in Duncan's history in COSAM.) The reckoning is long overdue. But what if it isn't? What if the gray caps (I still prefer Sporn) are not after a reckoning? What if they are so Other that the inhabitants of Ambergris really can't know what they want? (And, what if many inhabitants of Ambergris don't want to know? What then?) This book will not answer any of those questions. (Maybe it will only suggest the shape of the proper questions.)
"Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren't any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn't get it out." {I still can't get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.}
It will begin (as I am beginning, again) to sketch the beginning of the end. I think. I'm not sure. But it seems to be in there. At the heart of this twisting story that Janice keeps starting over, keeps approaching from every different angle, spiraling in closer to a personal tragedy or triumph that seems to have no bearing on this larger story. Or maybe it does. What is truth? What is history? What is an afterword? Is it the moment when the whole thing comes together and lies glistening and golden in your mind? Or is it the getting there?
{Not that it matters to anyone anymore. History is about to catch up with us, and what I've really learned is that anything connected to the printed page becomes a kind of tombstone, marking the death of the past.}
If it's the getting there (and if you were patient enough to stick with me through my lame attempt to emulate Janice, even without Duncan's wry comments to liven the whole thing up) you might just like this book. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but then this sort of spiraling, asymptotic approach to the truth is kind of my thing. Read City of Saints and Madmen first. If you like that one, read this. It is a very different book, but you will be coming home to Ambergris and that will be good. (Ambergris will be eating some people you will probably like by the time they are eaten, but you knew that, right?) As for me, I will be reading the next book in the series, Finch, very soon.
Bonus content:
Shriek the Novel: official site with excerpts, interviews, alternate versions of certain chapters, and links to Shriek the Movie.
"Some things should not be articulated. Some words should never be used in exact combination with other words." My father said that once, while reading a scathing negative review of one of his essays. He said it with a tired little sigh, a joke at his expense. His whole body slumped from the words. Weighed down with words, like stones in his pocket.
A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan's journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully...
Let's start with some George Orwell, shall we?
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
This is, appropriately enough, the opening of a rather savage critique of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, worth reading in its own right just for sentences like "Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight." (Warning for homophobia at the link, but few people do scathing like Orwell.) But I digress. And maybe it's rather pompous to pull a real world quote into the review of a fantasy book. Even though there is not a single other quote in the world that better captures this book. Not even this one:
You'll doubt me now, dear reader, even if you didn't already, even though this is all true. I doubt myself. I doubt the evidence of my eyes. Doubt was a great friend to my father. To Jonathan Shriek, it was the Great Ally. "Doubt," he would say, raising a finger, "is what will see you through. It is a great truth." Dad doubted every word he'd ever written. He told me so once, in the living room, at the end of a long, exhausting day. Every word. I thought he was joking, but now I can see that he wasn't.
Let me start over. This is a fantasy book. Some people read fantasy for escape. (Nothing wrong with that!) Most of the time, I read it for what is true. All books are ultimately constructs, all books are ultimately fictions; sometimes you can get closer to the truth by making a whole world a fiction, by constructing the whole reality from scratch. Sometimes you can see more clearly who and what we really are if the real world isn't getting in the way. The city of Ambergris (the real protagonist of this series) can tell us the truth better precisely because it is a fantasy.
We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.
No, that's not right either. After all, this is not just a fantasy book. It's an afterword to a fantasy history, "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris," written by Duncan Shriek and published in City of Saints and Madmen. The author of this afterword is Duncan's sister, Janice, who also wrote some art criticism of her own, "A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading," for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition, snippets of which were published in "Martin Lake," also in COSAM. I am only mentioning this to say 1) you should probably read COSAM before you read this book, and 2) VanderMeer is here attempting some literary derring-do: taking a rather unlikable character from the first book and making her the historian of the second book. Fortunately, he did not leave her on her own, and Duncan will be there to grouse at her the whole way. And she will need a lot of grousing. In ostensibly relating the story of how her brother came to write his history, she feels compelled to pour out all their failures, all their disgraces. (And still almost manages to leave out her nadir!) Can you love a snitch? Can you love an addict? Can you love a vain, self-centered, shallow and bitter woman? Can you love a teacher who seduces a student? Can you love an innocent who becomes an unrepentant racist through sheer cowardice? (I know I'm forgetting several venial little things here, but you get the idea.) I can't say it will work for everyone, but I love them. That's the point.
Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together… When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain…every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal.
Or maybe it's not. Maybe I can begin again. Janice and Duncan and their lives (and the lives they connect to) are but the window (maybe it's a door) into the end of Ambergris. Or the rebirth of Ambergris. (I'm not sure which at this point. The story is not perfectly clear.) Ambergris is a city founded on a xenocide, followed by what was assumed to be a retaliatory genocide. (The story of both can be found in Duncan's history in COSAM.) The reckoning is long overdue. But what if it isn't? What if the gray caps (I still prefer Sporn) are not after a reckoning? What if they are so Other that the inhabitants of Ambergris really can't know what they want? (And, what if many inhabitants of Ambergris don't want to know? What then?) This book will not answer any of those questions. (Maybe it will only suggest the shape of the proper questions.)
"Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren't any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn't get it out." {I still can't get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.}
It will begin (as I am beginning, again) to sketch the beginning of the end. I think. I'm not sure. But it seems to be in there. At the heart of this twisting story that Janice keeps starting over, keeps approaching from every different angle, spiraling in closer to a personal tragedy or triumph that seems to have no bearing on this larger story. Or maybe it does. What is truth? What is history? What is an afterword? Is it the moment when the whole thing comes together and lies glistening and golden in your mind? Or is it the getting there?
{Not that it matters to anyone anymore. History is about to catch up with us, and what I've really learned is that anything connected to the printed page becomes a kind of tombstone, marking the death of the past.}
If it's the getting there (and if you were patient enough to stick with me through my lame attempt to emulate Janice, even without Duncan's wry comments to liven the whole thing up) you might just like this book. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but then this sort of spiraling, asymptotic approach to the truth is kind of my thing. Read City of Saints and Madmen first. If you like that one, read this. It is a very different book, but you will be coming home to Ambergris and that will be good. (Ambergris will be eating some people you will probably like by the time they are eaten, but you knew that, right?) As for me, I will be reading the next book in the series, Finch, very soon.
Bonus content:
Shriek the Novel: official site with excerpts, interviews, alternate versions of certain chapters, and links to Shriek the Movie.
July 23, 2016
I find myself thinking about Shriek in the same way I thought about its predecessor, City of Saints and Madmen. In other words, I'm not sure quite what to think about it. It has all the things that made City good: lots of atmosphere, a city so well constructed and populated that it feels like I was immersed in it, the feeling that this place existed before VanderMeer put his pen to paper. However, like City, Shriek doesn't really work well as a whole. Despite the richness of the setting, which is what motivated me to give is three stars, the story itself just feels empty.
The narrator is Janice Shriek, an art gallery owner who is writing something of a memoir about her and her brother Duncan, a controversial historian. Duncan often inserts his own thoughts about what his sister has written, the concept being that he came across her manuscript after she was done and wrote his comments in the margins. VanderMeer's comments at the end of the book say that he spent 7 years writing this book, and in all honesty, I'm not sure what he spent those 7 years doing. I didn't end the book feeling like I'd started in one place and ended further down the path. Substantively, there's just not much there.
I think that what might be holding VanderMeer back is wanting to keep things mysterious. Of course, it's usually good to hold things back and not spell everything out for the reader, but in this case, I think that there are so many secrets and questions about the history of the city of Ambergris that refusing to answer any prevents any true storytelling.
The narrator is Janice Shriek, an art gallery owner who is writing something of a memoir about her and her brother Duncan, a controversial historian. Duncan often inserts his own thoughts about what his sister has written, the concept being that he came across her manuscript after she was done and wrote his comments in the margins. VanderMeer's comments at the end of the book say that he spent 7 years writing this book, and in all honesty, I'm not sure what he spent those 7 years doing. I didn't end the book feeling like I'd started in one place and ended further down the path. Substantively, there's just not much there.
I think that what might be holding VanderMeer back is wanting to keep things mysterious. Of course, it's usually good to hold things back and not spell everything out for the reader, but in this case, I think that there are so many secrets and questions about the history of the city of Ambergris that refusing to answer any prevents any true storytelling.
March 4, 2008
I don't know, clever, but it just didn't do it. I think VanderMeer might be too fundamentally sane to accomplish the decadent style that he aspires to here. Get more insane, do more drugs, or be more French, Jeff. Otherwise you're S.O.L. Don't get me wrong, I think he can write, but I think he's not writing what he's suited for.
March 16, 2021
Not terrible but has the plot speed as an armadillo(now turtle slow but not fast).
April 3, 2007
Tarted up in a fin de siecle gaudiness and moldering crepe, Jeff VanDerMeer's latest tale of the decadent and unusual goings-on in the fantastical city of Ambergris promises raised eyebrows and wry humour. A few chapters into the book, it seemed as though the affair might collapse in upon itself due to the towering preciousness of it's central conceit: that it is in actuality a hideously distended afterword penned by the failed art gallery owner Janice Shriek, to be appended to a travel guide written by her peculiarly transforming brother, Duncan Shriek, a visionary historian who somehow (it will eventually be revealed) manages to encrust her narrative with asides and contradictions, despite having at least one soft shoe shuffling away his mortal coil. The atmosphere reeks of mildew and hallucination, morbid laughter and stark terrors. Wars are fought, lives ruined, loves founder, and sentient mushrooms from below the ground make their bids on surface life. By the end of the book, the artfulness of the prose and the depth in the portrayal of Janice's character rescue the story from turning into a frothy machination. The world of Ambergris is located in the poorly-lit and dangerous neighborhood of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and China Mieville's New Crobuzon. This isn't fantasy that you would wish to retreat into, but perhaps away from, rife with attractive poisons and dazzling decrepitude. Congratulations to Mr. VanDerMeer for capturing the unreal with extraordinary vividness.
November 12, 2007
The one where the life of historian Duncan Shriek is told by his sister, Janice, with annotations by Duncan after Janice dies. Abandoned at page 150.
I think there's probably a story in here somewhere. Things happen that would sound really exciting if I told you about them. But this is one of those books where you're given several unreliable sources and left to puzzle out what really happened between the lines of what they choose to tell you about, which means that there are layers and layers of other stuff between the reader and the story: Janice's high life and breakdown (bo-ring), the sibling relationship (if there was anything extraordinary about it, it hadn't shown up by page 150), dark hints of Duncan's love affair with a student (also boring).
Meanwhile, apparently this great adventure is happening in the background, but none of the actual words on the page tell anything about it.
Maybe this sort of thing is fun for people more academic-minded than me? Anyhow, it wasn't fun for me.
(2007 Locus poll: #6 fantasy)
I think there's probably a story in here somewhere. Things happen that would sound really exciting if I told you about them. But this is one of those books where you're given several unreliable sources and left to puzzle out what really happened between the lines of what they choose to tell you about, which means that there are layers and layers of other stuff between the reader and the story: Janice's high life and breakdown (bo-ring), the sibling relationship (if there was anything extraordinary about it, it hadn't shown up by page 150), dark hints of Duncan's love affair with a student (also boring).
Meanwhile, apparently this great adventure is happening in the background, but none of the actual words on the page tell anything about it.
Maybe this sort of thing is fun for people more academic-minded than me? Anyhow, it wasn't fun for me.
(2007 Locus poll: #6 fantasy)
March 21, 2023
This book shows just how well cosmic horror and comedy go together (strangely). The comedy helps create lovable characters with great flaws; flaws that make it clear they are completely unable to resist the horrors. It gets very scary, it gets very silly and it gets very long (a bit too long unfortunately).
March 4, 2025
Makes me yearn for the good old days of book burning...
January 4, 2011
From ISawLightningFall.com
During my misspent youth and a fair bit of my adulthood, I steeped myself in more fantastic fiction that I care to admit. As one book rolled into another and another, a pattern began to emerge: When authors crafted their imaginary worlds, they tended to take one of two tacks. The first (exhibited to great effect by C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces and his Narnia series) borrowed tropes from ancient mythologies. The second involved expanding some extant reality until it became fantastic, such as transmuting ordinary winter frost into a frozen world of deadly ice magic (à la Fritz Leiber's "The Snow Women"). It's this latter approach that Jeff VanderMeer employs in Shriek: An Afterword, the second installment in his Ambergris trilogy, and the element he expands upon sounds impossibly bizarre on paper -- the subterranean workings of fungi, mold and rot.
Ambergrisians don't like to talk about the Silence, that period when 25,000 citizens of their city simply ... vanished. General consensus holds that the gray caps -- the fungus people who have always dwelled in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the metropolis -- were responsible. Beyond that, any accord evaporates. That's why failed art promoter Janice Shriek has written this afterward to a travel guide penned by her brother, failed (and also missing) historian Duncan Shriek. He never held with the opinion that the gray caps were barely smarter than animals, an inferior life form meant to be mastered. Risking his reputation, health and the love of his life, Duncan dedicated himself to searching out the truth about Ambergris' original inhabitants, even if it meant travelling deep into their world, where strange spores and fruiting fungal bodies invaded his frame, granting him unheard of abilities even as they subsume him. Now Duncan is gone forever -- or is he? Because, reader, as you page through Janice's account you begin to notice marginal notes penned in his own hand ...
Admittedly, much of Shriek sounds as though it shouldn't work. Take its odd dual narration, Duncan's bracketed addenda inserted willy-nilly in Janice's "original" text. In truth, though, the two voices nearly always strike a harmonious tone, no doubt the result of careful composition on VanderMeer's part. And fungus as a fantasy element? Undeniably weird, but much like the gray caps' growths miraculously ravage Duncan's body, such speculation so suffuses the novel than its own internal logic emerges. Floating spores become multi-sensory surveillance systems for the gray caps. A quasi-biological machine, an abomination of metal and flesh strung together with mycological polyps, nearly drives Duncan mad when he beholds it underground. And molds visible only under certain spectrums of light reveal Ambergrisian buildings and byways tagged with countless cabalistic codes, "glowing and bold, in phosphorescent greens, yellows, reds, purples, blues." Add in subplots on the transience of artistic fame, the politics of publishing, the nature of religious belief, a humorously awful war, and the lasting impact of a parent's death, and you have a good book on your hands.
A good book, but not an easy one. Exposure to the trilogy's compendium-like first installment, City of Saints and Madmen, is almost a prerequisite. However, readers looking beyond the run of the mill will likely find the extra effort worth it. Shriek is truly the product of a fecund imagination.
During my misspent youth and a fair bit of my adulthood, I steeped myself in more fantastic fiction that I care to admit. As one book rolled into another and another, a pattern began to emerge: When authors crafted their imaginary worlds, they tended to take one of two tacks. The first (exhibited to great effect by C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces and his Narnia series) borrowed tropes from ancient mythologies. The second involved expanding some extant reality until it became fantastic, such as transmuting ordinary winter frost into a frozen world of deadly ice magic (à la Fritz Leiber's "The Snow Women"). It's this latter approach that Jeff VanderMeer employs in Shriek: An Afterword, the second installment in his Ambergris trilogy, and the element he expands upon sounds impossibly bizarre on paper -- the subterranean workings of fungi, mold and rot.
Ambergrisians don't like to talk about the Silence, that period when 25,000 citizens of their city simply ... vanished. General consensus holds that the gray caps -- the fungus people who have always dwelled in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the metropolis -- were responsible. Beyond that, any accord evaporates. That's why failed art promoter Janice Shriek has written this afterward to a travel guide penned by her brother, failed (and also missing) historian Duncan Shriek. He never held with the opinion that the gray caps were barely smarter than animals, an inferior life form meant to be mastered. Risking his reputation, health and the love of his life, Duncan dedicated himself to searching out the truth about Ambergris' original inhabitants, even if it meant travelling deep into their world, where strange spores and fruiting fungal bodies invaded his frame, granting him unheard of abilities even as they subsume him. Now Duncan is gone forever -- or is he? Because, reader, as you page through Janice's account you begin to notice marginal notes penned in his own hand ...
Admittedly, much of Shriek sounds as though it shouldn't work. Take its odd dual narration, Duncan's bracketed addenda inserted willy-nilly in Janice's "original" text. In truth, though, the two voices nearly always strike a harmonious tone, no doubt the result of careful composition on VanderMeer's part. And fungus as a fantasy element? Undeniably weird, but much like the gray caps' growths miraculously ravage Duncan's body, such speculation so suffuses the novel than its own internal logic emerges. Floating spores become multi-sensory surveillance systems for the gray caps. A quasi-biological machine, an abomination of metal and flesh strung together with mycological polyps, nearly drives Duncan mad when he beholds it underground. And molds visible only under certain spectrums of light reveal Ambergrisian buildings and byways tagged with countless cabalistic codes, "glowing and bold, in phosphorescent greens, yellows, reds, purples, blues." Add in subplots on the transience of artistic fame, the politics of publishing, the nature of religious belief, a humorously awful war, and the lasting impact of a parent's death, and you have a good book on your hands.
A good book, but not an easy one. Exposure to the trilogy's compendium-like first installment, City of Saints and Madmen, is almost a prerequisite. However, readers looking beyond the run of the mill will likely find the extra effort worth it. Shriek is truly the product of a fecund imagination.
December 6, 2024
I don’t know if this really deserves the 5-star rating but it feels right in my heart. I think this is in part due to the fact that I spent 2 months and 2 days reading this book (those 18 credit hours have me in the TRENCHES), but I feel like I witnessed a whole lifetime in real-time play out in this book. Do I remember the beginning of the book? No, but I don’t need to. It’s all about the experience, and dear god was this an experience.
I recently saw a criticism of Ambergris that said something like “VanderMeer excels at writing characters as unlike real people as possible”, which is kind of crazy to me because his characters have always felt very fleshed-out to me. And this is especially true in Shriek: An Afterword. Janice is entirely composed of digressions and transgressions, more so than Duncan. This book is less about Duncan and more about her. Though she tries and tries and tries not to talk about herself, she can’t stop her self from spilling into her words and the spaces between them. And throughout it all, both she and Duncan felt so…real. They felt multidimensional and complex and fascinating and understandable and beyond comprehension. They felt more like people than characters. There were so many parts in this book where I had to pause because I suddenly glimpsed a reflection of myself staring out at me from the page, and even more parts where I recognized someone I personally knew—specifically (but not exclusively) this one friend I have, who’s just so…Duncan coded, to put it simply. Every once in a while he’ll send me melodramatic passages about his mundane suffering and obsessions and romantic yearning with absolutely no preamble, and the resemblance between his writing and Duncan’s is really quite uncanny. I sent him a couple passages from Shriek that I thought he’d like and relate to, and he never responded. To be fair, I don’t know how I’d respond if someone sent book passages as unhinged and personal as those to me either. I think I’d just have to let them sit there, buried among messages, forever. Mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc. I might be losing it a little. Actually, I think I’ve already lost it. But I digress. (How fitting for a review of this book. It’s not even really a review. My reviews are mostly about me and my miscellaneous thoughts than about the books in question. How fitting, indeed…) The parenthetical responses left by Duncan in Janice’s manuscript were also a really interesting and really cool narrative choice. It gave the book the feeling of a long, long dialogue, where we were only allowed to hear one of the speakers and the occasional choice phrase from the other. I don’t know where I’m going with any of this. Characterization? Insane. Incredible. Prose? Changed me forever, while simultaneously leaving me the same.
And the worldbuilding? I don’t even know where to begin. Just…god. Godddd. There’s so much going on. SO much. The lore runs deep, and then deeper still. Ever see a chart comparing the depths of the world’s deepest lakes? Ever see how Baikal compares to everything else? It’s like that. Deceptive. Descriptive. Dreamlike. The scene in the Truffidian church during the Festival will never leave me.
I’m not sure what else I can say about this book, since the rest of my thoughts are completely incoherent. I’m still in the trenches. I’ve been writing this for the past 45 minutes on my phone, sitting in the library with my laptop open to the Canvas calendar, when I should be locked in on that academic grindset. This was for sure one of the novels I’ve ever read. You guys are really sleeping on Ambergris. The Southern Reach is good, but consider branching out a little. It’s worth it, I promise.
I spent another 45 minutes typing out a long paragraph where I aired out my complaints about all the people who whine about this book being filled with meanders and digressions and pointless bits of information and unlikeable characters and redundancy, and being devoid of a cohesive plot or a linear narrative, and basically being badly written. I unfortunately was still typing on my phone and still sitting at that same table in the library with my laptop open in front of me. Somehow, I accidentally swiped down on the screen and that instantly closed the review editing window and didn't save a single word I wrote. I hate the new Goodreads UI, especially in the app. It's evil. It's actually evil. And it's such a shame that that paragraph got deleted, because I thought it was pretty well-written and touched on some foundations of literary analysis, and it also took me 45 minutes to write, so I basically wasted that whole time. But anyway, the core point of that paragraph was this: Shriek was always supposed to be poorly written. It was always supposed to suck and have clunky phrases and repetition and mistakes and confusing storytelling. Why? Because it was written by Janice.
See, sometimes authors will ask you to treat their writing as a thought experiment. Sometimes you have to play along and let them tell you what you should believe. Here, as with many other stories in this series, VanderMeer is telling you to pretend, for the sake of the narrative and the experience, that the world is real, and that its characters are people, and that what you are reading was written in that world and taken out of it and given to you as a window and not as a magic mirror that lies to you. He is telling you to accept Janice Shriek as the author. And Janice is flawed. Deeply so. Janice has fallen from grace time and time again. Janice is typing everything on a fungus-infested typewriter in a musty room. Janice forgets, Janice remembers, Janice's mind wanders, Janice feels, Janice thinks, Janice doesn't have the ability to edit what she's written and has to push forward through it all, adding information only where she can. Yes, obviously, Janice was written by Jeff VanderMeer. But is the assumption that every single detail and aspect of the text was fully intended by the author and carries meaning not, like, one of the core principles of narrative analysis? Janice is not a good writer or a good person. But you simply have to understand (or pretend, or assume) that Jeff VanderMeer intended for her to be those things, and that all the myriad flaws in the writing are intended to reveal meaningful details about the world, the characters, and the story. Treat the bad writing in Shriek not as an accident, but as an intentional feature of what the writing is trying to convey. This novel is poorly written because Janice is a bad writer, not because VanderMeer is. You have to accept that. You don't have to like it, but you have to accept that.
I recently saw a criticism of Ambergris that said something like “VanderMeer excels at writing characters as unlike real people as possible”, which is kind of crazy to me because his characters have always felt very fleshed-out to me. And this is especially true in Shriek: An Afterword. Janice is entirely composed of digressions and transgressions, more so than Duncan. This book is less about Duncan and more about her. Though she tries and tries and tries not to talk about herself, she can’t stop her self from spilling into her words and the spaces between them. And throughout it all, both she and Duncan felt so…real. They felt multidimensional and complex and fascinating and understandable and beyond comprehension. They felt more like people than characters. There were so many parts in this book where I had to pause because I suddenly glimpsed a reflection of myself staring out at me from the page, and even more parts where I recognized someone I personally knew—specifically (but not exclusively) this one friend I have, who’s just so…Duncan coded, to put it simply. Every once in a while he’ll send me melodramatic passages about his mundane suffering and obsessions and romantic yearning with absolutely no preamble, and the resemblance between his writing and Duncan’s is really quite uncanny. I sent him a couple passages from Shriek that I thought he’d like and relate to, and he never responded. To be fair, I don’t know how I’d respond if someone sent book passages as unhinged and personal as those to me either. I think I’d just have to let them sit there, buried among messages, forever. Mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc. I might be losing it a little. Actually, I think I’ve already lost it. But I digress. (How fitting for a review of this book. It’s not even really a review. My reviews are mostly about me and my miscellaneous thoughts than about the books in question. How fitting, indeed…) The parenthetical responses left by Duncan in Janice’s manuscript were also a really interesting and really cool narrative choice. It gave the book the feeling of a long, long dialogue, where we were only allowed to hear one of the speakers and the occasional choice phrase from the other. I don’t know where I’m going with any of this. Characterization? Insane. Incredible. Prose? Changed me forever, while simultaneously leaving me the same.
And the worldbuilding? I don’t even know where to begin. Just…god. Godddd. There’s so much going on. SO much. The lore runs deep, and then deeper still. Ever see a chart comparing the depths of the world’s deepest lakes? Ever see how Baikal compares to everything else? It’s like that. Deceptive. Descriptive. Dreamlike. The scene in the Truffidian church during the Festival will never leave me.
I’m not sure what else I can say about this book, since the rest of my thoughts are completely incoherent. I’m still in the trenches. I’ve been writing this for the past 45 minutes on my phone, sitting in the library with my laptop open to the Canvas calendar, when I should be locked in on that academic grindset. This was for sure one of the novels I’ve ever read. You guys are really sleeping on Ambergris. The Southern Reach is good, but consider branching out a little. It’s worth it, I promise.
I spent another 45 minutes typing out a long paragraph where I aired out my complaints about all the people who whine about this book being filled with meanders and digressions and pointless bits of information and unlikeable characters and redundancy, and being devoid of a cohesive plot or a linear narrative, and basically being badly written. I unfortunately was still typing on my phone and still sitting at that same table in the library with my laptop open in front of me. Somehow, I accidentally swiped down on the screen and that instantly closed the review editing window and didn't save a single word I wrote. I hate the new Goodreads UI, especially in the app. It's evil. It's actually evil. And it's such a shame that that paragraph got deleted, because I thought it was pretty well-written and touched on some foundations of literary analysis, and it also took me 45 minutes to write, so I basically wasted that whole time. But anyway, the core point of that paragraph was this: Shriek was always supposed to be poorly written. It was always supposed to suck and have clunky phrases and repetition and mistakes and confusing storytelling. Why? Because it was written by Janice.
See, sometimes authors will ask you to treat their writing as a thought experiment. Sometimes you have to play along and let them tell you what you should believe. Here, as with many other stories in this series, VanderMeer is telling you to pretend, for the sake of the narrative and the experience, that the world is real, and that its characters are people, and that what you are reading was written in that world and taken out of it and given to you as a window and not as a magic mirror that lies to you. He is telling you to accept Janice Shriek as the author. And Janice is flawed. Deeply so. Janice has fallen from grace time and time again. Janice is typing everything on a fungus-infested typewriter in a musty room. Janice forgets, Janice remembers, Janice's mind wanders, Janice feels, Janice thinks, Janice doesn't have the ability to edit what she's written and has to push forward through it all, adding information only where she can. Yes, obviously, Janice was written by Jeff VanderMeer. But is the assumption that every single detail and aspect of the text was fully intended by the author and carries meaning not, like, one of the core principles of narrative analysis? Janice is not a good writer or a good person. But you simply have to understand (or pretend, or assume) that Jeff VanderMeer intended for her to be those things, and that all the myriad flaws in the writing are intended to reveal meaningful details about the world, the characters, and the story. Treat the bad writing in Shriek not as an accident, but as an intentional feature of what the writing is trying to convey. This novel is poorly written because Janice is a bad writer, not because VanderMeer is. You have to accept that. You don't have to like it, but you have to accept that.
November 19, 2010
Ambergris can only be illuminated obliquely--through the backscatter of light as it bounces off things much closer in focus. VanderMeer worked this to wondrous effect in many of the short pieces in "City of Saints and Madmen," but the technique is far less satisfying in this full-length work.
Janice, Duncan, and Mary are simply not interesting enough to stand up to this close focus. This author's books are never easy on the reader but there is little pay-off for slogging through 350 pages. 350 pages and we get a slap, an opera, and a very tiresome love affair. Also missing is the humor that was present throughout the work that Shriek is ostensibly a sequel to.
There are little tidbits of Ambergris revealed, but not nearly enough to keep the story afloat. We get the Machine, the glasses, and Edward the fake gray cap; unfortunately, there's tenfold more about Duncan and Mary, Mary and Duncan.
As with "Dradin in Love," the most effective scenes are the highly charged reminiscences of earlier family life. This time, instead of the indelible image of Dradin's mother eating mud in the rain, we get Mr. Shriek sprinting across the yard, being struck down by his own happiness. A pity about his children.
Janice, Duncan, and Mary are simply not interesting enough to stand up to this close focus. This author's books are never easy on the reader but there is little pay-off for slogging through 350 pages. 350 pages and we get a slap, an opera, and a very tiresome love affair. Also missing is the humor that was present throughout the work that Shriek is ostensibly a sequel to.
There are little tidbits of Ambergris revealed, but not nearly enough to keep the story afloat. We get the Machine, the glasses, and Edward the fake gray cap; unfortunately, there's tenfold more about Duncan and Mary, Mary and Duncan.
As with "Dradin in Love," the most effective scenes are the highly charged reminiscences of earlier family life. This time, instead of the indelible image of Dradin's mother eating mud in the rain, we get Mr. Shriek sprinting across the yard, being struck down by his own happiness. A pity about his children.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 14, 2019
I really wanted to like this book. The Ambergris hinted at in Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen was so beguilingly strange that I had to go deeper in its fungivarious depths. Shriek, unfortunately, remains a stolid second act. The thing with books that rely on a dominant character’s voice is that they work only if the reader feels emotionally invested in the character. Janice Shriek is so bland and uninspired as a character that I was left cold. If only this was a work composed in the voice of her brother... What a wasted opportunity!
October 14, 2018
I considered rating higher for the fun gray cap stuff. but what is fun about that all is just the ideas and such from City of Saints and Madmen. and then my god, the interjections from Duncan. always exactly the same tenor, rarely do anything other than directly contradict what Janice has just said. which might be fine a few times, but not ninety thousand times.
December 14, 2025
This second installment of the Ambergris series held up much better than Book 1 on a reread. The writing is beautiful and evocative. There were highs and lows, the pacing was uneven - compelling start, slightly tired middle, impactful end - but the book holds up due to the emotional depth of the character narratives. I found the culmination of all the narrative points very moving.
July 2, 2022
incredible. you should drop w/e book you think you're enjoying right now and read city of saints and madmen then this.
December 28, 2025
I have consistently ranked Jeff Vandermeer among my favorite authors for years now, despite the fact that I have yet to give one of his books 5 stars. I think his worldbuilding, his characters, his style and the sheer audacity of his imagination are compelling enough to keep me reading, even if the books he ultimately produces are frustrating and uneven. “Shriek” was no different - a ponderous, hallucinatory diatribe that scratched my itch for Ambergrisian lore but is occasionally so self absorbed as to be unreadable.
City of Saints and Madmen, the first book in the Ambergris cycle, is an anthology of loosely connected novellas, each of which is an in-world document by a fictional author from the gritty psychedelic metropolis of Ambergris. In the first volume we are introduced to the family Shriek - Duncan, a historian, and his sister Janice, an art critic. This second volume focuses in on these two figures exclusively, as Janice waxes poetic about her relationship with her brother following his mysterious disappearance.
There are some surprisingly tender moments here. The Shriek’s relationship rings true. Their ups and downs as siblings and also the challenges they face as struggling intellectuals in a cut throat publishing market are compelling and human enough that they would not be out of place in a realistic literary fiction novel. Unfortunately, Vandermeer never quite reconciles this more personal tone with the fact that this is also, ostensibly, a book about mushroom people building a mind control doomsday device under a grimdark steampunk city.
The problem is that Vandermeer gets lost inside his narrators. Every book he writes is an artifact, an invented document subject to all the same flaws and biases and omissions that plague journals and histories in the real world. While I believe that Jeff Vandermeer can write circles around his contemporaries, Janice Shriek, fictional though she may be, absolutely cannot write. Vandermeer even forgives himself of her shortcomings, placing her in dialogue with Duncan, who notes her biases and vast errors of character judgment, and later their editor Sirin, who laments her omissions, lapses in chronology and gramatical abuses.
As in the previous book, the city of Ambergris is truly the main character of the story, with the panoply of voices all picking it apart from different angles even as it eludes their understanding and forces us to confront their unreliability as narrators. While the first volume gave us enough different perspectives to enjoy the city in all its contradictions, the Shrieks are simply too difficult to read to shed much new light on Ambergris. I still think I want to read Finch, the final installment. In for a penny in for a pound, I suppose. But I do hope that book’s narrator is coherent enough to keep Vandermeer focused on the more interesting parts of his world.
City of Saints and Madmen, the first book in the Ambergris cycle, is an anthology of loosely connected novellas, each of which is an in-world document by a fictional author from the gritty psychedelic metropolis of Ambergris. In the first volume we are introduced to the family Shriek - Duncan, a historian, and his sister Janice, an art critic. This second volume focuses in on these two figures exclusively, as Janice waxes poetic about her relationship with her brother following his mysterious disappearance.
There are some surprisingly tender moments here. The Shriek’s relationship rings true. Their ups and downs as siblings and also the challenges they face as struggling intellectuals in a cut throat publishing market are compelling and human enough that they would not be out of place in a realistic literary fiction novel. Unfortunately, Vandermeer never quite reconciles this more personal tone with the fact that this is also, ostensibly, a book about mushroom people building a mind control doomsday device under a grimdark steampunk city.
The problem is that Vandermeer gets lost inside his narrators. Every book he writes is an artifact, an invented document subject to all the same flaws and biases and omissions that plague journals and histories in the real world. While I believe that Jeff Vandermeer can write circles around his contemporaries, Janice Shriek, fictional though she may be, absolutely cannot write. Vandermeer even forgives himself of her shortcomings, placing her in dialogue with Duncan, who notes her biases and vast errors of character judgment, and later their editor Sirin, who laments her omissions, lapses in chronology and gramatical abuses.
As in the previous book, the city of Ambergris is truly the main character of the story, with the panoply of voices all picking it apart from different angles even as it eludes their understanding and forces us to confront their unreliability as narrators. While the first volume gave us enough different perspectives to enjoy the city in all its contradictions, the Shrieks are simply too difficult to read to shed much new light on Ambergris. I still think I want to read Finch, the final installment. In for a penny in for a pound, I suppose. But I do hope that book’s narrator is coherent enough to keep Vandermeer focused on the more interesting parts of his world.
November 3, 2022
Vandermeer’s writing infiltrates your brain just like the mushrooms take over the city Ambergris. It lingers with you long after you close the book and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I almost wish I had read Shriek before City of Saints and Madmen, I loved many of the stories in the book but personally I have a harder time connecting with characters in short stories. Now that I’ve read Shriek I feel much more invested in these characters and the city and find myself wanting to go back and reread some of City of Saints.
Regardless this is just an incredible piece of work. Vandermeer is so engulfed in the world and it’s fascinating to read, not to mention the phenomenal writing. I’m very much looking forward to Finch.
I almost wish I had read Shriek before City of Saints and Madmen, I loved many of the stories in the book but personally I have a harder time connecting with characters in short stories. Now that I’ve read Shriek I feel much more invested in these characters and the city and find myself wanting to go back and reread some of City of Saints.
Regardless this is just an incredible piece of work. Vandermeer is so engulfed in the world and it’s fascinating to read, not to mention the phenomenal writing. I’m very much looking forward to Finch.
March 4, 2025
I enjoyed this so much more than the first book.
August 12, 2024
The sort of relentless rehashing of events robs this story of being a worthy successor to the first book in the series. Duncan’s edits are a bright spot but VanderMeers choice to make us feel the same slog as his character does reading Janice’s afterword doesn’t pay off.
April 6, 2021
Ask yourself what would be worse: if a younger sibling went into your room and read your diary outloud to all their friends, or if they decided it was better to scribble all over it with a running snarky commentary over your most personal thoughts? Oh, and sometimes they'll do you the favor of correcting stuff they think you got wrong.
Sound like fun? Well, it may fall into the category of "Funnier when its not happening to you" but if you find even a passing hilarity with that kind of thing then you may find yourself chuckling with all the sadistic gleam of that invasive sibling when reading this novel. Especially if you think the one overlooked area of fantastic literature is people shaped like mushrooms.
Yes, we're back in Ambergris, which VanderMeer introduced with great fanfare in "City of Saints and Madmen", on ode to all things fungal and squid-like (though fortunately not at the same time). Presented as his attempt at joining the memorable weird cities of literature, it was memorable for its dogged insistence on forcing us to take the mushroom people seriously and for VanderMeer gleeful genre hopping, with stories set in a variety of formats and narrative approaches. It was strange, though at times I felt it wasn't quite as strange as the book wanted us to think it was and it didn't seem to hold itself together atmospherically as well as other famous locales, including his New Weird buddy China Mieville's New Crobuzon.
This one takes a step back from the "anything goes" style of that collection and attempts to tell a fairly straightahead story, albeit in a roundabout fashion. That previous book had among its various stories introduced Duncan and Janice Shriek, siblings who appeared in different stories (Duncan narrated one of them and Janice was involved in "The Transformation of Martin Lake"). Here they take more or less center stage, as Janice is writing an afterword to her brother's (who at the time of writing has disappeared into the mushroom people infested underground) "The Early History of Ambergris" and in the time honored tradition of giving a task nobody really asked for to a person who might be slightly unbalanced, is using the space allotted to her to basically air out a lot of family history and disagreements. Which, given that whoever is publishing this seems to have no problem with a novel-length afterword with barely a nod toward things like editorial considerations, or, you know, staying on-topic, it seems like Janice has been given a pretty sweet deal. Little does she know that at some point after she typed this all up her brother returned from wherever he's been to read over her thoughts and, as it turns out, has some thoughts of his own.
If this sounds like someone trying to do a fantasy version of Nabokov's "Pale Fire" that doesn't require an insane level of literary analysis, you could certainly make a decent case. If you think it sounds more clever than interesting, well, you could certainly make that case as well. The Shriek siblings clearly have some issues that they need to hash out but I'm not sure if doing it this way, like talking to someone on a tape delay, was the best way to go about it. Its clear very early on that Janice is slightly unhinged and has enough axes to grind to make a lumberjack salivate, but for the most part she's giving a retelling of her career as a artist and gallery owner while being a bystander to both her brother's attempts at being an author and his gradual descent into mushroom-mania, as his attempt to study the grey-caps that live underneath the city cause him to start going native in a definitively transformative way.
However, it doesn't seem to have improved his mood any and his contributions to his sister's story are mostly rude asides or irritated corrections, never really threatening to take over the story but not especially adding anything to either unless you start finding yourself very invested on whether the Shrieks are going to kiss and make up. A lot of it revolves around his love affair (such as it is) with Mary Sabon, who is a student that he takes up with while he's a professor and who is the source of much of Janice's ire (she's mentioned what feels like a hundred times before she actually appears in the narrative), although both of them have a fixation with her, for different reasons.
But Mary is just one of the many digressions Janice's narrative embarks on and after a while it starts to feel like a story from someone who, having already started, is obligated to continue but isn't quite sure how to wrap it up, either because they don't know how or they don't want you to leave. The big issue seems to be Janice's feelings about her brother and their relationship to each other, but since both of them seem like antisocial weirdos with not much in the way of charming qualities, a definite sense of "who cares" starts to creep into the proceedings after a while. VanderMeer is a solid enough storyteller that this never becomes actively boring but I do feel like he's assuming that people are going to find Ambergris compelling enough that he can coast on that vibe for a while without worrying too much if the story he's trying to tell is worth sticking around for.
And thing is, I don't find Ambergris that fascinating. The mystery surrounding whatever the grey-caps are up to never quite seems to be as alluring as VanderMeer so clearly wants it to be, although he doesn't seem to be even trying that hard this time out, with most of the focus on Duncan's gradual changes. So they function mostly as background noise that becomes closer to ambient music but since they were the one vaguely interesting aspect about the city, with their presence mostly subtracted Ambergris comes across as . . . just a city, a place with some elements of strangeness but on some level probably not much weirder than anything you'd come across making a turn down a random street in New York City at the right hour. I feel at times like VanderMeer is trying to push it toward Viriconium-esque levels but he doesn't have M John Harrison's gift for wrapping deconstruction in an unspeakably strange environment (in ways that are oddly subcutaneous . . . like, you can't quite articulate what makes the city strange, it just "feels" off) so that even if it doesn't feel like a place where you'd want to leave, you can imagine those particular people living there.
Here, without that weight it feels like two people being catty to each other without the benefit of consequences for their actions. At times it feel like VanderMeer thought a stroke of brilliance was the phrase "flesh necklace" and while it may have an impact the first couple times he writes it (in his defense, it does conjure some creepy imagery) by the end of the book you could have made an drinking game out of it that would have sent everyone involved to the emergency room. It never feels like Janice's story is building to anything but the end of her story and I had hoped bringing in Duncan would have made more of a parallel narrative hinting at something happening beyond Janice's story but instead it feels more like an episode of "Mystery Science Theatre" where all the writers have gone on strike. You can tell that VanderMeer is proud of his fictional city, filling it with nooks and crannies and odd bits of history. But there's a difference between making a city that has actual foundations and one seemingly designed by a narcoleptic architect that's just a clearinghouse for all your stored idea. Maybe it will settle into the collective imagination given time but right now if I see its exit on the highway, for the moment, I'll probably just keep driving.
Sound like fun? Well, it may fall into the category of "Funnier when its not happening to you" but if you find even a passing hilarity with that kind of thing then you may find yourself chuckling with all the sadistic gleam of that invasive sibling when reading this novel. Especially if you think the one overlooked area of fantastic literature is people shaped like mushrooms.
Yes, we're back in Ambergris, which VanderMeer introduced with great fanfare in "City of Saints and Madmen", on ode to all things fungal and squid-like (though fortunately not at the same time). Presented as his attempt at joining the memorable weird cities of literature, it was memorable for its dogged insistence on forcing us to take the mushroom people seriously and for VanderMeer gleeful genre hopping, with stories set in a variety of formats and narrative approaches. It was strange, though at times I felt it wasn't quite as strange as the book wanted us to think it was and it didn't seem to hold itself together atmospherically as well as other famous locales, including his New Weird buddy China Mieville's New Crobuzon.
This one takes a step back from the "anything goes" style of that collection and attempts to tell a fairly straightahead story, albeit in a roundabout fashion. That previous book had among its various stories introduced Duncan and Janice Shriek, siblings who appeared in different stories (Duncan narrated one of them and Janice was involved in "The Transformation of Martin Lake"). Here they take more or less center stage, as Janice is writing an afterword to her brother's (who at the time of writing has disappeared into the mushroom people infested underground) "The Early History of Ambergris" and in the time honored tradition of giving a task nobody really asked for to a person who might be slightly unbalanced, is using the space allotted to her to basically air out a lot of family history and disagreements. Which, given that whoever is publishing this seems to have no problem with a novel-length afterword with barely a nod toward things like editorial considerations, or, you know, staying on-topic, it seems like Janice has been given a pretty sweet deal. Little does she know that at some point after she typed this all up her brother returned from wherever he's been to read over her thoughts and, as it turns out, has some thoughts of his own.
If this sounds like someone trying to do a fantasy version of Nabokov's "Pale Fire" that doesn't require an insane level of literary analysis, you could certainly make a decent case. If you think it sounds more clever than interesting, well, you could certainly make that case as well. The Shriek siblings clearly have some issues that they need to hash out but I'm not sure if doing it this way, like talking to someone on a tape delay, was the best way to go about it. Its clear very early on that Janice is slightly unhinged and has enough axes to grind to make a lumberjack salivate, but for the most part she's giving a retelling of her career as a artist and gallery owner while being a bystander to both her brother's attempts at being an author and his gradual descent into mushroom-mania, as his attempt to study the grey-caps that live underneath the city cause him to start going native in a definitively transformative way.
However, it doesn't seem to have improved his mood any and his contributions to his sister's story are mostly rude asides or irritated corrections, never really threatening to take over the story but not especially adding anything to either unless you start finding yourself very invested on whether the Shrieks are going to kiss and make up. A lot of it revolves around his love affair (such as it is) with Mary Sabon, who is a student that he takes up with while he's a professor and who is the source of much of Janice's ire (she's mentioned what feels like a hundred times before she actually appears in the narrative), although both of them have a fixation with her, for different reasons.
But Mary is just one of the many digressions Janice's narrative embarks on and after a while it starts to feel like a story from someone who, having already started, is obligated to continue but isn't quite sure how to wrap it up, either because they don't know how or they don't want you to leave. The big issue seems to be Janice's feelings about her brother and their relationship to each other, but since both of them seem like antisocial weirdos with not much in the way of charming qualities, a definite sense of "who cares" starts to creep into the proceedings after a while. VanderMeer is a solid enough storyteller that this never becomes actively boring but I do feel like he's assuming that people are going to find Ambergris compelling enough that he can coast on that vibe for a while without worrying too much if the story he's trying to tell is worth sticking around for.
And thing is, I don't find Ambergris that fascinating. The mystery surrounding whatever the grey-caps are up to never quite seems to be as alluring as VanderMeer so clearly wants it to be, although he doesn't seem to be even trying that hard this time out, with most of the focus on Duncan's gradual changes. So they function mostly as background noise that becomes closer to ambient music but since they were the one vaguely interesting aspect about the city, with their presence mostly subtracted Ambergris comes across as . . . just a city, a place with some elements of strangeness but on some level probably not much weirder than anything you'd come across making a turn down a random street in New York City at the right hour. I feel at times like VanderMeer is trying to push it toward Viriconium-esque levels but he doesn't have M John Harrison's gift for wrapping deconstruction in an unspeakably strange environment (in ways that are oddly subcutaneous . . . like, you can't quite articulate what makes the city strange, it just "feels" off) so that even if it doesn't feel like a place where you'd want to leave, you can imagine those particular people living there.
Here, without that weight it feels like two people being catty to each other without the benefit of consequences for their actions. At times it feel like VanderMeer thought a stroke of brilliance was the phrase "flesh necklace" and while it may have an impact the first couple times he writes it (in his defense, it does conjure some creepy imagery) by the end of the book you could have made an drinking game out of it that would have sent everyone involved to the emergency room. It never feels like Janice's story is building to anything but the end of her story and I had hoped bringing in Duncan would have made more of a parallel narrative hinting at something happening beyond Janice's story but instead it feels more like an episode of "Mystery Science Theatre" where all the writers have gone on strike. You can tell that VanderMeer is proud of his fictional city, filling it with nooks and crannies and odd bits of history. But there's a difference between making a city that has actual foundations and one seemingly designed by a narcoleptic architect that's just a clearinghouse for all your stored idea. Maybe it will settle into the collective imagination given time but right now if I see its exit on the highway, for the moment, I'll probably just keep driving.
June 17, 2011
Cholernie obawiałem się tej książki, bowiem przyzwyczaiłem się, do tego, że Jeff VanderMeer, podobnie, jak M. John Harrison, lubuje się w "dręczeniu" czytelnika na wiele rozlicznych sposobów: od prowadzenia fabuły niezwykle splątanymi ścieżkami - którymi podążając, nie wolno w żadnym wypadku pozwolić sobie na rozproszenie uwagi, należy zachować pełną koncentrację i czujność - poprzez kreację bohaterów, których motywacje są niejasne, losy zagmatwane a czyny irracjonalne, aż do doprowadzanie do kompletnego "skołowacenia" w końcówce, w której nie wiemy, co jest prawdą a co tylko imaginacją tychże postaci.
A jednak udało się autorowi całkowicie zawładnąć wyobraźnią - "Shriek: Posłowie" jest doskonałym uzupełnieniem "Miasta szaleńców i świętych" a jednocześnie jestem pewien, że ponownie sięgnięcie po pierwszą z książek z cyklu o Ambergis, całkowicie zmieniłoby jej odbiór, nadałoby nowy sens i głębię temu, co zostało tam wcześniej spisane.
Ponadto książka jest - oczywiście - bardziej spójna (w przeciwieństwie do "Miasta szaleńców i świętych" mamy tu do czynienia z bardziej tradycyjną formą opowieści, która mimo zaburzeń chronologii i narracji w często polemicznym dwugłosie, ma swój wstęp, swoje rozwinięcie i zakończenie), bardziej wciągająca fabularnie (zwłaszcza w drugiej połowie) i "okraszona" licznymi nawiązaniami do "Miasta..." (znani bohaterowie pojawiają się w dalszym, lub bliższym tle, znane wydarzenia poznajemy z nowej, często zaskakującej perspektywy). Wszystko to sprawiło, że po raz kolejny dałem się porwać VanderMeerowi w tą oniryczną podróż do Ambergis. Chociaż, trzeba dodać, do najłatwiejszych ta wycieczka nie należała.
I jeszcze drobna uwaga: uważam, że "Shriek: Posłowie", można czytać bez znajomości "Miasta szaleńców i świętych", a kto wie, czy nawet nie lepszym zabiegiem byłoby zacząć właśnie od drugiej książki? Tego jednak, niestety, już się nie dowiem...
July 11, 2016
After having read the Southern trilogy, I am on a quest to read all of Jeff VanderMeer's novels. I had read a short story based in Ambergris before but had not cared that much for it, and the more I read his novels, the more clear it seems to me why I love them but I'm not (for now) going to read his short stories.
VanderMeer's novels are set in such weird worlds that they require an immense suspension of disbelief on the readers side, BUT his characters are so good, that you'll find yourself believing in the conspiracies of subterranean mushroom civilization. However, this requires enough length to allow for character development, which is just not possible in a short story, where you are just left with plain weirdness.
This book contains excellent imagery and great storytelling, but above all, great character development. Even secondary characters were complex and well developed, especially the religious head of Duncan's school. The sibling relationship also made for great reading. I am an only child, which is not to say that I am a spoiled brat, but for instance I am someone with great capacity to happily spend time on my own. Nevertheless, sometimes I get a glimpse of a good sibling relationship such as that between the narrator and protagonist in Shriek and I wonder what it must be like to have this kind of relationship.
VanderMeer's novels are set in such weird worlds that they require an immense suspension of disbelief on the readers side, BUT his characters are so good, that you'll find yourself believing in the conspiracies of subterranean mushroom civilization. However, this requires enough length to allow for character development, which is just not possible in a short story, where you are just left with plain weirdness.
This book contains excellent imagery and great storytelling, but above all, great character development. Even secondary characters were complex and well developed, especially the religious head of Duncan's school. The sibling relationship also made for great reading. I am an only child, which is not to say that I am a spoiled brat, but for instance I am someone with great capacity to happily spend time on my own. Nevertheless, sometimes I get a glimpse of a good sibling relationship such as that between the narrator and protagonist in Shriek and I wonder what it must be like to have this kind of relationship.
October 20, 2020
One can never be sure, when reading the second book in a "series," whether it's going to work or not.
This did. Enough to tempt me back into the City of Saints and Madmen at some point. It's rich, gothic and musty, the kind of book that feels both dreamlike and faintly feverish. It's very reminiscent of Mervyn Peake, cold and grey and dank, even when big bright exciting things are happening.
Janice Shriek, our primary narrator? She's...occasionally frustrating as she spins out the story, even with her brother's glosses added in to the telling. This isn't a narrative that carries you forward in a great torrent, the pages sweeping you along. There are digressions upon digressions, moments of self pity, points of indulgent turn of phrase. It feels, by structure and intent, a little more like wading through a bog in early winter.
I don't say that as a negative. This isn't a book that I could devour, though, meaning it was the work of many nights to read it.
A three point eight.
This did. Enough to tempt me back into the City of Saints and Madmen at some point. It's rich, gothic and musty, the kind of book that feels both dreamlike and faintly feverish. It's very reminiscent of Mervyn Peake, cold and grey and dank, even when big bright exciting things are happening.
Janice Shriek, our primary narrator? She's...occasionally frustrating as she spins out the story, even with her brother's glosses added in to the telling. This isn't a narrative that carries you forward in a great torrent, the pages sweeping you along. There are digressions upon digressions, moments of self pity, points of indulgent turn of phrase. It feels, by structure and intent, a little more like wading through a bog in early winter.
I don't say that as a negative. This isn't a book that I could devour, though, meaning it was the work of many nights to read it.
A three point eight.
August 6, 2024
I don't know why exactly, but I just didn't feel it with this one. All the elements were there, all the players, and yet I didn't feel engrossed in the story.
There were several scenes and passages that made me sit up and pay attention, but they were unfortunately few and far apart. Perhaps 'City of Saints and Madmen' set the bar too high? Perhaps I just don't care for Vandermeer's novels as much as his short fiction? Either way, I WILL be continuing the Ambergris "trilogy" by reading 'Finch' in the foreseeable future. Perhaps that will once again grab me by the collar, throw a handful of spores in my face, and shove me back into the stony gutter of Albumuth Boulevard, ready to explore the city once again.
There were several scenes and passages that made me sit up and pay attention, but they were unfortunately few and far apart. Perhaps 'City of Saints and Madmen' set the bar too high? Perhaps I just don't care for Vandermeer's novels as much as his short fiction? Either way, I WILL be continuing the Ambergris "trilogy" by reading 'Finch' in the foreseeable future. Perhaps that will once again grab me by the collar, throw a handful of spores in my face, and shove me back into the stony gutter of Albumuth Boulevard, ready to explore the city once again.
February 6, 2011
3.5 stars. I felt the writing style and format were 5 stars, truly fabulous. Vandermeer writes with originality, flair, and is not afraid to be unique. This was a tough read for me, I found it difficult to make it through many parts of it. It is a true testament to how great Vandermeer can make things so exceptional that I was ablebto push through the slow, stagnate parts that left me wanting. Being that this is an Afterword, much of the book rambles on and stops the story line from moving forward. I absolutely loved all of Duncans wise cracks, rebuttals, and story filler. Ambergris is well imagined and a place that I wish that I could see. I will read on in this series but it does seem to be work at times.
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