Shriek: An Afterword

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

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

Widely regarded as one of the world's best fantasists, bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer's book-length fiction has been translated into fourteen languages, while his short fiction has appeared in several year's best anthologies and short-listed for Best American Short Stories. His most recent books have made the year's best lists of Publishers Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Weekly. He is also the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. A two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, VanderMeer has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In addition to his writing, VanderMeer has edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the critically acclaimed Leviathan fiction anthology series and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. He now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann.

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 City of Saints & Madmen--Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies.

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

Like some delicious, delirious mashup of H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake and L. Frank Baum, but with his own verbal dexterity and perverse ingenuity, VanderMeer's book is a dual autobiography . . . Looping back and forth through time, built of small intimate moments and large societal set-pieces (the wartime opera performance is positively Pynchonesque), this novel never allows its elaborate literary apparatus to muffle its affecting narrative about love, art, sibling rivalry, commerce, history and some really nasty 'shrooms.--Paul Di Filippo, Washington Post

Jeff VanderMeer's latest is as complicated, impressive and exasperating as anything he has written . . . VanderMeer makes no compromises with his readers, but Shriek is twisted, darkly funny and ultimately rewarding.--Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Guardian (U.K.)

With literary stylings, a complex, riveting plot, and ideas that lesser writers could not imagine, Shriek: An Afterword further establishes Jeff VanderMeer as the finest fantasist of his generation.--The Austin Chronicle

It is, in short, exactly the sort of book which ought to be in contention for major literary prizes--except that it is set in an imaginary city beset by malevolent fungus, and non-genre award panels tend to get scared of such books. In this case, such fears are misplaced; Shriek is a fantastic book, and a fantastical one. For lovers of the uncomfortable and slightly unhealthy work of a Will Self, or the fractured cityscapes of M. John Harrison, Shriek is a delight.--Birmingham Post

Five stars A stunning and very different fantasy novel from an author who should be turning heads in the 'serious' literary world. VanderMeer concerns himself with the life of a notorious historian whose investigations into a subterranean race known as 'grey caps' may hold the key to an ancient mystery. In reality, however, the book cleverly plays with the ways in which an author can manipulate an audience. But it's far less heavy and more entertaining than that makes it sound.--BBC Focus magazine

VanderMeer's fantasy vision is a hallucinatory incantation not just of mushrooms but also of literature . . . It's not clear what obsesses Jeff VanderMeer more, mushrooms or books. Both appear on almost every page of his new novel, in which disgraced historian Duncan Shriek seeks to uncover the mystery of a race of mushroom people with mysterious fungal plans, who lurk below the surface of the moss-covered city of Ambergris. VanderMeer conjures a neo-Victorian city which is as much a character as anyone in the novel. It provides a perfectly decadent setting for its melancholic inhabitants, who are made more real, and sadder, by the impossible strangeness of their home.--Peter Bebergal, The Believer magazine

VanderMeer explores brilliantly, penetratingly, the frail, evanescent intersection of human understanding and historical actuality . . . In the telling, Shriek: An Afterword is an exceptional novel, a tapestry of fine writing, deep psychological insight, and acute narrative excitement. Never forget the excitement: quests after cryptic clues in antique manuscripts; forays into the alien territories below ground; heartbreak and breakdown; the War of the Houses, with one publishing company assailing the other with murderous fungal mines and bombs; an opera performance that becomes a literal, three-cornered battlefield; the gray caps surfacing in massacre; injuries, insults, the inexplicable and the horrifying. And enigmas at the end. Shriek: An Afterword is a dark fantasy of tremendous distinction, and more is to come, as the story of Ambergris is still far from concluded.--Nick Gevers, Locus

Maybe it's because Jeff VanderMeer looks so normal when you see him at cons or talking panels that his fiction comes as such a huge shock. Is this fetid hothouse world really the subconscious of that smartly dressed American writer? . . . A typical VanderMeer novel: clever, intense, and multi-layered. Four stars.--SFX

Ambergris, city of artists and powerful merchant clans, is corrupt, violent, beautiful, and edgy. Beneath its fungi-scented brick and wooden buildings are huge caves, home to remnants of the indigenous inhabitants, the mysterious Gray Caps. Brutally slaughtered when Ambergris was founded, they have since lived underground, obscure and mostly ignored. Duncan and Janice come to the city after the sudden death of their beloved father, a double loss because their mother subsequently withdraws into indifference. Duncan becomes a brilliant historian, obsessed with the Gray Caps. Janice establishes an Art Gallery that is wildly successful until she embraces orgies of drugs, alcohol, and casual sex. Duncan's promising career also collapses as his books increasingly challenge accepted religious dogmas. Turning to teaching, he falls madly in love with a student who violently rejects him. When war erupts in Ambergris, the Gray Caps inexplicably enter the fray, demonstrating deadly power before mysteriously withdrawing. Janice feverishly writes Duncan's biography before both of them disappear. Subsequently Ambergris begins to experience bizarre metamorphic 'Shifts' that partly rehabilitate Duncan's reputation . . . VanderMeer is not an author to dismiss.--VOYA

An enthralling book which takes you into the vivid and superbly-realized world of Ambergris. It is in turn unsettling, moving and thrilling--with passages of writing that can be dryly funny on one page . . . and beautiful on the next.--Clare Dudman, author of 98 Reasons for Being

There's a madness in Jeff VanderMeer's literary eye, and I would be a liar if I didn't admit it seems intimately familiar. VanderMeer envisions an outlaw literature of shrieks and shouts and a screaming across the sky, worth a thousand polite and respectable mutterings. I, for one, am listening.--Steve Erickson, author of Our Ecstatic Days and editor of Black Clock

Political, philosophical, many-textured, and multi-layered, the history of fantasy's most intriguing city, Ambergris, is brought vividly to life. The perfect balance of conscientious invention and subtle, comic irony. VanderMeer fearlessly walks a tightrope to deliver an enthralling read.--Jeff Ford, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Girl in the Glass

Jeff VanderMeer is a realist of the surreal, a chronicler and bibliographer of the impossible city of Ambergris, which could only have been constructed in a collaborative dream between Charles Dickens and E.T.A Hoffman. It is a city of Dickensian scope and intricacy whose inhabitants are the lovers, the artists, the grotesques of German romanticism, and I sometimes suspect that VanderMeer himself is a fragment of the same dream. Shriek is a beautiful and maddening, and beautifully maddening, book. Go to Amberg

Praise for "Shriek: An Afterword"

"Here is a desert island book, a tale you can lose yourself in for days, a novel of character in which the setting--the magnificently gritty city-state named Ambergris--proves as the light fails to be the finest character of all."

--Gene Wolfe

"There's a madness in Jeff VanderMeer's literary eye, and I would be a liar if I didn't admit it seems intimately familiar. VanderMeer envisions an outlaw literature of shrieks and shouts and a screaming across the sky, worth a thousand polite and respectable mutterings. I, for one, am listening."

--Steve Erickson

"An enthralling book which takes you into the vivid and superbly-realised world of Ambergris. It is in turn unsettling, moving and thrilling--with passages of writing that can be dryly funny on one page . . . and beautiful on the next."

--Clare Dudman

"Jeff VanderMeer is an extraordinary writer. His vision of Ambergris is passionate, beautiful, complex, terrifying. What is remarkable about "Shriek: An Afterword" is the way it combines such surreal imagery with intensely human feeling. He writes about real people--about the real world."

--Tamar Yellin

Praise for "City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris"

"Somewhere at the intersection of pulp and Surrealism, drawing on the very best of both traditions, is Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris. Unsettling, erudite, dark, shot through with unexpected humour, the stories engross and challenge endlessly. Ambergris is one of my favourite haunts in fiction."

--China Mieville on "City ofSaints and Madmen"""

"A rare treasure, to be tasted with both relish and respect. It is the work of an original. It's what you've been looking for."

--Michael Moorcock

"Beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work... connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding."

--"Publisher's Weekly "(starred review)""

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Praise for Jeff VanderMeer

""Secret Life," an utter dazzlement, demonstrates one of this literary era's defining truths, that in the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression. In VanderMeer's hands, it is also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly, imaginative."

--Peter Straub

""Veniss Underground" is full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders ... it marks VanderMeer as a novelist to be reckoned with."

--"San Francisco"" Chronicle"