Shriek: An Afterword

“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 Ambergris: lose yourself among its labyrinthine streets and the fabulous, deadly secrets that lie beneath them.”—Theodora Goss, author of In the Forest of Forgetting

“Jeff VanderMeer's work opens a trapdoor in the world we think we know, into a realm as unforgettable and compelling as an opium dream, and as seductive. Shriek: An Afterword is a sinister and bewitching tour-de-force.”—Elizabeth Hand, bestselling author of Mortal Love

“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, author of The Wizard

“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, author of The Genizah at the House of Shepher

“The first authentic 21st Century fantastical writing. A masterpiece by any standard.”—Zoran Živkovic, author of Hidden Camera

“World Fantasy Award winner VanderMeer introduced Ambergris in City of Saints & Madmen, five intertwined tales set in the paradoxically disturbing and wondrous urban domain. Framed as an elaborate afterword to The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, this novel-within-a-novel is narrated by the sister of the guide's author, famed Ambergris historian Duncan Shriek, who is also the obsessed victim of a failed love affair. With frequent sardonic asides (in brackets) by Duncan himself, the story line ambles through the Shriek clan's scandal-ridden past while unearthing the minutiae of Ambergris' haunted, eccentric history. Here we meet the elusive, subterranean gray caps, who yearn to transform the city with a mushroom-based technology. Ritualistic monks rub elbows with the mercantile heirs of the city's embattled founding fathers. The result is a compulsively readable collection of odd anecdotes, character studies, and inventive, pseudohistorical detours that place Ambergris on the literary map beside both Gotham City and the Emerald City as one of the most memorable metropolises in speculative fiction.”—Carl Hays, Booklist

“World Fantasy Award–winner VanderMeer makes a triumphant return to Ambergris, the fungus-shrouded metropolis he first chronicled in City of Saints and Madmen (2001), in this masterful if difficult fantasy novel. Janice Shriek, a failed gallery owner and journalist, has ostensibly created an afterword to The Early History of Ambergris by her brother, Duncan Shriek, a talented if unconventional historian who finds his career in shambles after his controversial theories concerning Ambergris's founding and the genocide perpetrated against its nonhuman inhabitants gain public disfavor. Worse yet, he's caught in a love affair with one of his students, Mary Sabon. A tragic, brooding figure, Duncan makes repeated journeys underground, into the world of the alien gray caps, and is eventually transformed into something both wonderful and inhuman. Ambergris is a city of magnificent, decaying architecture and multiple baroque religions, where publishers fight wars for control of civilization and authors of obscure historical texts can be major bestsellers at the Borges Bookstore. Fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Angela Carter and Borges will be well rewarded.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)