Who Would Like This Book:
Dive into the haunting, inventive city of Ambergris, where the lines between biography, history, and dark fantasy blur. If you love immersive worldbuilding, unreliable narrators, experimental storytelling formats, and weird, atmospheric fantasy with literary depth, Shriek: An Afterword is your jam. Fans of China Miéville or those who enjoyed City of Saints and Madmen will find plenty to savor here: crumbling cities, fungal mysteries, sibling rivalry, and a mesmerizingly surreal sense of place.
Who May Not Like This Book:
This book can feel dense, meandering, and meta to the point of confusion. If you prefer tightly plotted stories, straightforward narration, or don’t enjoy digressions and fractured timelines, you may find it tedious or frustrating. Some readers found the pacing slow, the narrative repetitive, and struggled to connect with unlikeable characters. If you haven't read City of Saints and Madmen first, you might feel lost.
About:
"Shriek: An Afterword" by Jeff VanderMeer is a complex and engrossing story set in the imaginative city of Ambergris, revolving around the lives of siblings Janice and Duncan Shriek. The narrative delves into themes of love, loss, art, war, and madness, all intertwined with the mysterious and menacing presence of the gray caps, a fungus-loving race driven underground by the city's early settlers. The story unfolds through a series of memoirs, commentaries, and revisions, offering multiple perspectives on the events and characters, creating a darkly humorous and macabre tale of a civilization in decline.
The writing style of the book is described as achingly weird and beautiful, with prose that is dense and immersive, allowing the setting of Ambergris to become a character in its own right. VanderMeer's narrative weaves together elements of fantasy, science fiction, and steampunk, creating a multidimensional world filled with weirdness and intrigue. The story is rich in detail, exploring the complexities of the sibling relationship, the city's history, and the power dynamics between different factions, all while maintaining a sense of mystery and suspense throughout.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
The book contains mature themes including existential dread, substance abuse, body horror related to fungal elements, sibling dysfunction, and violence.
From The Publisher:
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-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 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.
After reading this introduction to the Family Shriek-part academic treatise, part tell-all biography-you'll never look at history in quite the same way.
Ratings (9)
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Reader Stats (16):
Read It (9) | |
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Not Interested (1) |
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Shriek: An Afterword?
About the Author:
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Acceptance, and Authority), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo.
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