Shriek
An Afterword
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Janice Shriek, ex-society figure, narrates this tale with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions. We follow the adventures of her brother Duncan, an historian obsessed with a doomed love affair, and learn of a secret that may kill or transform him. We witness a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever. And we're introduced to the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies, who've been waiting underground for their chance to mould the future of the city.
Shriek: An Afterword is an epic yet personal look at life, love and death in the vividly imagined city of Ambergris. And, through this tumultuous story of the family Shriek, the author shows his genius at capturing and displaying the bizarre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
