Review: Shriek: An Afterword
I spent a chunk of the last year studying “urban fantasy,” an umbrella term for speculative fiction that takes fantasy out of the Misty Mountains and brings it back to Minas Tirith. Urban fantasy narrows the scope of a journey, such that a hero’s quest can encompass the geographical distance of a few city blocks without losing any of the emotional resonance or character growth from something more traditional. A show/movie like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” represents one approach to urban fantasy. There’s a huge audience of readers who enjoy elements of the paranormal peppered into everyday contexts. It offers a healthy mixture of the familiar and the unusual, a crossing of borders. A sense of revelation not unlike the first time you notice the raisins lurking in your bran.
Jeff VanderMeer takes the other approach, and the one I like best: building the city from scratch. He’s written three books about the fictional city of Ambergris, which was built over the ruins of a fungal civilization. This isn’t the Mushroom Kingdom you remember from Super Mario. This is a place where spores can kill you, where the “gray caps” promise to rise again from their underground lair, and where humans bicker too much to regard the silent invasion of fungus back into their world.
The first book, City of Saints and Madmen, is a puzzle box of point of views. Everyone has a different experience of Ambergris and what it takes to live there. Shriek centers around the siblings Duncan and Janice, both of whom are deeply troubled and find divergent ways of self-healing. Janice loses herself in Ambergris’ high society, while Duncan goes underground and loses himself in the fungal society. As a result, readers get to experience both sides of the city, its differences and its intersections. They get an accurate (and often violent) crash course in Ambergris living.
Shriek is structured in a fashion that makes any lover of experimental narratives smile. The book itself is Janice’s manuscript, seeking to explain some of the events of her life leading up to a single pivotal moment. She keeps getting closer to that moment and circling away, “starting over,” using a wide orbit to give the readers all of the necessary emotional context to take that moment in for what it’s worth (and let me tell you, it’s worth it). At some point in the “book’s” history, Duncan found the manuscript and started editing, pointing out Janice’s inconsistencies and letting his own narrative thread continue as an undercurrent. By that curious technique, the book reflects as a map of the city. The goings-on above ground, and the suggestion of what’s happening below. We’ve seen this before, and it works.
Jeff really crafted a gem in Shriek. This book is an emotional vice, it’s hilarious, and at a couple of points it even scared the hell out of me. I cannot emphasize that enough. I was reduced to trembling psychosis over mushrooms. That much alone can tell you that Shriek is doing all of the right things in the right ways. Read it.
