Shriek: An Afterword was published by Tor Books in 2006, and it is VanderMeer’s most emotionally complex Ambergris work — a novel structured as a memoir by Janice Shriek (a gallery owner and failed historian) about her brother Duncan Shriek (a disgraced historian obsessed with the gray caps), with Duncan’s annotations contradicting, supplementing, and undermining Janice’s narrative throughout.
The dual-narrator structure allows VanderMeer to explore the unreliability of memory and the impossibility of objective history — themes particularly relevant to a city whose past is literally buried beneath its streets. Janice and Duncan remember the same events differently; their annotations of each other’s accounts reveal not objective truth but the specific distortions that love, resentment, and self-deception introduce into any attempt to tell the truth about another person.
Duncan’s obsession with the gray caps — his attempts to understand what they are, what they want, and what the fungal growths that increasingly cover Ambergris signify — drives the novel’s plot. His research takes him underground, into the gray caps’ domain, and what he finds there (or claims to find) changes him in ways that Janice can observe but not comprehend. The novel’s horror lies in this incomprehension: the gray caps’ purposes are genuinely alien, beyond the reach of human understanding, and Duncan’s attempt to bridge the gap costs him his sanity and eventually his humanity.
Collecting Shriek: An Afterword
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2006): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $5–$12