Shriek (Ambergris)

by Jeff VanderMeer

[empressbrooke]

I find myself thinking about Shriek in the same way I thought about its predecessor, [b:City of Saints and Madmen|230852|City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1)|Jeff VanderMeer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390260432s/230852.jpg|522014]. In other words, I'm not sure quite what to think about it. It has all the things that made City good: lots of atmosphere, a city so well constructed and populated that it feels like I was immersed in it, the feeling that this place existed before VanderMeer put his pen to paper. However, like City, Shriek doesn't really work well as a whole. Despite the richness of the setting, which is what motivated me to give is three stars, the story itself just feels empty.

The narrator is Janice Shriek, an art gallery owner who is writing something of a memoir about her and her brother Duncan, a controversial historian. Duncan often inserts his own thoughts about what his sister has written, the concept being that he came across her manuscript after she was done and wrote his comments in the margins. VanderMeer's comments at the end of the book say that he spent 7 years writing this book, and in all honesty, I'm not sure what he spent those 7 years doing. I didn't end the book feeling like I'd started in one place and ended further down the path. Substantively, there's just not much there.

I think that what might be holding VanderMeer back is wanting to keep things mysterious. Of course, it's usually good to hold things back and not spell everything out for the reader, but in this case, I think that there are so many secrets and questions about the history of the city of Ambergris that refusing to answer any prevents any true storytelling.