In Shriek: An Afterword, VanderMeer avoids this pitfall only to be caught in another.

A story returning to Ambergris is fraught with delight and peril, delight in once again traveling with VanderMeer along its shadowy paths, and peril in staying too long, seeing too much, such that the romance of the exotic and the mysterious fades with familiarity. City of Saints and Madman exemplifies the allure of fantasy, leading the reader on a journey of discovery that amazes as it reveals. The Hoegbotton Guide details the early history of Ambergris and its citizens’ relations with their predecessors, the mysterious mushroom-like people known as the gray caps. When the same question is asked by Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Shriek: An Afterword, the answer is “devotees of fantastic literature, and with much anticipation.” The Hoegbotton Guide is the second piece in the collection that introduced readers to Ambergris, VanderMeer’s acclaimed City of Saints and Madmen. Why would anyone be interested in a self-indulgent autobiography of a has-been purporting to be the biography of another has-been, let alone one appended to a tourist pamphlet? Duncan is a once prominent historian who has also disappeared into obscurity, both figuratively and literally.

When asked by the narrator of Shriek: An Afterword, Janice Shriek, once a mogul of the city of Ambergris’s “New Art” movement, now bitter and forgotten, the answer would seem to be “no one.” Her star having fallen years earlier, Janice is writing an afterword to The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris, a tourist pamphlet written by her brother Duncan Shriek. The answers to this question vary depending upon the person asking it. “Sometimes – only sometimes – I wonder who I am writing this account for.

Jeff vandermeer shriek