#cool historian person! does living history stuff! excellent!

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 3 of 26

Title: Shriek: An Afterword (Ambergris #2) (2006)

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Genre/Tags: Weird, Memoir, Historical (like... in a fictional world lol), Horror, Fantasy, War, Mushroompunk (yeah), Postmodern, Female Protagonist, Disabled Protagonist, First Person, Unreliable Narrator.

Rating: 7/10

Date Began: 1/19/2020

Date Finished: 1/29/2020

Shriek: An Afterword is a pseudo-memoir by a woman named Janice Shriek about the troubled lives and relationships of her and her brother Duncan Shriek in the strange, fungus-riddled city of Ambergris. While Janice believes Duncan is dead, he's apparently found her manuscript and makes extensive edits and commentary throughout the story. (This is indicated in parenthetical sentences, like this one.) 

The closer I get to the end, the closer I get to the beginning. Memories waft up out of the ether, out of nothing. They attach themselves to me like the green light, like the fungi that continue to colonize my typewriter. I had to stop for a while -- my fingers ached and, even after all that I have seen, the fungi unnerved me. I spent the time flexing and unflexing my fingers, pacing back and forth. I also spent it going through a box of my father’s old papers -- nothing I haven’t read through a hundred times before... On top, Duncan had placed the dried-up starfish, its skeleton brittle with age. (I kept it there as a reminder to myself. After your letter to me -- which, while reading this account, I sometimes think was written by an entirely different side of your personality -- I wanted to remember that no matter how isolated I might feel, separated from others by secret knowledge, I was still connected. It didn’t help much, though -- it reminded me of how different I had become.) 

To qualify my rating, I have to be honest. This book is officially separated into two parts, and I found Part I -- which makes up about 60% of the novel -- pretty boring. On the other hand, Part II is brilliant, and everything coalesces beautifully in this second act. Is it worth it? I thought it was, but I understand anyone who tries and gives up. 

Even though Shriek is technically a standalone, I would strongly recommend you read City of Saints and Madmen (#1) first. Both Duncan and Janice are key characters in two of those stories (The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris and The Transformation of Martin Lake, respectively), and there are references and connections all over the place. I’m not sure if Shriek does a great job introducing Ambergris to new readers, so people starting here will be pretty lost without reading the first book.

Just to clear the air, I really liked this book... overall. As I said, the first half-or-so of the book was pretty rough, but the second half redeems it in a lot of ways, even justifying certain writing/plot decisions that didn’t gel with me at first. However “it gets good eventually” is not really an excuse for the rough first half. Hence the mediocre rating. I was close to giving this book a 6/10, but I found that I appreciated the first half much more by the time I got to the ending, so that bumped it up a little. Maybe I’ll enjoy this book more on a reread when I can see the patterns and know where they’re leading ahead of time. 

Before I dive into my issues with it, I’d like to discuss the strong points of this novel. 

At a base level, VanderMeer is a great writer. He has a mastery of the English language that always delights me when I read his stuff. So even when I struggled to like this story in the first half, his wordplay and prose were entertaining and thought-provoking. 

I loved the format. The story basically has two protagonists, since you see things from Janice’s point of view and then Duncan’s interpretations-- but it’s in a very postmodern way, not just a perspective switch like most novels do. Duncan’s commentary often brings much needed humor or heartbreak, depending on the situation. 

In particular, any scene in which Janice and Duncan interact directly is brilliant. Janice recalls a scene, but her memory is faulty (like anyone’s), so sometimes she forgets what they talked about, or interpreted an interaction in a certain way. Then Duncan dives in with his own commentary, supplying information Janice didn’t include or forgot, or correcting something she said, or offering an alternate interpretation... these scenes were fascinating to read and some of my favorite parts of the novel. 

There’s a lot of fun revelations and Easter eggs for people who read City of Saints and Madmen. In particular: 

My favorite story in the first book was The Cage, which is a work of fiction  within the universe of Ambergris by a man named Sirin. In particular there is a very creepy and distinct monster that plays a pivotal role in the story. However, since it’s technically fiction within fiction, that monster and the events didn’t really happen in canon... right? Imagine my surprise in this book when Janice encounters and describes a very similar monster. This struck me as odd, until I got to epilogue/afterword at the end... written by Sirin, and everything clicked. He got the idea for his “fictional” monster from Janice’s account in this story. He doesn’t state this outright, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. I loved that. It was like putting a puzzle together and it would have been so easy to miss. And there’s the extra horror that something like that really exists in this world. There was other stuff like this but this one stood out to me, and I’m sure there’s other things I missed. 

This mostly concerns the second half, but the war sequences and memories are horrific and brilliant. It's very World War II-esque with a unique twist to it (the awful fungal bio weapons one of the sides uses). In particular, the war is introduced with a chapter about a ceasefire opera staged in the broken city... without spoiling it, it’s an excellent and intriguing self-contained story. 

And the horror chapter about the Festival, which is conspicuously absent in the rest of the story? Just so goddamn good. VanderMeer strikes just the right chord with me when it comes to horror. It’s always fresh and intensely creepy. 

If you told me this during the first half, I wouldn’t believe you -- but I ended up loving the characters and finding most of their relationships fascinating. This is a heartbreaking story and it really hit home by the end. 

With that lofty praise, what’s my issue with Part I? The simplest way I can put it is that the struggles Duncan and Janice face are so mundane. They would maybe be interesting in a generic work of fiction, but here they felt out of place. For example, Janice’s arc concerns her rise to fame, which leads to success, which leads to lavish parties and orgies, which leads to excesses and a drug addiction, which leads to a suicide attempt, which leads to rehab, which leads to a diminished life of poverty. Yes, these can be interesting and harrowing problems in the right context, but the strongest point of these books is the setting, and there was nothing that tied these events to Ambergris. You could easily go through and change the character/place names and it wouldn’t seem off. 

Duncan is a little more interesting in this regard, because his is a story of obsession. In particular, he’s obsessed with the gray caps (strange humanoid mushroom creatures that haunt the pages of these books), and it takes over his life until he becomes totally discredited as a historian. But even he falls into this trap when he becomes a college professor and has an affair with one of his much younger students (Yikes! Though it is treated as creepy within the story, at least). That takes over most of his character’s emotional core from that point. 

Said student -- Mary Sabon -- is a core antagonist in the story. Janice in particular obsesses over her and her personal vendetta against her, and honestly even with the second part I was never really sold on this or cared about it all that much, so I was disappointed it took up so much of the story. 

All of this would be one thing, but there’s all sorts of tantalizing hints about more interesting things. The gray caps probably have some ulterior motive that no one knows! There’s this crazy eldritch Machine hidden underground! Duncan is sort of turning into a mushroom! But these are only teased before the story pivots back to something comparatively uninteresting. Rather than encouraging me with the cool foreshadowing, it just got grating because it meant there were more interesting events and stories going on that I didn’t get to see for some arbitrary reason. Janice also rambles and goes back and forth quite a bit. This is clearly intentional (after all, you learn in the end this is a mostly unedited draft -- at least in the fiction of the story), but even so, it can be hard to follow at times. 

Part II justifies a lot of this because these hints do pay off. You DO get to see a lot of the interesting stuff in detail at this later point of the story, and it’s not always what you expect. There’s overt and subtle dramatic irony and contrast between what characters go through in the first half versus the stranger, more profound traumas of the second half. You learn Janice is suffering from some severe PTSD and it explains a lot of the manic style in the first half. But again, is it worth 245-ish mediocre (to me) pages? I think that probably depends on the reader. I had a problem with it-- but clearly a lot of people don’t, based on reviews I’ve skimmed. Many put the book down and don’t finish it, but that’s true for any book. Hell, lots of people preferred the first half, so who knows. 

Ultimately, I’m glad I read this book. For me it really does come together in an amazing way toward the end, and I found myself really caring about Janice and Duncan. If you read City of Saints and Madmen and want more of the characters and the world, then definitely give this a try. But it is a pretty niche book as these things go, so I can’t recommend it to everyone. 

Anyway, I’ve come this far -- so I’m going to read Finch, the final (for now?) installment in this universe. 

[eiael-thinks]

IT: some thoughts by me

I just saw IT and I loved it even though I had some quibble with it. I just want to type my thoughts out really quickly. There will be spoilers for both the book and the movie, so I’ll throw it under a cut.

As I said, I loved it. They movie really captured the terror, humor, and pathos of the book. Over the course of the movie, I laughed out loud MANY times, I got choked up And even shed a tear, and I also hid my eyes at a couple of really fucking scary moments.

As someone who was 11 years old in 1989, I can definitely say they nailed what it was like to be a preteen at that time. the weird freedom to go where ever, roam all over town on your bike, get into it with other kids, sneak a cigarette, curse like a sailor, and be subject to pretty fucked up cruelties from other kids as well as adults. (As an aside, I read the book for the first time when I was 13 fwiw)

The actors who played the Losers Club were phenomenal, and Skaarsgard was freaking off the charts scary as Pennywise. The adults all hit that sweet spot of either menacing or so emotionally distant as to be negligible forces in the lives of the kids. The movie does an excellent job of capturing the sense of “Derry below.” The part of the town of Derry that’s only accessible to kids, and completely under the radar of adults. Some of this is shown to be bc of IT’s influence, but some of it really is just the way adults overlook groups of kids.

Henry Bowers was also very well portrayed, but a lot of the character development that happens in the book with him (i.e.: him slowly going from a vicious bully to someone who tried to kill the Losers to someone who does kill his father) is pretty compressed bc of they constraints of the story. Also oddly, they made his father a cop rather than a racist drunk, for really no reason I can discern other than that it will play into part 2 when they come back as adults.

The thing I missed the most was the ways the kids fought Pennywise, and the different solutions they try before finally going down into the tunnels. In the books, Bill steals his dad’s gun and he and Richie try to shoot it at the Neibolt Street house. IT attacks them as a werewolf, the gun does bubkes, but Richie (forever the joker) has itching powder, his bad impressions, and his jokes... and those DO harm IT. Of course, they focus on the werewolf thing and make silver slugs for Bev to shoot IT with a slingshot (FYI, they change up the kids’ strengths... I’ll come back to that), and the silver does hurt IT bc IT does have some of the weaknesses of whatever form IT’s in, but once again, it’s Richie’s jokes, Eddie shooting it with his inhaler, and (iirc) Bill yelling at IT without his stutter that make the big difference. To me, this part of the book is so important bc it fit’s in with that famous Neil Gaiman quote on the importance of fairy tales. It’s not that monsters exist, it’s that we can beat them... and the theme of these kids, these “Losers,” beating this primordial evil with the weapons forged from their “weaknesses” and the pure beliefs of childhood, which both make them such tasty prey for IT but also the most dangerous weapon to wield against IT, has always meant a lot to me.

In the movie, they jump straight into a physical confrontation with IT at the Neibolt Street house. There is no prep beforehand, no silver slugs, and the entire encounter is very different from the book. However, the whole sequence is scary as shit and the kids all get their moments to shine.

The biggest change the movie makes plot-wise is that the kids decide that IT’s lair is underneath that house, and they are right. This cuts out the whole sequence of them being chased into the sewers by Henry, as well as a lot of the parts of the story where they’re hanging out in the Barrens which are personal favs of mine. But here’s the BIGGEST spoiler (be warned)

~~~~~spoiler space~~~

Rather than gathering together and going off to fight the monster as a group for their own reasons, the movie has Pennywise kidnap Bev to get them down into the sewers. I assume this is to provide a narrative mirror to the adult plot, when Bill’s wife Audra gets kidnapped by Henry and brought to IT... BUT I was not happy with that decision. Bevvie is not a damsel in distress. OTOH, having her have a one on one with Pennywise gave the audience a hint of how they might handle the Deadlights and what IT really is, and that was really cool and well done. It also reinterpreted how “We all float down here” might look, and again, really fucking cool. Bringing Bevvie back from from the Deadlights is done very sweetly, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

For those wondering, the infamous escape sequence (aka tween orgy thing) DOES NOT happen THANK GOD (not that I was too worried it would, but still...)

Now to the thing that bugs me the most: the way they switched up the kids’ strengths. Bevvie is never the dead-eye gunslinger, and she never gets to run point on an attack (she does however save Bill and get in a great hit on IT). Stan’s neat-freakness is never really touched upon, and the scene where he helps Bevvie clean up the bathroom and directs the other kids how to create order from chaos is given to Bill. They also really downplay the amount of antisemitism he faces, which I think is a shame bc so much of the book parallels the mundane human evil that lurks in Derry alongside the more flamboyant supernatural stuff.

Speaking of not addressing social issues, the vast majority of the racism that Mike Hanlon and his family face, the hate crime that burned around 100 black people alive in the nightclub The Black Spot, and the constant torture of Mike by Henry bc of his race is almost completely absent. Again, I think the movie missed a chance to make the points about the evil humans do that King addresses so well in the novel. Also w/r/t Mike... he is no longer the historian of the group. Mike was always my fav character, bc as a kid he’s into history, and then as an adult becomes the librarian. The movie takes that away from him, and that pisses me off to no end. The black character is basically reduced to the muscle in a lot of the scenes, and that’s not cool.

Because the movie mostly does away with the Barrens as the main hang-out, Ben never gets to show his engineering prowess. Rather, he is the kid who knows the history bc he’s new in town and hangs out in the library where he puts together Derry’s fucked up history. Again, I’m disappointed they took the history nerdery away from the black character, and the building/physical labor away from the fat kid.

Oh and FYI, even though they downplayed the racism and antisemitism and ableism the boys faced, boy howdy do they lean into the slut-shaming Bevvie faces.

All that being said, the movie does an excellent job with each of the kids. They all have compelling stories and set-pieces dedicated to their encounters with IT and how that reflects their individual fears and strengths. While I might have made different choices with how to condense the story, I was still very impressed.

This review might read more negative than I mean it to. I really enjoyed it, I will almost definitely see it again, and I am super excited for the adult’s chapter. But I also needed to get some of this off my chest... so I hope you enjoyed the word vomit.

TL;DR: the movie is AWESOME. it dropped the ball in a couple of ways, but it’s still well worth the price of admission.