PW REVIEW OF SHRIEK

After a very fun if activity-packed stint at Odyssey and reading at Toadstool Book Shop, among other adventures, we're now in Manchester, New Hampshire, hoping to get home today--our flight yesterday was canceled.

More blog entries soon, but in the meantime, I'm pleased to report that Shriek has gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly and been featured in the table of contents. I've cut some of the review only because it contains small spoilers.

World Fantasy Award-winner VanderMeer makes a triumphant return to Ambergris, the fungus-shrouded metropolis he first chronicled inCity of Saints and Madmen (2001), in this masterful if difficult fantasy novel. Janice Shriek, a failed gallery owner and journalist, has ostensibly created an afterword to The Early History of Ambergris by her brother, Duncan Shriek, a talented if unconventional historian who finds his career in shambles after his controversial theories concerning Ambergris's founding and the genocide perpetrated against its nonhuman inhabitants gain public disfavor...A tragic, brooding figure, Duncan makes repeated journeys underground, into the world of the alien gray caps, and is eventually transformed... Ambergris is a city of magnificent, decaying architecture and multiple baroque religions, where publishers fight wars for control of civilization and authors of obscure historical texts can be major bestsellers at the Borges Bookstore. Fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Angela Carter and Borges will be well rewarded.(Aug.)