I'm having a hard time expressing how amazing this novel is. It has so many different levels and types of goodness, it's kind of hard to break it down, but I'll try.

This is Jeff Vandermeer's first novel, after several short story/novella collections. It is basically a "sequel" to a novella in City of Saints and Madmen. That novella is a tourist's guide to the history of Ambergris, the setting of the story collection and the novel. It is written by historian Duncan Shriek and is filled with all sorts of footnotes, attacks on other scholars, and paranoid references to the "gray caps".

Shriek is written by Duncan's sister Janice, and purports to be his biography. It is really a biography of both Duncan Janice, and goes into much more detail about Duncan's research into the gray caps. The gray caps are basically the central mystery of the Ambergris setting, and this book gives us a bit more information on what they are and what they want, though it's still in the form of tantalizing hints.

The story is gripping just from the curiosity that keeps you wanting to find out more about the gray caps. But that's just one small part of the overall novel. It's also the story of the great love affair of Duncan's life, the story of Shriek family, mostly Janice and Duncan, and also the story of the recent history of Ambergris.

The novel interweaves these different elements so seamlessly it's simply awe-inspiring. I'm getting chills down my back just thinking about how well done this is.

But wait, there's more! This book also features one of my favorite devices, an unreliable narrator. The book is mostly in first-person from Janice Shriek's viewpoint, and it's clear that at the time of writing she is not in the best of mental health. There are strange jumps backwards and forwards in time, bizarre digressions, and things that we often find out are outright untruths.

But wait, there's still more! The novel also introduces Duncan's voice. The conceipt is that Janice wrote the "afterword", then disappeared. Soon after, it was found by Duncan, who adds his own annotations. For extra fun, Janice has also included excerpts from Duncan's own journals. So we get two Duncan voices, one the voice of the past in the form of the journal entries, and the other the present Duncan in the form of annotations.

Duncan not only fills in details or corrects outright mistakes in the narrative, he also takes it on himself to criticize his sister's writing style, and it often reads like notes from an editor.

The book also has a great variety of tones, from deeply dark and serious emotionally gripping passages, to horror and mystery, to moments of great humor, the latter most often found in Duncan's annotations.

Shriek is really an amazing achievement. I knew Vandermeer was talented when I read his earlier works, but this novel brings him to a whole new level. I'd put him up there with some of my other true favorites, like Gene Wolfe and Ursula K. LeGuin. This novel is the work of someone who has mastered both art and craft. He combines great inventiveness with real emotion and depth of characterization.

If you haven't read City of Saints and Madmen I'd recommend you read that first, as it gives a lot of background on various characters in this novel, as well as background on the city of Ambergris and the world in which it lives.

I'm looking forward to re-reading that collection, since I this novel really illuminates so much of what is just hinted at in the earlier stories.

This novel took Vandermeer eight years to write, let's hope the next one doesn't take quite as long.