Read Online Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer - Free Book Online
Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
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career as a serious historian—the sort of career our father would have died for—he should have suppressed the book and moved on to a new project. Samuel Hoegbotton, contributing to the disaster, ordered the printing of a banner across the top of the book {almost, but not quite, obscuring my name} that proclaimed: “At Last! The Truth! About the Gray Caps! All Secrets! Revealed!”
I bought the book as soon as it came out, not trusting Duncan to send me a copy. {I would have, if you’d asked.} It disappointed me for contradictory reasons: because it showed little of the scholarly care displayed by On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, and because it never mentioned, even once, Duncan’s underground journey. I had already accepted the irritation of waiting to read about the trip along with everyone else. This I could have tolerated, even though it indicated a lack of trust. But not to mention it at all? It was too much. {I did mention Zamilon, though. Wasn’t that enough? To start with?}
The book did not “reveal” all secrets. It obscured them. Duncan tantalized readers with incredible images he claimed had come from ancient books, the existence of which most scholars discounted. Mile-high caverns. Draperies of fungi that “undulated in time to a music conveyed at too high a pitch for the human ear.” Mushrooms that bleated and whined and “talked after a fashion, in the language of spores.” {Yes, perhaps I obscured some deeper truths, but nothing was made up.}
In typical Duncanesque prose, it tried with almost superhuman effort to hide the paucity of its insight:
Although the inquisitive reader may wish for further extrapolation regarding this aspect of Tonsure’s journal, such extrapolation would be so speculative as to provide a poor gruel of a meal indeed, even for the layperson. Some mysteries are unsolvable.
{One part fear, I suppose. One part truth. Some mysteries are unsolvable. Just when you unearth the answer, you discover another question.}
A beautiful sword, but blunt, the book relied on quotations from “unnamed sources” for the bulk of its more exotic findings. Although claiming to know the truth about the gray caps, Duncan instead spent most of the book combining a history of fungi with historical suppositions that made me laugh:
Could it be that the rash of suicides and murders in the Kalif’s Court fifty years before the Silence were the result of emanations from a huge fungus that lay under the earth in those parts? Might much of the supposed “courtly intrigues” of the period actually have more to do with fruiting bodies? Might this also reveal the source of the aggression behind so-called “bad Festivals” in Ambergris?
The book, in short, violated most rules of historical accuracy and objective evidence. Duncan mentioned that he had journeyed to examine the page of Tonsure’s journal, but he gave no specifics of location or content. Certainly nothing like the detail and “local color” provided by his own journal. {I admit Cinsorium was hardly my finest hour, although I had my reasons for writing it at the time. My thoughts turned to Tonsure and his encryptions. My need for encryption was not as urgent as his, or as profoundly solitary, but I still felt a certain danger. Not just from the gray caps, but from those who might read the unexpurgated truth and…reject it. And reject it violently. Couldn’t I, I reasoned—falsely—allude to and suggest that truth so that, perhaps, even if in just a thousand minds, my suspicions might harden into certainty? It is a question I wrestled with even later, working with James Lacond, although by then I had come to realize that the best I could hope for was a hardening certainty in a mere handful of souls.}
The most daring idea in Cinsorium was the theory that Tonsure had rewritten the journal after completing it, which alienated dozens of influential scholars {and their followers, don’t forget} who had based hundreds of books
I bought the book as soon as it came out, not trusting Duncan to send me a copy. {I would have, if you’d asked.} It disappointed me for contradictory reasons: because it showed little of the scholarly care displayed by On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, and because it never mentioned, even once, Duncan’s underground journey. I had already accepted the irritation of waiting to read about the trip along with everyone else. This I could have tolerated, even though it indicated a lack of trust. But not to mention it at all? It was too much. {I did mention Zamilon, though. Wasn’t that enough? To start with?}
The book did not “reveal” all secrets. It obscured them. Duncan tantalized readers with incredible images he claimed had come from ancient books, the existence of which most scholars discounted. Mile-high caverns. Draperies of fungi that “undulated in time to a music conveyed at too high a pitch for the human ear.” Mushrooms that bleated and whined and “talked after a fashion, in the language of spores.” {Yes, perhaps I obscured some deeper truths, but nothing was made up.}
In typical Duncanesque prose, it tried with almost superhuman effort to hide the paucity of its insight:
Although the inquisitive reader may wish for further extrapolation regarding this aspect of Tonsure’s journal, such extrapolation would be so speculative as to provide a poor gruel of a meal indeed, even for the layperson. Some mysteries are unsolvable.
{One part fear, I suppose. One part truth. Some mysteries are unsolvable. Just when you unearth the answer, you discover another question.}
A beautiful sword, but blunt, the book relied on quotations from “unnamed sources” for the bulk of its more exotic findings. Although claiming to know the truth about the gray caps, Duncan instead spent most of the book combining a history of fungi with historical suppositions that made me laugh:
Could it be that the rash of suicides and murders in the Kalif’s Court fifty years before the Silence were the result of emanations from a huge fungus that lay under the earth in those parts? Might much of the supposed “courtly intrigues” of the period actually have more to do with fruiting bodies? Might this also reveal the source of the aggression behind so-called “bad Festivals” in Ambergris?
The book, in short, violated most rules of historical accuracy and objective evidence. Duncan mentioned that he had journeyed to examine the page of Tonsure’s journal, but he gave no specifics of location or content. Certainly nothing like the detail and “local color” provided by his own journal. {I admit Cinsorium was hardly my finest hour, although I had my reasons for writing it at the time. My thoughts turned to Tonsure and his encryptions. My need for encryption was not as urgent as his, or as profoundly solitary, but I still felt a certain danger. Not just from the gray caps, but from those who might read the unexpurgated truth and…reject it. And reject it violently. Couldn’t I, I reasoned—falsely—allude to and suggest that truth so that, perhaps, even if in just a thousand minds, my suspicions might harden into certainty? It is a question I wrestled with even later, working with James Lacond, although by then I had come to realize that the best I could hope for was a hardening certainty in a mere handful of souls.}
The most daring idea in Cinsorium was the theory that Tonsure had rewritten the journal after completing it, which alienated dozens of influential scholars {and their followers, don’t forget} who had based hundreds of books
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