Shriek: An Afterword

Oddly, it made me love him for being brave, and it almost made me cry as well. I knew that he held our father in his head as he wrote, running toward him across the summer grass. That, I could respect. But by not revealing all, he became lost in the land between, where lies always sound like lies, and so does the truth. He could not protect the gray caps and satisfy serious readers without betraying both groups. {The gray caps needed no protection, only the readers. Janice, you may now be beyond protection, but there are still things that can be done for those aboveground.}

In part due to these defects, Cinsorium had a peculiar publication history. It became an instant bestseller when the Kalif’s Minister of Literature, rather than ban the book, had his operatives buy all available copies and ship them off to the Court. Readers in the South bought most of the second printings, the Kalif distracted by warfare with the Skamoo on his northern border. However, despite the sale of more than fifty thousand copies, Hoegbotton refused to go to a third printing.

Certainly the strange and curious silence created by the book must be seen as a reason for Hoegbotton’s reluctance to reprint Cinsorium. This silence occurred among those most raucous of vultures, critics. In the superheated atmosphere that is the Southern book culture, such omissions rarely occur. Even the most modest self-published pulp writer can find space in local book review columns. {Fear. It was fear.} This lack of attention proved fatal, for although many journals noted the book’s publication in passing, only two actual reviews ever appeared, both in a fringe publication edited by James Lacond. Lacond, a passing acquaintance of Duncan’s even in those days before the war, wrote that, “Subtle subjects require subtle treatments. For every two steps back, Shriek takes three steps forward, so that in the circular but progressive nature of his arguments one begins to see this pattern, but also a certain truth emerging.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. {At least someone was prepared to accept it!}

But none of these events concerned me, not in light of what I thought the book told me about Duncan. The book, I felt, was an argument between Duncan and Duncan, and not about any of the surface topics in the book. Duncan did not know what, exactly, he had seen while underground. He had only a rudimentary understanding of the gray caps. {This is true—I didn’t know what I’d seen. But I couldn’t keep what I didn’t know to myself. How could I? I saw too many things that might shake someone’s worldview.} This kept alive Duncan’s compulsion to do what I most feared: return to the underground until he felt he understood…everything.

Perhaps it should not have surprised me that Duncan’s next four books settled back into the realm of acceptable accomplishment. Duncan reverted to the scholarship that had been his trademark. It was too late, of course. It didn’t, and couldn’t, matter, because the cowardly critics who had refused to review Cinsorium had read it. And so Duncan’s scholarly style steadily lost readers seeking further crass sensationalism, while critics savaged later books, most of them omitting any reference to Cinsorium. It hung over Duncan’s work like a ghost, an echo. The reviews that did appear dismissed Duncan’s work in ways that made him appear a crank, a misfit, even a heretic. {I’ve always blamed Gaudy for this, although for a long time I had no proof, or even a coherent theory. But I now believe Gaudy used his connections to blacklist me in typical F&L fashion—with the underhanded compliment, the innuendo, the insinuation. Did Gaudy do more than meet with a few influential journal editors? Perhaps not, but that might have been enough.} They appended the story of his banning by Bonmot in harmful ways: “This, the latest offering from the author who blasphemed against the Truffidian Church, concerns…” It did not matter what it concerned.

Shortly after the publication of Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan, Hoegbotton announced that Duncan had been dropped from their stable of writers. Gaudy must have been laughing from behind his rosewood desk in Morrow. No other publisher of note would prove interested in Duncan’s sixth book. None of his books would long remain in print. For all practical purposes, Duncan’s career as a writer of historical books had come to an end, along with any hopes of serious consideration as a historian. At the age of thirty-three.

It would only get worse after he met Sabon, who would spend much of her time chipping away at Duncan’s respectability, so that his books no longer contained anything but metaphorically shredded pages.

Odd. It strikes me for the first time that Duncan has been preparing me for this moment all of my life. There’s a green light shining upon the typewriter keys, and maybe it’s the light that allows me to see so clearly. Must we always be blind to those we are close to? Must we always fumble for understanding? Duncan never mistrusted me. He just didn’t want me to implode from the information he had—he wanted to dole it out in pieces, so that it would not be such a shock to my system. And yet it would have been a shock, no matter how gradual. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.

If Duncan feared losing me, he must have also feared losing his audience.

Which reminds me. I should ask: Am I losing you? Have I lost you already? I hope not. There’s still a war to come, for Truff ’s sake.

Maybe the only solution is to start over.

Should I? Perhaps I should.

3

We don’t see many things ahead of time. We usually only avoid disaster at the last second, pull back from the abyss by luck or fate or blind stupid chance. Exactly nine years before Mary Sabon began to destroy my brother like an old house torn down brick by brick, Duncan sought me out at my new Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. How he found me there, I still don’t know {a mundane story, involving broadsheet adverts and luck}. I had just bought the gallery—a narrow place off of Albumuth Boulevard {I remember when it was a sweets shop that also sold mood-altering mushrooms—a much more honest trade}—with the help of a merchant loan against our mother’s property along the River Moth. {That took some persuading!}

Outside, the sky was a blue streaked with gold, the trees once again threatening to release their leaves, turning yellower and yellowest. The smell of burning leaves singed nostrils, but the relief of slightly lower temperatures added a certain spring to the steps of passersby.

Half the proposed gallery lay in boxes around my feet. Paintings were stacked in corners, splashes of color wincing out from the edges of frames. Piles and piles of papers had swallowed my desk.

I was happy. After years of unhappiness. {It’s easy to think you’d been unhappy for years, but I remember many times you were invigorated, excited, by your art, by your studies. The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.} By now I had given up my dream of a career as a painter. Rejection, rejection, rejection. It had made the part of me that wanted to paint wither away, leaving a more streamlined Janice, a smoother Janice, a less creative Janice. I had decided I would do better as a gallery owner, had not yet realized I was still traveling toward remote regions marked on maps only by terms such as “Art Critic” and “Historian.” {You were traveling toward me, Janice. That’s not such a bad thing.} Only later did I come to see my initial investment in the gallery as a form of self-torture: by promoting the works of others I could denigrate my own efforts.