There are touches of Borges and Nabokov as well as H. P. Lovecraft in this tale of changing fortunes and shifting relationships . . . has an avant-garde, surrealistic sensibility.

Narrated with flamboyant intensity by one-time society figure Janice Shrit and Presenting a vivid gallery of fascinating characters and mysterious events, Shriek is an account of the adventures of Janice's brother Duncan, a historian obsessed, with a doomed love affair and a dark secret that may kill or transform him.

It involves, too, a war between rival publishing houses, which threatens to change Ambergris for ever, and rivalry with a marginalized race known as the 'grey caps', who, armed with advanced fungal technologies, wait underground for their chance to recover the city that was once theirs.