Summer! Solstice passed us by! Buttondown tells me I drafted this newsletter on the longest day of the year, but that rather deviates from my own recollection of the event, so we shall pretend, you and I, that my memory is not terribly corrupted by time and burnout. I’ve recently returned from a holiday cutting straight through the hottest days on record, which means that 1. I have been reading some terribly long books to tide me through my train journeys, and 2. that this poor newsletter has sat languishing on my phone because, as you will soon discover, trying to format this on my phone would have been actual hell on earth. Much like the 36°C weather and full sun.

For most people, the concept of a ‘fiction book rife with metafictional footnotes’ (which is different from the actually explanatory footnotes of, say, Saint Death’s Daughter, though that does perhaps reveal my fondness for footnotes in fiction) the work that likely comes to mind immediately is House of Leaves. In my last newsletter I said I was working my way through House of Leaves again, but I am not sorry to admit that I exchanged it for reading Perdido Street Station, which as one of the New Weird novels brings me back to my original point: for me, ‘book rife with metafictional footnotes’ will bring to mind always Hoegbottom’s Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, by Duncan Shriek (or, Jeff Vandermeer, as you will)

Hoegbottom’s Guide is unsurprisingly included in the collection City of Saints and Madmen, which I discussed previously in my ‘city books’ newsletter. The entire thing is written as a very tongue-in-cheek guidebook by an historian, in the world of the story, local to that great city of Ambergris, Duncan Shriek, who it is revealed to us (by Duncan himself) has written the majority of the actual story in the footnotes^{1 2 3}

Did you enjoy those little pop-ups? Did you enjoy engaging with a deeper level of the text through the very act of choosing to either move your eyes to the bottom of the page to avail yourself of the footnotes or clicking upon a link to see the information blossom before your own eyes?⁴

This is not another newsletter about City of Saints and Madmen. Rather, this is about the afterword to Hoegbottom’s Guide:

Shriek: an Afterword.

Shriek is fashioned as an afterword written by Duncan’s older sister, the aging socialite Janice Shriek, which veers between historical, autobiographical, and fantastical in turns, which addresses not at all the text it claims to be an afterword for, but instead acts as a record of the lives of the two siblings. What makes Shriek stand out, besides the conceit, which is uncommon but certainly not unique, is that Duncan himself has left comments throughout the text.

Some of these comments reminisce alongside Janice or expand upon her points, others reprimand her for her biases and reassert Duncan’s own neuroses. The non-standard format is not merely a trick of prose, but rather acts as a further strengthening of the themes of the work. Who gets to write history? Who do we believe? Do we believe Janice’s stories of her own glory days, or Duncan’s gentle reminders of her drunken stupors? Do we believe in Duncan’s claimed brilliance, or Janice’s perception of his obsessions and blinding single mindedness? That this afterword, full of corrections, is an addendum to a supposedly historical document only provides another layer to the mille-feuille (there is, of course, an afterword to the afterword; why wouldn’t there be).

You can talk forever, abstractly and academically, about the craft and the imagined intentions behind the work, but that is still not particularly what I want to cover. What I would like to argue is that non-standard narrative styles, such as those observed in Shriek: an Afterword, House of Leaves, or even Harrow the Ninth, cause a shift in the mode of engagement not usually encountered in text mediums.

Arguably, I’ve stolen my concept of modes of engagement from Linda Hutcheon’s use of the term in reference to adaptation. Hutcheon proposes three major modes of engagement: the reading/telling mode (books, written and aural texts), the showing/ mode (movies, art, tv shows), and the interacting mode (video games and, interestingly enough, theme parks). Each of these modes of engagement force the audience to interact with a text according to its own rules and within the limits of its form, resulting in different impacts for each form. The experience of being forced to make a morally challenging choice in a video game cannot be replicated in a text medium, but neither can a stream of consciousness narrative and the experience of being within the narrator’s mind be replicated in a video game. Adaptations, Hutcheon says, move a text into different modes of engagement, and each mode contains its own unique strengths and weaknesses.

I want to suggest that certain deviations from the expected conventions of either a telling or showing mode can encourage a level of interactivity not usually experienced when interacting with these modes. I’m not the kind of person to write in my books, whether to highlight or take notes—no shade on the people who do, but it reminds me too strongly of GCSE and I simply cannot be sixteen again, even in my own mind.⁵

Digital books, however, are a different story, and I read Shriek on my kindle. I don’t take any kind of really formal notes, but I do highlight plenty and add a few comments—usually humorous notes to myself—as I go. One, which I typed in a fit of pique, made me aware of an element of the text which had hovered somewhere in the back of my mind. Allow me to lay out the situation, for context:

Duncan, obsessed with the fungal city hidden deep beneath his own city of Ambergris, dedicates his life, his decaying body, his work, all to uncovering its secrets. Which in the text, Janice points out that many of the troubles he faced were due to his inability to set aside his obsession, even for the sake of those he cared about. Duncan, then (and forgive me for the convoluted nature of this recollection, even if it reflects the experience of reading the book itself) reprimands her in one of his additions, saying that his work was never for his own sake, but rather to save the city from destruction.

This was the point at which I made the following comment:

you’re full of shit, Duncan. You have the last word so you seem reasonable, but you’re full of shit. Your obsession was entirely personal, with the city as [an] excuse⁶.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just someone in their dimly lit room furiously typing on my kindle, I was acting in direct response to the structure of the text. Suddenly I was the editor of the Shrieks’ manuscript, scribbling in my red pen an addition to the already cluttered and much marked pages. Who gets to write the history of these two siblings? Who gets the last word?

Well—I, the reader, do.

I have heard others have a similar experience with House of Leaves, those who claim that they began to feel a niggling dread that reading the book would subject them to the same fate as Johnny Truant⁷. Others, of course, have stated their disappointment that they weren’t actually drawn down into the dark by a Minotaur and proclaimed the book a failure, which did actually make me laugh out loud and wonder again about certain media literacy crises.

This is, of course, not unique to a work with footnotes. I am sure that we are all familiar with the concept of fourth wall breaks, in which perhaps a character looks suddenly out of the screen, or speaks to the reader, or turns at the sound of a wind chime being struck by a cameraman, and suddenly we the audience are forced to engage with our relation to the text. Does the character look at you? Does the actor? Are you complicit in the work you are experiencing? How do you engage with the direct interaction that is being simulated by the work?

In fact, I don’t think that this shift to perceived interactivity with a text requires a fourth wall break or even the metafictional elements of works like House of Leaves or much of VanderMeer’s work: rather, sometimes all that is required is a slightly surprising decision, a step away from medium and genre conventions. When your expectations are broken by a work, you are forced to actively engage with it, rather than just allow the text to carry you. Unusual narration styles or points of view, shifts in the medium of a work, bizarre and surreal staging of a play, anything that draws the audience from their comfort zone can encourage a certain amount of interactivity. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is only a deeper level of engagement, but are those not, in some ways, the same?

I expect that fourth wall breaks are, indeed, the most obvious example to explore in this meandering essay, but my aim is always to bring just a little something new to each edition of this newsletter. I always hope that I can make you look at something, whether a work, concept, or stylistic choice just a little differently. After all, that is what happened to me in that moment that I felt myself interacting with the structure of Shriek: an Afterword.

What I’m reading right now:

I burned myself out a little by reading Royal Assassin and Assassin’s Quest back to back (a grand total of 1500 pages) and then proceeded to get halfway through The Last Contract of Isako before switching to Centroeuropa and then teaching myself to tablet weave instead.

An album to listen to:

Gestalt, by Supernowhere! Just started listening to their stuff and have really been loving the album. It will sound like exactly what you would expect an album recommendation from me to sound like