A sonic manipulator and mutant, Shriek suffers an unstable upbringing and goes insane while trapped in the Darkforce Dimension. When paired with serial killer Cletus Kasady, AKA Carnage, her thirst for chaos is insatiable.
Unstable Childhood
As an overweight child, Frances Louise Barrison suffers humiliation, torment, and is horribly abused by her parents. She later blocks most of these early memories. Baffled and scared, Frances tries to be a good girl but the abuse never decreases. She often hides in a nearby church to escape the brutality. Unloved, Frances grows to despise positive emotions even as she yearns for a stable family. As a teen, she leaves home and, taking the name Sandra Deel, becomes a rock groupie. When her mutant powers surface, she becomes a drug dealer, but the vigilante Tyrone Johnson, AKA Cloak, temporarily traps her in the Darkforce Dimension, driving her mad. Viewing insanity as an art, she becomes Shriek and goes on a killing spree but is apprehended and imprisoned at Ravencroft Institute, a home for the criminally insane.
While at Ravencroft, Shriek overhears the nightmarish murdering menace, Carnage, escaping from confinement. She asks to join him and Carnage agrees to let her tag along. Viewing Carnage as her “husband,” Shriek next encounters the Doppelganger and adopts him as her “son.” Shriek soon uses her sonic blast to apparently kill the mutant Dagger, who actually transforms to light and finds refuge within her partner Cloak.
Sonic-Powered Villainess
Shriek initially manifests a sonic blast, which projects from her hands and can destroy objects, amplify pain, propel her through the air and remove Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man’s webbing. She also uses these blasts as sonar waves to locate hidden objects, and possesses a sonic buffer zone to reduce the impact of blows.
The time she spends in the Darkforce Dimension allows her to psychically feed off suffering and anguish, and bring out violence in others. As her powers grow, she learns to levitate people, objects and herself, drain power from machinery, and reach into minds, pulling out their dark sides.
She develops greater than normal strength, able to touch Malcolm McBride, AKA Carrion, without harm and draw the Carrion virus into herself. She begins manifesting her power from her often-glowing left eye.
Dead on Target
Several negative encounters with Cloak and his partner Tandy Bowen, AKA Dagger, make the pair of mutants some of Shriek’s foremost enemies. She also goes up against Spider-Man and defeats the polymorphic Eddie Brock, AKA Venom.
When Shriek and her chosen family go on a murder spree, they battle Felicia Hardy, AKA Black Cat, Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, Cloak, Michael Collins, AKA Deathlok, Angelica Jones, AKA Firestar, Daniel Rand, AKA Iron Fist, Dr. Michael Morbius, AKA Morbius, the Living Vampire, Spider-Man, and Venom.
Killer Allies
Shriek has several encounters with alien Symbiotes, most notably the superhuman serial killer Carnage. While they’re at Ravencroft together, she meets him as he escapes the facility. She joins him and sees him as her husband. She then meets Doppelganger and takes him under her wing, considering him a son. Attracting others to their murderous ways, such as Demogoblin and Malcolm McBride, AKA Carrion, she also sees them as her sons, creating a freaky family of mass-murdering menaces.
Chaos and Murder
Seeking pure chaos for its own sake, Shriek, Carnage, and Doppelganger began a murder binge that took them to Fifth Avenue, the hot nightclub The Deep, the Metropolitan Museum, and Lower Manhattan. They attracted Demogoblin and Carrion, both of whom Shriek adopted as her “sons.” Known in the media as “Maximum Carnage,” the killings went on for days with Shriek and her “family” battling Black Cat, Captain America, Deathlok, Cloak, Firestar, Iron Fist, Morbius, Spider-Man, and Venom.
During this time, Shriek helped collapse a warehouse roof on Black Cat and nearly electrocuted Deathlok. When Firestar and Venom deprived a cringing Carnage of his symbiote, Shriek contemptuously struck him, drawing blood that generated a new symbiotic “other.” She defeated Venom, then helped Carnage torture him within the Statue of Liberty. She psychically channeled the city’s anguish, creating violent mobs in all five boroughs; however, when Carnage apparently killed Doppelganger, a distraught Shriek lost her hold on the crowds. Re-emerging, Dagger tried to heal Shriek with the light of forgiveness. This inspired Spider-Man to conceive the alpha magni-illuminizor, a biofeedback device quickly built by the Rand Corporation which amplified Shriek’s calming alpha waves, causing a tide of inner light which cured Carrion, forcing Carnage and Demogoblin to flee.
Returned to Ravencroft, Shriek broke free and released four other inmates: the strong-woman Gale, the lethal gas-exuding Brigid O’Reilly, AKA Mayhem, the fire-starting Pyromania and the escape artist Webber, all soon defeated by Spider-Man and Ravencroft security head John Jameson. Later, shown Malcolm McBride by Dr. Ashley Kafka, Shriek recognized him as Carrion. She abducted Malcolm, using her power to bring Carrion back. Wanting him as a son, she instructed Carrion to kill Malcolm’s real mother, Beatrice. Unable to harm either mother, Carrion turned his decay powers on himself, but Shriek drained him of the Carrion virus, restoring Malcolm. Driven completely mad, Shriek returned to Ravencroft and treated the virus as she waited for her unborn child to emerge. Instead, Dr. Miles Warren, AKA the Jackal, infiltrated Ravencroft and removed the virus. Still at Ravencroft, Shriek was a jury member in Dr. Judas Traveller’s trial of Peter Parker, though she remembered little of it afterwards.
After Carnage was thrown into space and ripped apart by the Super Hero Robert Reynolds, AKA Sentry, apparently perishing, Shriek eventually gained her freedom from Ravencroft and has begun frequenting the Bar With No Name.
While transferring Shriek in an armored vehicle, it was attacked by Doppelganger who posed as Spider-Man and wanted to liberate her. While they were pursued by the real Spider-Man and Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, Hall’s armored security also got involved. When fires were shot towards Shriek, Shriek’s psychiatrist Dr. Tanis Nieves protected her and lost her arm. She received a revolutionary prosthetic limb from Industrialist Michael Hall, who had retrieved Carnage’s body from space and had extracted the Carnage symbiote and combined it with the limb and other exo-suits called Iron Rangers. The symbiote in Nieves’ arm possessed her and shattered Carnage’s cell, freeing it and bonding to Nieves, turning her into an all-new Carnage. The symbiote forced her to find Kasady who was held in a top-secret location. Rejoined with the suit, Carnage defeated the Iron Rangers and taking them into himself became Mass Carnage. He wanted revenge on Hall but Spider-Man and Iron Man stood in his way.
Shriek escaped to torment Nieves while Nieves cut off her symbio-prosthetic arm, which Shriek grabbed and grew more powerful than ever. But what she didn’t anticipate was that the symbiote desired to reunite with Nieves since it had planted an offshoot inside her, an ability it did not have before and was a result of Hall’s experimentation. Transferring itself to Nieves, it transformed her into a new symbiote calling itself Scorn. With her symbiote powers, she held Shriek up by the neck and kicked Doppelganger aside with ease. She forced Shriek to use her sonic blast against Mass Carnage which defeated it, and revealed that the real Carnage had already made a stealthy escape with Doppelganger. Shriek was left in a coma with apparent brain damage.
She recovered from the ordeal and joined the Doom Maidens against the Defenders. Later she reunited with her love Carnage who was being chased in a car by Wade Wilson, AKA Deadpool. Shriek suffered injuries in a resulting crash, which led Carnage to attack Deadpool and then deliver Shriek to the Mercury Team base and then a psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, Deadpool had obtained a symbiote and attacked Shriek and despite engaging in a battle with Carnage, Deadpool used his symbiotes to disguise Shriek as himself. Carnage attacked her which resulted in a mental break which led to his decision to turn himself into the proper authorities.
Shriek recovered and joined Fred Myers, AKA Boomerang’s Sinister Sixteen for a short time and later Eliot Franklin, AKA Griffin, Thursday Rubinstein, AKA Ruby Thursday, and Gibbon and attacked police but were stopped by Roger Gocking, AKA Porcupine. She was later hired by Nain Rouge as an enforcer alongside Erikson Hades, AKA Firebrand and went up against the Great Lakes Avengers (GLA).
Shriek later teamed up with Sergei Kravinoff, AKA Kraven the Hunter, on a hunt under New York City, and ended up facing off with Venom. When the Cult of Knull (Knull, the God of Symbiotes) recruited her, she joined them and took on her Sandra Deel alias to help them take over and massacre Doverton, Colorado. She assisted Carnage and Doppelganger in sacrificing the townspeople to Knull. Carnage then took over the Ravencroft Institute, while Shriek volunteered as a sacrifice to resurrect Demogoblin, except in Shriek’s body, it referred to itself as Demagoblin to honor the female host body. Then the Shriek/Demagoblin hybrid and Carnage shared a passionate kiss.
