By: Gene Wolfe Publisher: Tor Books Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Tor Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 304 Publication Date: September 16, 2008 Release Date: September 16, 2008
Lovecraft mets Blade Runner. This is a stand-alone supernatural horror novel with a 30s noir atmosphere. Gene Wolfe can write in whatever genre he wants--and always with superb style and profound depth. Now following his World Fantasy Award winner, Soldier of Sidon, and his stunning Pirate Freedom, Wolfe turns to the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and the weird science tale of supernatural horror.
Set a hundred years in the future, An Evil Guest is a story of an actress who becomes the lover of both a mysterious sorcerer and private detective, and an even more mysterious and powerful rich man, who has been to the human colony on an alien planet and learned strange things there. Her loyalties are divided--perhaps she loves them both. The detective helps her to release her inner beauty and become a star overnight. And the rich man is the benefactor of a play she stars in. But something is very wrong. Money can be an evil guest, but there are other evils. As Lovecraft said, "That is not dead which can eternal lie."
An Evil Guest...with interesting recreational drugs This is going to be a hard book to review and I suspect that the ratings will be all across the board. Some people are going to hate it, some like it, and many more will just be confused. I'm in the last camp, but despite being confused, I must say I liked and enjoyed this book.
The downside of An Evil Guest is that this book is extremely disjointed, not very clear, and parts seem missing. I truly wondered as I was reading this if Mr. Wolfe didn't thrash this out while on some very intersting medications. The upside is that the book grabbed my attention and I enjoyed reading it despite what I might normally call serious flaws. So this is hard to explain. I'm not sure I understood the story, I'm not sure who the evil guest was, I'm not sure what the heck Wolderan had to do with anything, and despite being set 100 years in the future I could detect no trace of that in the book other than that some people had personal spaceships. Other than that, and they didn't have any bearing on the plot, it could have been 1999. In fact, I am not even sure this book has a plot. The musings in the early part of the book regarding good and evil never bear fruit, fun forays into sentient mountains and werewolves never seem to amount to anything and the two Alpha males, Gideon and Reis, never deliver on their promise. The dialogue left me so confused that at many points in the book I had to go back and re-read a sequence three or four times to understand it. It often felt like reading a play without any of the visual cues, mostly because Wolfe didn't add much in the way of descriptions throughout the book. Ready to run away? Not so fast. Somehow I enjoyed this book. I've read several books in the last month that I didn't enjoy at all, but I actually enjoyed this one and even the complete lack of a comprehensible ending didn't take the blush off the rose.
So what is about this book? It reminded me of nothing so much as if Hunter S. Thompson, whacked out on good acid and bad whiskey during a broadway show, started writing a science fiction book right in the theater and then finished it over the course of a jittery and spastic night. The book is extremely disorienting, but it is disorienting in a recognizable way. It may not make a ton of sense, but think about a long and interesting dream you may have had once. This book comes as close as anything I've ever read to being like a dream. It doesn't have a lot of logic, things show up which have no relevance, characters change and morph over time for no particular reason, the story changes and goes to bizarre places and the end is like waking up to a different reality. Which is always disorienting. Nominally this book is about an actress, Cassie Casey, who does theatre and gets caught up in the maneuverings of two wealthy, powerful, interesting and dangerous males who are both being hunted by the US government. Kind of. That's as close to a plot as you're going to get and the wanders away from it frequently.
So, if you have had fabulous, disjointed random dreams before, I think you may like this book. That's exactly what the reading experience is like. I enjoyed this book despite it ignoring every convention out there, but I think to enjoy this one you just have to let go and flow with the book. This is very odd stuff, but if you don't fight it you may enjoy it.
A return to form Recommended - a return to form after 'Wizard Knight' and 'Pirate Freedom' which struck me as a bit boy's-own-story-ish. This is classic Wolfe in the 'Free Live Free', 'Castleview' style: combining mundane reality and mystery, beautifully written, not yielding everything on the initial reading. Terrific.
Only half a novel? A wonderful premise by a wonderful writer, this novel features a great blurb (Neil Gaiman!) and a persuasive professional review published on Amazon's webpage that promise more than is delivered. As a fan of Wolfe's Torturer, Soldier, Long Sun, and Short Sun novel series (all of which deal with complex moral, social, and philosophical issues), there is a lot less going on in this novel than in other works of Wolfe's fiction. The afterword could be setting up a sequel, and many of the plot twists near the end feel like they came out of nowhere. While Wolfe's best novels have plot elements that I can only describe as "mobius strips" - here it appears the play the actors are performing "becomes" in a sense their reality - the larger issues that usually loom around the edges of a Wolfe novel are missing here. Well written (as always), intriguing and entertaining, An Evil Guest certainly merits the two stars given, but is a bit of a disappointment when compared with his other novels.
Even masters make mistake. This was very, very disappointing. I'm a big fan of almost all of Wolfe's stuff, even Wizard and Knight, which many I know did not appreciate.
The pacing is strange, seeming both too fast and annoyingly tedious at the same time. The characterization is completely lacking. And the plot goes nowhere. Late-story entrants that are effectively anti-deus ex machina.
If you think you'd like the story based on the sales blurb, read most anything by Tim Powers or Neil Gaiman's American Gods. You'll be happier.
Great Book at a Reasonable Kindle Price In response to my earlier review, in which I panned the initial price of the Kindle edition of this book (it was more expensive than the hard cover edition), I was asked what I thought about the book itself. Since Amazon doesn't enable readers to distinguish reviews of content from other issues that may be of interest to potential consumers, I had to use the feedback to signal my dissatisfaction with the publisher's price for an electronic edition. The publisher has now substantially lowered its Kindle edition price, and I've purchased the book and read it. It is wonderful, especially for those who are fond of interwar pulp fiction (notably Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos). It is also one of Wolfe's most accessible books. I've deleted my earlier comments about the very high price of the eBook. However, I do not think it's inappropriate to review all aspects of a product being sold, which includes the price, although it would be ideal if Amazon broke down its ratings to reflect different issues (content, price, book design, etc.)
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