An Evil Guest

by Gene Wolfe

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."

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Gene Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He was noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith, to which he converted after marrying a Catholic. He was a prolific short story writer and a novelist, and has won many awards in the field.

The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award is given by SFWA for ‘lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.’ Wolfe joins the Grand Master ranks alongside such legends as Connie Willis, Michael Moorcock, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Joe Haldeman. The award will be presented at the 48th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend in San Jose, CA, May 16-19, 2013.

While attending Texas A&M University Wolfe published his first speculative fiction in The Commentator, a student literary journal. Wolfe dropped out during his junior year, and was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After returning to the United States he earned a degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. He edited the journal Plant Engineering for many years before retiring to write full-time, but his most famous professional engineering achievement is a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato crisps. He lived in Barrington, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

A frequent Hugo nominee without a win, Wolfe has nevertheless picked up several Nebula and Locus Awards, among others, including the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the 2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. He is also a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/genewolfe

Reviews

[Panagiotis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Το Evil Guest σηματοδοτεί για μένα την απομάκρυνση του Gene Wolfe από το αμιγώς φανταστικό στοιχεία και τις πολύτομες αφηγήσεις. Είναι το ξεκίνημα μιας πορείας που ακολουθεί έως τώρα, όπου αφηγείται ιστορίες που έχουν σαν βάση το μυστήριο. Θεωρώ πως παρότι γηραλαίος, έχει καταφέρει να επαναπροσδιορίσει την γραφή του. Ο Γουλφ αυτή της περιόδου είναι τόσο χαρακτηριστικός, όσο ο πιο νέος και φιλόδοξος συγγραφέας των Book of the New Sun/Long Sun.

Η ιστορία ξεφεύγει σε απρόβλεπτα μονοπάτια. Είμαι σίγουρος πως ο αμύητος αναγνώστης θα νιώσει με αυτό το βιβλίο, όπως ένιωθα κι εγώ, χρόνια πριν, που δεν γνώριζα πως γράφει ο Γουλφ: πως ανοίγει πολλά μέτωπα, τα οποία αφήνει ανοιχτά. Ωστόσο η γραφή αυτού του ανθρώπου δεν αφήνει τίποτα στην τύχη, δίνει όλα τα στοιχεία στον αναγνώστη για να συνθέσεις τις απαντήσεις στα ερωτήματα που του δημιουργούνται. Είναι αμετάκλητος θιασώτης της οξύνοιας, τέτοιους χαρακτήρες φτιάχνει, και μάλλον απαιτεί από τους αναγνώστες να συμπεριφέρονται με μια ανάλογη διανοητική ευελιξία.

Ακούγεται βάναυση η ανάγνωση ενός τέτοιου βιβλίου, αλλά όταν κάποιος αφεθεί στις χάρες μια ιστορίας που ξεκινάει ως ένα μυστήριο κατασκοπίας και καταδίωξης και καταλήγει κάτι πολύ διαφορετικό, θα είναι πια αργά! Είναι ένα κράμα αστυνομικής και ε.φ. λογοτεχνίας, με νεύματα στην pulp λογοτεχνία, γραμμένο από έναν πνευματώδη, ευφυή άνθρωπο.

Το Evil Guest είναι ακριβώς ό,τι είναι τα μετέπειτα γραπτά του Γουλφ: λιγότερο φιλόδοξο όσον αφορά μια επική διήγηση φαντασίας, περισσότερο εγκεφαλικό. Αυτά τα μυθοπλαστικά παζλ μόνο αυτός τα φτιάχνει και είναι ο αγαπημένος μου συγγραφέας. Νομίζω το λέω συχνά τελευταία, αλλά ποτέ δεν είναι αρκετό για αυτό τον παραγνωρισμένο γίγαντα της Αμερικάνικης λογοτεχνίας.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Money is an evil guest."
Gene Wolfe can write in any genre he desires, I suppose. This book was a noir with subtle science fiction elements. The blurbs and book jacket call it Lovecraftian horror, which is a lie. You can expect 95% dialogue, well-polished, for about 250 pages, and the final 50 pages reward you with a surprising, even shocking, ending.

The best part of the book is the main character, Cassie Casey, who is a well-rounded (voluptuous), smart, funny, charming, likeable, up-and-coming actress, who stumbles into a conspiracy of cosmic significance. Her run-ins with rich bastards and slick sorcerers, and later, vicious islanders, make for an occasionally harrowing drama. But for the bulk of the novel you will be piecing together the plot elements through Wolfe's effective dialogue, which only reveals enough background to draw you into the tale. What it does on the surface level is establish deep characters, with complex motivations - enough for any fan of pulp noir.

Written with the simplicity and pace of a Philip K. Dick novel, Gene Wolfe afficionados and neophytes alike will appreciate a breather from his near-incomprehensible world-building. This was a refreshing, easy, compelling and surprising read, even if it lacked the abyss-like depth of Wolfe's masterpieces.

A close examination of his themes and devices reveals far more hidden meanings in the characters' names and "metamorphoses" than I gathered from my reading - as usual, I had to look them up. Wolfe, the sorcerer himself, doesn't disappoint on this score. But one can't help but wonder about Woldercan and many of the unexplored "islands" of this book. How much of the interior and exterior universe do we actually get to see? Very little. He maintains a close perspective, and limits himself to cast an aura of historical nostalgia. It would be a simple matter to dismiss this as a minor work, a mere curiosity in Wolfe's disturbing cabinet of secrets.

Yet, the dialogue-heavy explication does undermine the author's typically genius plot cues. We are given an Idiot's Guide through the characters's anxious dialogues. Cassie is still figuring out the scenario along with the reader. But I think this is more playful sleight-of-hand on Wolfe's part. How are you supposed to notice the influences outside the narrator's field of vision? Luckily, we are presented with a wider view at the end of the book. I think this abrupt shift in perspective saved this book from being ordinary, though it will bother some readers, who were enjoying the simplicity preceding it.

A memorable, exciting and still profound book by a grandmaster of the bizarre.

[Monty Merrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe has become one of my favorite living American authors. He always places an emphasis on character. As far as his standalone novels go (he has a few books that belong to a series, as you may know, but I'll stay away from those for now), each of them seem almost like they could have been written by a different person.

People either hate or love this book. I loved it. It starts off pretty fast paced with an assassin/wizard? talking to a very hickish president about tracking down an ex-ambassador to Woldercan (the only planet with intelligent life that humans have contact with) and how dangerous he is. They want the assassin/wizard to track him down. But very quickly, both him and his assailant fall in love with the same woman, a stage actress, and she falls in love with both of them.

After the first chapter it's told mostly from this stage actress's perspective as she helps both of her lovers and is torn between which one to be loyal to. I can't state enough how well Gene Wolfe draws his characters and how witty the dialogue is. Wolfe successfully writes a storyline that is highly complex and full of humor, without ruining the integrity of the very ominous mood that starts to set in toward the end.

I hope you don't read the reviews that spoil anything. If you're the kind of person that gets confused easily, I would suggest reading most of this in a short amount of time so the various plot threads make more sense and stay close together inside your head. I read it n two days, which is rare for me, even with a book of this length.

[Julie Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe Doesn't Get the Feminine Mind-Set
Warning: spoiler in the last paragraph.

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe is a pulp thriller that includes aliens, South Sea gods, and two enigmatic men vying for the hand of a young actress on the rise. Imagine the results if Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft, and Walter B.Gibson (creator of The Shadow) all conspired to write a book together, set 100 years in our future. Despite how odd that sounds, the first two-thirds of the book is fairly straight forward. When you get to the last part, it suddenly takes off as if a rocket was lit under you and the reader is left hanging on for all they're worth to keep up.

It is a fun ride and one that I enjoyed. Except for a key part of logic, it all held together. Unfortunately that key logic is integral to the very last line of the book which sums it all up. Essentially describing the reasons for a complete change of heart, actress Cassie delivers a long monologue while walking down the street with a friend. It rang so false that I was convinced she was doing it to poke for reactions of possible betrayal from her friend. Not so. It turns out that the change of heart described, which rang so falsely, was intended to give Cassie the reason for every subsequent action she takes. It took me a long time to realize that but I was able to suspend my disbelief until reading the last line of the book, which depends completely upon our belief in that speech.

No takers here. If that is how Wolfe and his editors think that a woman can change her mind in the way described about a man who she loathes and fears, then they have another think coming. If one is going to hang an entire section of a book, indeed that book's denouement, upon one set of emotions entirely replacing another, then that part at least needs to be real and human and ring true. Perhaps few women read Wolfe's books. I don't know about that. However, as one who does I can testify that such a patently false shift in Cassie's motivation feels like a cheap, easy trick a la "a shot rang out and everyone fell dead." Certainly it makes me lose respect for the author and editors who simply seem lazy in retrospect. It's too bad because I really liked the book and was willing to overlook the false feel until that final line which tied everything to Cassie's faked feelings.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set a hundred years in the future, yet feeling like a pulp mystery from the early twentieth century, An Evil Guest concerns a stage actress--somewhat famous but not a superstar--who finds herself caught between two very mysterious and powerful men. A "wizard" named Gideon Chase, at the behest of the president, enlists the assistance of Cassiopeia Casey to entrap William Reis, allegedly the most dangerous man in the world. At least that's how things start out. Along the way, alliances form, dissolve, and reverse... I have to admit it was hard to keep track of, and if the novel hadn't been written to a certain style (I felt), I would have found it all rather implausible, and I would have wanted considerably more substance to support it. But I really enjoyed reading, and it reads quickly. (It's almost entirely dialogue-driven, with little narrative exposition.)

Then in the last third of the book there's a jarring shift. This is where the Lovecraftian stuff mentioned on the cover comes in. I had mixed feelings about it. I was enjoying the noir feel and hated to see it go away, but this new direction was intriguing as well. I certainly can't say it was predictable. I enjoyed the book overall, but I think perhaps I need to let the story gel for a while...

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book earlier this year. A wonderful book from a master of the art. Anyone out there who has never read any of his books- shame, shame on you. However, i would not start with this one, start with The Book of the New Sun instead.
This is noir done right!! Being Noir, I'm sure many hardcore fans hate it, because it is so different from his other works. But i could care less, the man can write whatever he wants, literally. His flow is so effortless. Very intriguing and as is usual with Wolfe, levels upon levels, so i'm sure some people will find it hard to follow, but it is worth it. Plus, look at that cover, always a sucker for a great cover. I will not trade this book as i do with almost all my books after i read them, unless they are something super special, or written by Gene Wolfe.

[Benjamin]

Other than being a very good writer, Gene Wolfe is known for two things: he's often a difficult writer and he's a very Catholic writer. (Which is not to say that he's particularly orthodox about Catholicism, only that he often weaves in Catholic themes.) In his most famous works, the Book of the New Sun series, Wolfe uses a very baroque style of language and he plays with genre in a way which could be seen as challenging or treacherous. (It depends on what you think about genre as a contract. Full disclosure: I really dug the Book of the New Sun the first time I read it, but I haven't yet been able to force myself to re-read it.) If we were feeling playful, we could call the Book of the New Sun illegible--it's a book that does not permit itself to be read.

By contrast, Wolfe's An Evil Guest is illegible for completely different reasons: while it's an easy read from word to word (nothing here is described as "fuligin"), the deep story here is never really clear to me because the plot is episodic and the telling of it is full of holes. (And, judging from the reviews I've read online, it's not entirely clear to anyone what's going on, though the Gene Wolfe Wiki has some theories.)

Now, on one hand, we could say that Wolfe is playing here with the distinction between surfaces (the word-to-word ease of reading) and depths (the difficulty of finding the true story)--that the structure of the work is directly related to one of its main themes: the surface vs. the depths. (Or as Adam Roberts put it in his review on Strange Horizons, the Catholic issue of transubstantiation: how can the wine seem to be wine on the surface but really be blood in its true being, etc.? Well, this being a novel about "an evil guest," we should expect the flip side--the Host--to appear sometime.) Several characters mention this issue and it comes up in several ways. Not least of all the fact that several of the main characters are professional actors, putting on different surfaces but not changing their depths.

But on the other hand, as much as it might be fun to tangle with the strands of Wolfe's story and to fill in the holes, I'm not sure I see the upside to it. While this book gives an interesting alternative view on the Cthulhu mysteries (like what if you don't know what night-gaunts are, how would you describe them?), I miss the cosmic horror that Lovecraft was into. (In that way, this reminds me almost of something by August Derleth, who took care of Lovecraft's estate and was also a Catholic.) And once you take away the main theme of cosmic horror and loneliness, what's left in the Cthulhu stories is just stage settings. Wolfe may be very skillful in moving around sets to make them look real, but I'm not sure there's anything beyond the surface here.

[Randy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really don't know what to say about this book.

I'm a complete, card carrying Gene Wolfe fan. I buy all of his works as they come out in hardcover. I rave to any and all about the man and am in complete awe of his genius.

But . . .

I just can't get over my first impression of this book. Frankly, it's a stinker.

But, given that it's Gene Wolfe, perhaps, just perhaps, the book will run like a program in my memory and at some point I'll suddenly see it.

Don't think so. This is more likely that this is simply a miss. I shrug, put it on the shelf, and await the next.

[Travis Heermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe has clearly earned his Grand Master title, but I'm not sure if this book isn't trying to be too smart for its own good. I spent much of this novel feeling as if everything was slightly askew, as if 95% of the action was happening off-stage, given only brief glances of larger machinations afoot, not all of which are adequately explained.

The heroine, Cassie Casey, aspiring actress, is dragged into strange interplanetary dealings between Earth and the planet Woldercan, by a wizard, Dr. Gideon Chase, whom we find later is a professor at Miskatonic University. A couple of Lovecraftian touches and the presence of Cthulhu and a cult of his worshippers, make an already convoluted story even more so. Cassie is a charming character, with bravery, perception, and moxie, but because the goings on behind the scenes are so high-powered, complete with interplanetary gangsters, nefarious government agencies, Great Old Ones, werewolves, bat-winged humanoid aliens, all of which are so incomprehensible and disjointed that I couldn't quite grasp all the connections, poor Cassie is simply tossed hither and yon by forces beyond her control, along with the reader, with too often no clear cause and effect. She has little agency of her own throughout most of the story, except in instances where she simply grabs it and hopes for the best.

The narrative breaks all the rules I was taught about plot and scene construction, but there's a powerful subtlety lurking behind everything, leaving me a strong sense of more going on than I can grasp, and a pervading oddity about the whole thing. Nearly all of the book is dialogue, often snappy, often difficult to follow, mirroring a dramatic play with the reader expected to fill in a whole lot of blanks. In the hands of anyone other than Gene Wolfe, I probably wouldn't trust that this was purposeful. The fact that the plot of the latter half parallels the plot of an internal play lends a sense of layering and resonance that I can sense is there, but cannot quite grasp the significance of.

Gene Wolfe's writing always provides greater appreciation on subsequent readings as one sees connections and deft touches that were missed on the first go around, but because this was such an odd mix of Lovecraft, science fiction, 1930s noir, romance, and Spunky Broadway Heroine in the South Pacific, I don't know that I have the kind of time to do it with an entire novel.

I would recommend this book to Gene Wolfe fans, and to people looking for something unlike any other book, someone ready to embrace oddity and just take a surreal ride with a charming red head.

[Ivy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes! This book was awful. I don't normally write reviews unless a book is so amazing that I can't keep it to myself but this one I have to warn others about. This comes from a pretty prolific author from the long list of novels shown on the inside cover so I'm bummed that this was the first book of his I picked up. I'm not sure where the author was trying to go with this one as it was all over the place. It starts off with a government conspiracy feel then flips to science fiction, on to fantasy and alternates between these genres which isn't really fair to the reader. Also futuristic verbiage is used in the novel with no explanation as to what these things mean. Several times I had I guess as to what in the world this guy meant. This was a planet hopping, werewolf wait staff, volcano sea god love triangle for a washed up actress who gets her fame and talent from a presidential informant who uses mountain magic to future her career for his gain. Seriously!?! The storyline was a nightmare and I was honestly hoping she was going to wake up at the end!
The

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe is one of the world's greatest fantasy writers. He has also written some popular SF, notably the Book of the New Sun series. His SF has never really been my thing, as I prefer his fantasy work, but this is a real oddity that spans the two. Arguably it is science fiction, as the odd happenings all have 'science' explanations. And we've got some science fiction tropes such as warp drive, hyperspace and projected 3D TV. But the whole setting is a dream-like mix of periods.

So, though An Evil Guest is clearly set in a future where we have interstellar travel and have met one other intelligent race, a lot of the everyday technologies, such as the mobile phones, are distinctly early-twenty first century. Meanwhile the characters - both how they speak and act - are straight out of the 1940s. If that sounds weird, it really is - and yet, being Wolfe, it works wonderfully.

The central character Cassie Casey, a struggling actress, is thrust into a complex situation where nothing is quite what it seems. In classic Wolfe fashion the reader, like the central character, is rarely sure what's going on. This is helped by dialogue that is indirect even by Wolfe's standards - no one seems happy to give a straight answer to a question if they have an opportunity to reply obscurely.

If this sounds frustrating, it really isn't, as long as you are prepared to go with the flow and trust Wolfe. Things do mostly become clear eventually. And the ride is great.

However, don't expect total clarity when you get to the last page. Wolfe's endings are famously open - and this one feels as much a beginning as an end. In fact, the ending didn't quite work for me, which is the reason the book is only getting four stars. Even so, it was an excellent read. In the puff on the back, Neil Gaiman describes An Evil Guest as 'a twenty-first century pulp adventure thriller with SF and horror elements that nobody else could possibly have written'. He didn't intend that 'pulp' word as the insult it once was, and his assessment is quite true.

Best of all, this is a book that just won't get out of my brain, and I know I'll read it again. If you do try it, here's one puzzle to consider. Just who is the evil guest of the title?

[Mathew Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

What the hell did I just read?

This will be a love-it or hate-it book for most but I enjoyed the roller coaster the entire way through. I'm certain there is a mountain of things I missed below the surface on this one that I am no where near smart enough to figure out, but that didn't affect my enjoyment of the surface story and I can't wait to reread and check out online theories.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

A delirious swirl of genres - sci-fi, noir thriller, Lovecraftian horror - An Evil Guest is the tale of a superstar actress who gets caught up in a number of knotty plots and dark intrigues. It is a fast-paced page turner that reads remarkably quickly for a Gene Wolfe novel, a writer normally fond of baroque language and complex prose. In fact, the bulk of the text is dialog, reading almost like a screenplay at times. But the simplicity is deceptive: like a mixed drink where you can't taste the vodka, the story's various twists and turns often left me flipping back, half-dazed, trying to figure out what just happened and why.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slippery, obsessive future noir that folds horror and romance into a mythic theatre.

Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest moves with pulpy momentum while quietly opening into Lovecraftian dread and classical legend. Cassie, an middling and middle-aged actress remade into a star by uncanny gifts, sits at the center of a triangle between the philosopher wizard Gideon Chase and the billionaire alchemist Will Reis, and the surface story—late night bargains, betrayals, stagecraft—readily satisfies as a compact noir-romance.

Wolfe’s prose is lean; dialogue snaps and set pieces double as metaphors for identity and power. The novella rewards lateral reading: Will Reis’s name and methods invite alchemical readings about transmutation and value, Gideon’s posture suggests mentor/magus archetypes, and the shapeshifters and uncanny fauna send the tale sliding from noir into uncanny horror. Readers and theorists routinely treat the text as a palimpsest; enjoyable as pulp on first pass, insistently suggestive on subsequent ones.

Many commentators map clear resonances with the Cthulhu mythos: submerged, indifferent forces, oceanic dread, and the sense that human drama sits atop older, hostile architectures. Others overlay a Cassiopeia/Perseus pattern; Cassie as a star bound figure whose rise, humiliation, and rescue can be read against constellation legend; so that the romance doubles as ritual and mythic enactment. Those readings don’t cancel the noir; they deepen it.

Wolfe’s layering is the book’s principal delight; and utter f’n challenge. Small verbal dissonances return like stage cues, letters are flipped in dialogue, and symbolic correspondences accumulate into interpretive richness.

There is a crack in the armor though, Wolfe’s command of the architecture of masculine desire is often brilliant; but his attempts to render female interior subjectivity less so. Cassie is vivid in action and persona, but when the text tries to grow her conflicted love between Gideon and Will, the voice sometimes reads inauthentic. The noir stylization masks this at times, but the emotional core of her divided heart never quite settles into convincing feminine subjectivity.

Taken together, An Evil Guest is a compact, re readable experiment in genre blending: read it once for the noir, again for the alchemical and mythic echoes, and return if you want to follow the many public exegeses that press the novella toward Lovecraftian scale and constellation legend. It’s small, ambitious, and deliciously slippery (kinda like a shark god....or an elder god?).

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are good Gene Wolfe books and there are the rest of his works. This book is part of the latter category. It has the ambiguities, mysteries, symbols that you expect out of a Wolfe book, but it doesn't weave those things into a cohesive whole, in fact this is probably the most disjointed book by Wolfe I've read. It also just doesn't have characters and relationships written well enough to carry the book, making the mysteries and symbols ultimately no more than window-dressing.

The first two-thirds of this book is a noir mystery set in the near future. This style and the setting prove a problem right off the bat, as they work at odds with each other: the very old-fashioned tropes of noir, with people saying "golly!" and speaking of relationships in a more demure way, make most of this section of the book seem like it's set in the past. The occasional mention of interstellar travel, cloning, etc. are therefore even more jarring. Also, Wolfe doesn't write the near-future very interestingly, with little in the way of new ideas about what the future might look like (zero points for self-driving cars, for instance). The last third of the book takes an abrupt left-turn into the Lovecraftian, the problem being that there only started to be hints of this aspect of the book after the first third was already complete. Thus, the book feels like two different halves weakly sewn together, with neither half being satisfying.

As I mentioned, there are mysteries here if you want them- is there more than one werewolf in the book? Are some characters time traveling? Is Cassie warping reality around her with her newfound higher-plane powers? Ultimately, I'm left not caring, because these are questions I would only care about if they were built upon a proper storytelling base, and here Wolfe has neglected the fundamentals. As already mentioned, the story is disjointed. Alongside of that, there aren't many characters here. There's Cassie, but her defining traits are her beauty and her concern over her weight, not any aspect of her intellect or personality. There aren't many other characters to speak of besides Gideon. In most Wolfe books, written from the perspective of the main character, it is understandable how the narrative focuses exclusively on a single character and reduces everyone else to secondary roles. Here, there's no such excuse. The lack of well-drawn characters is a serious enough flaw, but it seems minor in comparison to how poor the relationships are depicted in this book. An Evil Guest has made me realize that Wolfe really isn't able to write characters falling or being in love. Here, he tries, and the result is a terrible love triangle that failed to evoke anything Wolfe could have possibly intended.

Without a cohesive story, or characters, or interesting interactions between characters, the signature stylistic touches of Wolfe are incapable of redeeming the book. They save it from being downright bad, I guess, but they don't make this book worth reading unless you want to read everything in Wolfe's oeuvre. If you aren't a Gene Wolfe fanatic, skip this one.

[Dawn Albright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe is famous for his unreliable narrators. Typically, when I read one of his books, there is a moment when I realize what's really going on -- A is really B, the bad guy is the good guy, there is a time loop so the end of the action is really the beginning, probably all of them at once. Then when I finish reading I go on the internet and pick up the pieces I missed.

With this book, I never got the aha moment. I was tucking away all the seeming non-sequiturs and then when I got to the end it still didn't make any sense. OK, I thought, I was a dummy this time. I went on the internet to see what was really going on. Nope, it seems like no one knows. There are some theories, but none of them provoked the aha moment I've enjoyed with his other fiction.

It reads OK as SF noir with a guest appearance by Cthulhu. For Wolfe, it's light and breezy. If you read it as a straight piece of fiction, as if someone other than Wolfe wrote it, it's got a lot of non-sequiturs, unexplained plot twists, and events that seem important but go nowhere which would weaken the book considerably. Knowing it's Wolfe, I suspect there is some underlying secret that would clear up all the discrepancies but he hid them too deeply this time.

In particular, the main character is supposed to be in love with the person originally set up as the bad guy, but I don't see it at all. At the beginning, she's supposed to be leading him on so he can be caught, but along the way she is supposed to doubt that he's really all that bad and then fall in love with him for real. Is that really what happened? I dunno. The emotional resonance was simply not there. I didn't believe she fell in love with this character who terrified her at the beginning. At one point she gives essentially the Marilyn Monroe line that it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man, and that's that. But her actions after that imply that Wolfe did intend for her to genuinely be in love with this man. ???? The emotional core of the book is missing without understanding that.

There is a hint in her name -- Wolfe makes a big deal out of her name being Cassiopeia instead of Cassandra. Cassiopeia was a queen who insulted the gods with her vanity. So I'm thinking she is motivated by vanity instead of love. However, if I know this from putting together puzzle pieces instead of from the emotional core of the book, it falls flat for me. And it doesn't explain the other missing pieces. Most importantly, there is a kidnapping that feels like it should be important but then disappears, and a mysterious death at the beginning that also disappears. In typical Wolfe, things that disappear don't really disappear, it's just that the resolution was so subtle you might miss it. So I'm willing to believe that's the case with this book, but I haven't encountered any readers smart enough to pick it up yet.

Maybe I'll wake up at 2AM some night understanding what Wolfe was trying to do, but since it seems like no one got it, I doubt it. I expect this to remain a puzzling and frustrating read.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess if you ever wanted to find out what a Gene Wolfe novel looks like when he's on cruise control and letting his hair down, this may be the nearest you're going to get. And even then its still smarter than most SF books you're going to read.

Certainly if he's going to pick a time in his career to have a bit of fun, by 2008 he had proven most everything a SF writer could possibly prove and won practically all the awards (nobody named an asteroid after him as far I can tell, which is kind of a shame). Ten years before he had published "The Book of the Short Sun" and then followed it up half a decade later with "The Wizard Knight", all works deceptively simple on the surface and ridiculously complex underneath . . . almost all of his work can be described as a constant tension between what the story is telling you is happening and what is actually happening. Done properly its glorious and Wolfe did it more than properly.

Here, though, it feels like he's being too opaque for his own good, giving us a bunch of oblique blanks but never supplying the story with the tools that can help us fill them. It makes for an entertaining reading experience but a weird step removed from the feeling you get from a typical Gene Wolfe story.

It starts intriguingly enough. A man who appears to be some kind of super private detective is called into a meeting with the President and a high level official . . . they want him to take care of some rich guy who is also a sort of super criminal but is incredibly elusive. All straightforward enough . . . until they mention that the man has been an ambassador to an alien planet that Earth has some sort of diplomatic relations with (the book summary says it takes place a hundred years in the future but other than some fancy vehicles there's no way you would get that) and perhaps might have learned some stuff there. The private detective has been to the planet himself as a child when his father was an ambassador there. Details of the planet are kept very vague. So far, it feels very Gene Wolfe.

Then we go and make a foxy redhead a star.

Cassie (not short for Cassandra!) is an actress of moderate talent. Then she meets the private detective, who tells her he needs her help to stop the evil rich man. She agrees, they go on a journey and after the expected Gene Wolfe Gap in Time (those blank spaces between sections often do a lot of work) suddenly she's an amazing actress that is like the Meryl Streep of off-off-Broadway plays. Which means she's in demand. Which means she gets recruited for a big play. One that is backed by, you guessed it, the evil rich guy. Who may not be as evil as you'd think. Or maybe he is.

Yeah, this one is odd and this is coming from an author who once set three entire books around a guy with constant retrograde amnesia. One of the fun parts of reading too many Gene Wolfe novels is that you start to automatically assume that all the characters are lying to you in serious ways (or at least leaving stuff out) and you start to look for the places where the real story is happening, because there's no way that people are giving it to you straight.

And they probably aren't but unlike previous novels its hard to tell at times what it is trying to give you. The dialogue is often rapid and borderline flippant, as if everyone realizes they're also in a play and are only taking this as exactly as serious as they have to. We get hints about whatever planet nearly everyone knows about but never seem to discuss directly. The play might be some elaborate mirror of the plot and is something going on with her new assistant? Before too long Cassie has to choose between two powerful men that seem to be in love with her but are also playing some elaborate game. Of love. Also, weird bug things sometimes appear to her in windows several stories above the ground. Its all meaningful. Unfortunately at times it feels like all the meaning is in another language.

With all these elements sort of prancing around in the background like black suited dancers against a black velvet draped wall there's this continual hope that eventually something is going to break and Wolfe's going to turn this all on its head and blow it wide open, albeit probably tangentially. But as much as I kept waiting for that "oh! so THAT'S what this is about!" the plot just kept chugging along, teasing and teasing but somehow hiding from itself. Sometimes we get bursts of action where people get shot at but then its back to the play or the rich guy falling in love with Cassie . . . you keep waiting for that back curtain to get pulled down but it never seems to happen.

Something Wolfe seems to be trying to do here is perform a high level mixture of genres, so you have SF and noir and some kind of Lovecraft homage but for the most part they seem to be slyly evading each other, as if unable to intersect or exist in the same paragraph. Thanks to Wolfe's skill it never feels like he's generating whiplash but the ride is so smooth that you miss all the peaks and valleys that can come with a typical Wolfe experience. In a way the entire plot seems to be happening completely off-screen and the characters in the story are just hearing about it from other people. Which would be fine if we even got a glimpse of what was really going on. But all we have are these people, who are either lying or confused or completely misinformed.

The end result is a book you admire because its Gene Wolfe but you don't necessarily feel that strongly about because its not clear what the stakes are on an emotional or even intellectual level. It just progresses and things keep happening and they are mysterious (as I said, even the straightforward stuff feels mysterious because he just trains your brain that way after a while) but all the different strands treat each other like matter and anti-matter . . . if they touch we get a big destructive explosion but after a while you kind of want that? Its only toward the end sequences that we get a real sense of the larger story as Cassie and the rich guy wind up on some Polynesian island, which is around the time the Lovecraft influence starts to creep in. If nothing else, the book is worth it for postulating that if there really was a R'lyeh the US would simply just bomb the living crap out of it and be done with it.

But then things get hazy again and you start to feel like you're in an audience for some absurdist play where everyone gets what's going on but you. By the time it finishes its hard to tell what's been accomplished . . . the closing scenes have an elegiac mood about them, a sense of gossamer tragedy where the impact is keenly felt even as the meaning dissipates all too quickly, the idea that something was lost, even if the exact parameters can't be defined. That's where the book worked best for me, where it most felt like a Gene Wolfe story, where you finally feel the subtle pressures of the weight he's been bringing to bear all along and how even when the periphery is brought into focus it still doesn't have to be very clear. You wish the book had shot for that tone earlier on, or had tried to weave it into everything that was going on. And of course Wolfe puts in a cast list at the end that doesn't really illuminate anything, as if to mock us.

Its not bad. Nothing Wolfe did was ever bad. It is entertaining in its breeziness but its definitely not where you want to start with him because you could come away with the wrong impression that he's just some talented genre-masher, putting it all into a giant blend-o-matic. Anyone remotely familiar with his work can tell you that he's much deeper than that, to the extent where he's very capable of changing your view of both SF and fantasy. But sometimes you do things because you want to be innovative and sometimes you do things just for fun. This one is good, but its just for fun and probably should be approached with that in mind.

[Yolanda Casica · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I couldn't decide what I thought about the story or the characters. This was about a third into the book, I suppose, so not very far in. The majority of the book does stay mysterious and sensual, which was a great tease. I'll admit I didn't believe the characters fell in love exactly when they did but individually they were terrific. The book is dark but not suffocating in the way it presents itself.

It took me a while to get into the story and when I did...man what a story. It constantly strung me along, making me believe a certain thing and then wham! I'm confused again. The ending of course is nothing like I expected or wanted and that is fine with me.

By the end I was very emotional and had to go for a walk to try and clear my head after reading through so much to get that ending. I'm not disappointed by it, far from it.

When I first decided to get this book I had never read Gene Wolfe before and had no idea what to expect. I still don't. Not really. I loved this book is what I'm trying to say...it's just that I feel so...empty. I feel crushed in a way, like I've just tasted an extremely delicious appetizer but I only got a one piece. It was satisfying, but the nagging craving for more is still there.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

First impression: Great writing, terrible characterization, illogical plot, interesting premise, tantalizing mythology/magic/science, anticlimactic ending.

But! He comes so highly recommended!

But–but! That doesn't matter if his writing doesn't work for me.

But-but-BUT! The book is so stylized that the above negatives were probably intentional! After all, it's clearly not only a pastiche of at least three different styles/genres but also an exercise in deconstructing narrative and genre at a very basic level.

But-but-but-but I don't care. It gets three stars, because I didn't like any of the characters, I didn't believe in their relationships, I didn't believe the sexy ones were sexy (especially the men), I was annoyed at the most egregious lacunae in the plot, and what I did like didn't make up for all of that.

But-but-but-but- BUT : I will read more Wolfe, to see if I ever "get" him.

[Nicky · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought when I got to the end of this book I'd know what to think of it, but nope. I still don't know what to think. I feel like, since this is Gene Wolfe we're talking about, it must be genius and I just don't see it. Like people who somehow read Tolkien and just don't have the mindset that can appreciate the glories of his best work. Especially since people like Neil Gaiman think it's genius.

But. Everything else tells me that this is near-incoherent, with characters who seem devoid of inner life, and rules that not only keep changing all the time but aren't even coherently explained as they change. I just felt more and more puzzled, and not in the sense that some of Gene Wolfe's work has inspired in me.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a lot of talking in this book. A lot. In fact, the entire thing is one endless conversation. Wolfe is a good writer so most of it is pretty clever. But some of it isn't. For example, here's a sample aphorism from one of the main characters: "Add nothing to God and you get good." Even with a laugh track, that nugget is a groaner.

I tell you, the whole thing just wore me out. At some point I lost patience with it. To paraphrase Elvis: "I need a little less conversation and little more action." The Lovecraftian horror kept things punchy, but I fear it showed up too late.

[Shozo Hirono · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe the weakest Gene Wolfe novel I've ever read.

[John Defrog: global citizen, local gadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve known about Gene Wolfe for ages, mainly via his contributions to a number of SF/F anthologies I read back in the 90s. However, I’ve never gotten around to reading his novels, and when he passed away in April, so many writers whose opinions I respect talked about how great he was, so I decided it was time to give him a try. This particular book was the only one available on my most recent book hunt, and the description sounded great – pulp noir with a Lovecraftian twist – so I went for it.

Turns out the description barely scratched the surface. The story is set in the future and mashes together a whole bunch of genre tropes – magic, werewolves, aliens, giant intelligent bats, flying cars with warp-drive, sea monsters, etc, much of which Wolfe seems to throw in as he goes along. Somewhere in here there’s also a story – interplanetary man of mystery Dr Gideon Chase is tasked by the US President to find alleged spy Bill Reis. Chase recruits aspiring stage actress Cassie Casey with a simple proposition – he’ll use magic to make her a superstar if she agrees to help find Reis. She does, and falls in love with both Chase and Reis.

And. Well. Frankly, it’s a mess. Wolfe throws a lot of different things into the mix but it doesn’t cohere well in terms of worldbuilding or plot. The problem is that most of the story relies on dialogue to explain what’s going on – and most of this involves Cassie Casey, who tends to get sidetracked so easily when talking to people that it makes it hard to follow what’s going on or why. Seriously, most of her conversations tend to ramble to the point where it’s like she has no idea why she’s even in this story. Which is unhelpful since her conversations comprise the majority of the book. Wolfe may have had a reason for this – and I’m told his books are typically deeper than they look on first pass – but I’m damned if I know what it is.

To his credit, it wasn’t so bad that I gave up on it – I kept hoping everything would gel by the end. It didn’t. But that could well be my problem. Anyway, even great authors turn out a not-so-great book once in a while, so I do intend to give Wolfe at least one more try.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second time through this one. Here’s what I wrote* in 2008:

great story. these are jokes would've been a better title, but wolfe has already used it. in an evil guest everyone is playing a role (or two), and they camp it up, big time! an evil guest has just about everything we've come to expect in a wolfe novel: colonised worlds with shape-shifting natives, hidden familial relationships, causality paradoxes, bad accents and totally wacko pacing. there might be a reason for everything, but my guess is that the great cthulhu was more of a red herring god than a squid god.

I think I got more of the jokes this second time around, but I’m not entirely sure. That uncertainty. That’s the the thing with Wolfe, isn’t it?

*for WeRead. Remember that? Now if I could only hop to Woldercan and resuscitate my MySpace reviews…

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cassie Casey is an undistinguished actress with "latent" star quality. Dr. Gideon Chase is a philosopher, wizard and high stakes trouble-shooter who casts a glamour on Cassie and hires her to entrap a mysterious and seemingly dangerous businessman.

Bill Reis is said businessman, a one time ambassador to the planet Woldercan, who has learnt some interesting physical tricks of his own as a result of the advanced biology on that world.

This trio of characters inhabit a future America which is also like a past America, shooting up into space in "hoppers" while conducting conversations in snappy, 1930s style dialogue.

Much of this involves ordering a multitude of sandwiches with extremely specific ingredients, e.g. "I want a club sandwich, turkey and bacon on lightly toasted white bread. Mayonnaise in a cup on the side."

There is plenty of playfulness, a kidnapping, a murder and an attempted murder, a werewolf (as always with Wolfe), a gaggle of giant bats and a Lovecraftian type "horror" from beneath the sea and beyond the stars called The Storm King. And there is plenty more besides.

And all of it ultimately adds up to...I'm not entirely sure?

Appearances are always deceptive in a Wolfe novel and this was no different. Much of the interest in this story came from Cassie's changing affections for the two main men as she understands more about them and their role in the obscure, high-stakes battle being acted out.

Onomastics are important with Wolfe too, so I looked up the meanings of the names Gideon ("destroyer" or "feller of trees") and William Reis (which could be translated as "protective king") and it certainly helped to know those meanings, but they don't necessarily point to where you would expect.

There is also plenty of shape-changing going on, with characters transforming "up" and "down" in both form and, I suspect, in spiritual function. This was another key, possibly to the storey's central lock, but I couldn't open it after one reading.

Wolfe is always tricky, he never "leave(s) a clue more than once" to quote his own words; and much which can only inferred at best. There is always a deeper plot hidden beneath the surface story.

Yet upon first reading of An Evil Guest, I can only imagine that he either surpassed himself this time out, or that he simply lost his way during his latest genre-bending exercise.

Put simply, I was completely along for the ride for the first 2/3s of the story, even though I knew I was only getting snatches of what was going on, but the last third took it somewhere else entirely, somewhere that didn't quite fit with what preceded it.

I don't mean to say that it was a total digression, it wasn't; it's just that so much happened in such a hurry, so many new and crucial characters were introduced and killed or discarded, that it seemed like willfully obtuse plotting to me.

Another gripe, which I think only a voracious reader of Wolfe like me could have, is the manor in which his characters constantly quiz each other throughout. This often reveals important plot points or gives us our only look at events that happen off stage, which I have no problem with as a device.

But why does Wolfe never grow tired of variations on "May I just ask you a question? In fact, may I ask two?" - who speaks like that? That's not a literal quote, but any avid reader of latter-day Wolfe will recognise dialogue like that, it's almost endemic.

Uncertainties and quibbles aside, there was still a lot to admire here. The story was a rollicking one for the most part, while few can write as silkily as Gene Wolfe, so there is always a pleasure to be had through the reading alone.

I can only bring myself to give it three stars, however. I will certainly read it again, and if the last 100 pages sit more comfortably with the first 200 second time around I will be back to edit this review, no doubt with a more favourable rating.

p.s. I finally got around to a reread during the Xmas of 2018. Unsurprisingly I did indeed pickup on a lot more of what Wolfe was about this time, and the abrupt shift in scene and pace near the end was a lot less jarring.

That said, An Evil Guest remains one of my least favourite novels by the maestro. The dialogue still irritated me in places, alongside all the nodding, smiling, and grinning the characters did.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered Gene Wolfe more than twenty-five years ago, when I first read Book of the New Sun, and have been following him ever since. He has been hailed as a modern day Melville, at ease in both the novel and short story genres. He’s disappointed me only three times: The Wizard Knight diptych and Pandora by Holly Hollander. The former just never measured up to what I’ve come to expect from Wolfe; the latter because he fell short writing from the female perspective. His last novel, Pirate Freedom, on the heels of The Wizard Knight, was for me a return to form, and so I looked forward to reading An Evil Guest (no, it is not my biography).

In An Evil Guest, Wolfe mixes Lovecraft’s mythos and Miskatonic University ― much of the story takes place in Lovecraft’s fictional town of Kingsport, Massachusetts ― with iPods, the Internet and intergalactic hoppers. Set in the latter half of the twenty-first century, An Evil Guest is also flavored with a Chandleresque taste of the mid-twentieth century, although, unfortunately, Wolfe lacks the wit and sense of comedic timing to carry it off. Our protagonist is Cassie Casey, an aspiring actress who makes a deal with a wizard to become a star of the stage only to become engrossed in a deadly game of double-cross, eventually finding herself on a South Sea island menaced by the god, Cthulhu, in the nearby underwater city R’lyeh.

Wolfe is a master of blurring the lines of reality ― in this case the distinctions between past, present and the future. The story is dense, which may leave many readers feeling excluded, even as Wolfe often resorts to dialogue to drive the story; at times the narrative is so sparse the story reads like a stage play.

As in Pandora by Holly Hollander, Wolfe again tries his hand at cross-gender writing, and again he falls short. Feminists of both genders will be dismayed by Cassie’s characterization. In one exchange, Gideon Chase tells her: “One day after you get to Kolalahi you’ll be wearing a bikini that covers three square inches. And every man who sees you will foam at the mouth.” Cassie responds by giggling and sitting down in front of her mirror to put on makeup.

All of the male characters objectify her:

“This is one of the things I love about you. You’re not at all intellectual — we intellectuals are, for the most part, fools — but every so often you show the most marvelous penetration.” I can only imagine the reaction I’d get if I tried that line on a woman.

In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson tells the receptionist at his agent’s office, when she asks him how he writes women so well, “I start with a man and remove all sense and accountability.” A sexist commentary to be sure, which only goes to show how difficult it is to write as the opposite sex. In An Evil Guest, Cassie’s character lacks just enough authenticity to be a distraction to enjoyment of the whole.

In An Evil Guest little is explained, most is left to the reader to infer ― are Bill Reis and Gideon Chase one and the same (Reis managed to pickup the ability to shape-shift while visiting the distant planet Woldercan)? Not for the uninitiated, I wouldn’t recommend An Evil Guest as an introduction to Wolfe.

--J. Conrad Guest for The Smoking Poet

[Sade · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given the number of big-name blurbs at the front of this book, I have to say I was really disappointed by An Evil Guest. So much so that I seriously considered simply not finishing it, and that's speaking as someone who hate-read their way through both Emperor Mollusk and the truly execrable Sugar-Frosted Nutsack.

The Evil Guest is described as a pulp thriller for the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, the author puts so much energy into creating his noir ambiance - a good 97% of the novel seems to take place in the thirties - that when modern elements appear they are confusing and out of place. So much of the book is a throwback that we get very little feeling for the future; Wolfe's economic sense, for instance, is so far off that the characters refer to sums of money that would be moderately appropriate today, then expects us to believe this is a hundred years in the future. Indeed, aside from some poorly explained hyper-space method of travel and reference to an archly-named planet populated by humanoid aliens, we have no sense at all of the futuristic world our characters supposedly inhabit.

And oh, the characters. Not a one is deeper than the page they're printed on. Not only are there a good many of them, but new ones get introduced all the time; with old ones cast off and mostly forgotten. There's a cast list in back (encountered only after you no longer need it), where every minor role is given a name and description equal to the weight of every one else. We know we have a heroine, the annoyingly named Cassie Casey. Do we have a hero? Maybe. Are there two? Possibly just one - or is it the other! - is really the bad guy. Who knows? Don't expect to tell them apart, except by initials (both appear under more than one name) that 'cleverly' tip you which is which.

Don't expect to be able to keep track of the endless conversations, either. Many go on for well over a page without ever attributing who's speaking, so that you have to count back lines if little details like that matter to you. You certainly won't figure it out by the way they talk, because every character in this pot-boiler has the same damn voice.

As for the plot, well, don't count on keeping track of that, either. (uh - insert minor spoiler alert).
First we're chasing bad guys, then some never-explained offstage bit of magic turns the heroine into a star overnight (and none of her friends or coworkers seem to particularly notice the change). The middle section reads like a romance novel in which the girl can't decide which guy she really loves - and believe me, if she doesn't know, the reader *really* doesn't have a clue. Eventually we wind up on a remote desert island where the islanders speak a condescending pidgin or else some sort of cockney slang; there's assassins, unexplained bat aliens, werewolves, and oh, why the hell not, Elder Gods. Yes really. And all of this squeezed into a paperback that barely tops three hundred pages.

If you don't mind reading something that chugs along like a 1930s serial, discarding plot twists the minute new ones get made up and never really explaining anything, then by all means take this to the beach, on an airplane or on the subway with you. Because should you happen to leave it accidentally behind any one of those places, you really won't be missing anything at all.

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book isn't worthless by any means, I felt when I was reading it as if an essential part of it was missing. It took me a while before I was able to hit on quite what that was, and I'm still not sure I'm entirely right, but my best guess at this point is that character development is completely left out. The main character, Cassie Casey, is an actress who becomes enmeshed in a complex plot involving government black ops, a billionaire with a shady reputation and strangely easy access to gold, a university professor with seemingly mystical powers, and strange networks of spies and assassins. The book generally gives us Cassie as a viewpoint character, but even as we're watching her every move, her motivations remain completely opaque. She goes from seemingly loving the mysterious professor to loving the man the professor is attempting to kill, and we're never given a basis for understanding which of these loves, if either one, is really true. The motivations that fuel the other characters are clearer, but more in a sense that we're told what motivates them, rather than being shown those things. Again, it never really rings true. It's almost like a novel written by an autistic person, in which the feelings and emotions that typically drive people are left out of the book because the author doesn't understand such things. The plot seems like it could be pretty entertaining if I understood and cared about the characters, and there are some neat elements of setting--the idea of a near-future sci-fi tale that mixes in Lovecraftian elements remains appealing to me, and I will admit that the book delivered in a big way on these elements, which is probably why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1. Ultimately, I found this book unengaging. As an intellectual exercise on the part of the author, it may have been useful, but there's not much of anything here that's actually worth reading.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I revere Gene Wolfe, but like many others I have to pan this book.

Gene Wolfe often gives us a very passive hero to whom things just "happen". We also often get strange pointless dialog, out of context things said, and incredibly illogical behavior.

Unfortunately when he set this book in times he wanted to seem somewhat modern, and coupled it with a backdrop of a noir spy mystery, his usual tactics of character and plot development are out of place. A ditzy actress who blathers inanities almost constantly suddenly finds herself the main focus of a gambit to capture a wealthy, genius billionaire. She is used as this gambit by another wealthy sophisticated genius. And we are supposed to believe that simply because she has charisma and is pretty, these two geniuses fall all over themselves aeound her.

Stranger things have happened, but seldom without there being several around the men thinking they are complete idiots. Unfortunately if Gene Wolfe thinks everyone is acting like an idiot, he failed to clue me in.

This book kinda stumbles along with no plot or intent, and then ends. Gene Wolfe likes protagonists who seem to wander purposelessly, then somehow become a Queen, King or Emperor. But usually along that journey such magnificent things happen that the insanity and illogical happenings look like they belong in the story. Here we get a few vague references to werewolves and giant talking bats and that is about all we get, other than an oversized angry cuttlefish we never see.

I wonder what this book COULD have been.

[Nigel · Rating 1 out of 5]

A funny thing happened yesterday. I decided to stop reading a Gene Wolfe novel. Yup, I decided An Evil Guest just wasn't worth my time. I love Wolfe. Soldier of Sidon and The Wizard Knight were amongst my favurite reads last year, but this? Nope. It's set in the future but drenched in the past, and so triangulates on the present. Consequently, stuff that passes fine in his science fiction and fantasy becomes unbearably grating, specifically his patented 'dialogue as spoken by no living person, ever, not even bad old pulp stories.' The way characters bring Sherlock Holmes style razor sharp deductive reasoning skills to bear on stuff that at first looks trivial, and then later turns out to actually be trivial. People telling each other exactly how many points they're about to make. Vacuous female characters.
It all feels like a subtle joke, (and I suspect this book is supposed to be humourous,) not necessarily on the reader, but it just doesn't seem terribly funny, and if there's all this stuff going on in the background or hidden, then why does the stuff up front have to be so boring and stodgy? Never a badly written sentence, mind you. Maybe I'll pick it up again later in the year and it'll be better.