The Road Goes Ever On and On

Day 6: To Pittsburgh

On the plane I read Gene Wolfe's new book An Evil Guest. Gene Wolfe is my favorite science fiction author and this book was hyped as a 30's-style Lovecraftian pulp horror story set in the future with other planets, wizards, and Cthulhu. As you can imagine, I was pretty psyched to read it.

Unfortunately, it mostly sucks.

The main character is a woman. That would be fine, even a really cool opportunity to mess with the tropes of 30's pulp fiction, but Wolfe apparently decided to import his value system directly from 1933 as well. So she mostly cries and is pretty.

Even that would be fine. It's obnoxious, but I know plenty of women who spend a lot of their time crying and being pretty. But then almost every single sentence in the entire book is dialogue, and it reads mostly like this:

"I have two questions. Wait, make that three."

"Okay, I'll try and answer them."

Invariably, only the first question is answered, and only sort of, before it's time for the next chapter.

Of course the plot doesn't make sense. The genius of Gene Wolfe is that his plots are buried pretty deep and almost never really make sense until you read the book again three or four times. Meanwhile on the surface there is enough interesting stuff going on to keep you entertained, and enough hints of the real story to force you to read the thing again. This is even true of his short stories, which is impressive and really difficult to pull off. The problem with An Evil Guest is that the on-the-surface story is not remotely interesting, and you never get enough of the real story lurking beneath.

When you do it's awesome. One chapter shows us a Cthulhu-cultist's journey to R'lyeh, where, of course, the dead god waits dreaming, and it's so freaking cool you want to crap your pants. And then another time a character talks about how there are all kinds of aliens on our world, but they never reveal themselves to us. And then he compares it the other planet in the book, Woldercan, which humans have visited and instead of lurking in shadows and swamps and ruined mansions in New England they've set up an embassy and diplomatic relations. Why isn't it like that here? Well, he explains, the difference is that Cthulhu is really the ruler of our world and he claims it as his private fiefdom or farmyard.

!!!! Holy freaking crap, right?? Unfortunately I just ruined the whole book for you because those are the only cool parts. Then I realized that I'd written a book review instead of a blog post about my trip to Pittsburgh so I got mad and posted it anyway.