I must admit that I was intrigued when I heard that the new Gene Wolfe novel, An Evil Guest, would be a heady mixture of science fiction, pulp detective mystery and Lovecraftian horror. Of course if anyone could pull off such a feat than Wolfe would be a pretty good bet. Has he managed it? Well, sort of.
The good news is that the book rattled along apace and kept me reading when I should have been doing other things (like sleeping and eating). The bad news is that the plot really doesn’t make a lot of sense (and I say this confidently, it is not just me missing half of what Wolfe is writing about). Also the setting doesn’t really lend itself to the odd, stilted way in which Wolfe characters so often speak. But I enjoyed reading it, and I suspect that Wolfe had a lot of fun writing it too. I’ll leave you with a small snippet of him getting carried away:
Her tiny dressing room seemed to be exactly as it had been the night before. Was the phone tapped? Was the room bugged? Cassie decided that the answers were no and yes. No because there was no phone. Yes because there were roaches..
Quite a lot of them, really; but everybody knew that it was the fly on the wall that spied on you. The roaches hid til you went to sleep, so they could raid your peanut butter.
Quite.
And on that note, I’ll just avoid anything in the pantry and go out to the international House of Toast. Fontina or anchovy? Difficult choice.
Stylistically it’s brilliant. There are so many elements in the pastische that there’s always something fresh and unexpected to giggle about. The plot does jump the shark a bit, literally enough that I wonder if that was intentional. (Do you think Wolfe was traumatized by a performance of South Pacific as a little fellow?) For once I thought the dialogue fit quite well, as it’s highly reminiscent of Earle Stanley Gardner. I’m hoping that there’s a sequel which, perhaps, clarifies some of the plot elements.