An Evil Guest [Mass Market Paperback]

Gene Wolfe (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 26, 2012

Lovecraft meets Blade Runner in a stand-alone supernatural horror novel. 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 the story of an actress who becomes the lover of both a mysterious private detective and an even more mysterious and powerful rich man, a 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. The rich man is the angel 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.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Caitlín R. Kiernan Near the conclusion of An Evil Guest, a character of no particular importance to the plot rather nicely sums up something central to understanding the story and the world in which it is set: The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. This paraphrase of Einstein stands as a sort of thesis statement for this deliriously anachronistic novel, which, though seemingly set near or at the end of the 21st century, feels more like a wild confabulation of the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s, with a bit of the '80s sprinkled here and there, and just a dash of the first decade of our new millennium.After striking an unholy deal with extrasolar ambassador and wizard Gideon Chase, Cassie Casey—a plucky amalgam of Grace Kelly, Claudette Colbert and Nancy Drew—becomes an overnight theater sensation and spends the rest of the novel coping with the cloak-and-dagger consequences. In a rapid-fire game of double-crosses, Cassie must come to terms with a world whose boundaries are not where she once believed, while avoiding death or worse. Though much of the action revolves around Lovecraft's fictional town of Kingsport, Mass., the book isn't the sort of baroque gothic horror that Lovecraftian usually denotes. Indeed, Wolfe moves deftly from the Oval Office to backstage Broadway and from faerie restaurants to South Sea islands menaced by the dread elder god, Cthulhu, in the nearby underwater city R'lyeh, concluding with a poignant scene that leaves Cassie looking back on the Milky Way as she races toward an alien planet. Even as Wolfe warps time and space, he also warps and dismisses the too often indulged expectations of genre readers. There is no slavish devotion to dull futurism, but a swaggering, romantic, unabashedly unlikely tomorrowland. The gilded age of the Busby Berkeley musical rubs shoulders with a film noir curiously free of smoke and grime. The Shadow's Lamont Cranston is a real historical figure; one may have breakfast at the International House of Toast and make calls on cellphones. Buck Rodgersesque science fiction careens headlong into Cold War intrigue. Lovecraft's mythos and Miskatonic University exist alongside iPods, the Internet and intergalactic flying cars. As befits such an homage to the pulp tradition, the novel's style is terse, minimalist, at times reading like a screenplay (or a stage musical's book), advancing primarily through dialogue. It succeeds by tumbling from unexpected world to unexpected world, from one grand absurdity to another, from one choreographed dance scene to the next, without ever missing a beat.Award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan's most recent novel, Daughter of Hounds, was published by Penguin in 2007.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Praise for An Evil Guest

“[An] enticing mix of mystery, wordplay, and ethical inquiry.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“Succeeds by tumbling from unexpected world to unexpected world, from one grand absurdity to another, from one choreographed dance scene to the next, without ever missing a beat.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Signature Review by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“It’s a pulp thriller—and that’s a compliment, because Wolfe knows from pulp thrillers…and because here he’s creating a strange sort of genre meltdown, a twenty-first century pulp adventure thriller with SF and horror elements that nobody else could possibly have written.”
—Neil Gaiman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tor Fantasy; Reprint edition (June 26, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765360977
• ISBN-13: 978-0765360977
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #490,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gene Wolfe is winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and many other awards. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He lives in Barrington, Illinois.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Place to Begin or to End Up. March 29, 2009

By Dmitry Portnoy VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Some of the best, and best known, works of science fiction are neither novels nor short stories, but something in between: just long enough to fully explore an idea, yet short enough to focus on a single set of events. "The Time Machine," "Who Goes There," (a.k.a. "The Thing,") and "Flowers for Algernon," (a.k.a "Charly") are three examples of the genre adopted into movies. Others were expanded into novels or even series by their original authors: for example, Theodore Sturgeon's turning "Jefty Is Five" into "More Than Human," Isaac Asimov's linking a series of novellas into "The Foundation Trilogy," and Orson Scott Card's stretching "Ender's Game" into a cottage industry that would be the envy of Pere Dumas. I would guess more than half the science fiction novels ever published started out as something shorter (and often better.)

As far as I know, Gene Wolfe himself has done this twice: turning the bleak and brilliant "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" into a single-volume "trilogy" of interlocking mysteries, and expanding an unpublished (possibly untitled) novella into his unprecedented and unsurpassed four-volume masterpiece "The Book of the New Sun." In this, he has shown remarkable restraint. Pretty much unanimously acknowledged as the master of the novella form, Wolfe could have filled ten acclaimed careers simply expanding into novel-length the short fiction collected in this book. "The Eyeflash Miracles" could easily have been a novel, "The Cabin on the Coast" a fantasy-adventure trilogy, "Seven American Nights," what else, a seven book post-apocalyptic epic, "Forlesen," the lifetime output of a couple authors I could name.

But no, they are what they are. "The Best of Gene Wolfe" is a book of books within books, a book of seeds each of which sprouts into a sequoia, but not on the page, in your head. It saves trees by blowing minds, I guess, making this collection both a boundlessly generous feast and an exquisitely torturous tease.

Is it "The Best of Gene Wolfe?" No, the best of Gene Wolfe is still his twelve-novel (untitled) sequence of "Sun" books. ("New," "Long," and "Short," in case you don't know.) But "The Best of Gene Wolfe" is the best of the best. A paradox? Why not. It's a great place to start reading him. Or a great place to finish--then start over.

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An Evil Guest...with interesting recreational drugs October 15, 2008

By Colin P. Lindsey VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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 interesting 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 story 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.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars brilliant fun... November 25, 2008

By Addison Phillips

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

An Evil Guest follows other recent Wolfe novels (Pirate Freedom, Wizard/Knight) that pastiche various fantasy or SF forms of the past. Unlike the others I just mentioned, Evil Guest is broader in ambition and more more true to its (multiplicity of) sources.

At its core, Evil Guest is basically a Hammett or Chandler "mystery" thriller circa 1930. The style, use of dialog, basic milieu, and plotting would feel right at home next to the Big Sleep or Maltese Falcon. Yet we have a completely modern world also (with cell phones, the Internet, etc.), plus 1950's Buck Rodgers space opera elements and some Cthulhu mythologizing thrown in for good measure.

If this sounds dubious, crackpot, haphazard, or just plain impossible... well... it's Gene Wolfe, here. It's not just eminently possible, it all works to build tension and gravity---not knowing who precisely our heroine should trust or whether/how it will work out until the end. The disparate elements and homages (with one exception) play seamlessly together, blending into the whole nicely. (The one exception, for me at least, is the mention of Miskatonic University in the Epilogue: begone, blatant mention!)

If you love Wolfe's "Book of the {whatever} Sun", the Latro stories, and are here for the unreliable narrator, Byzantine plotting, and 57-layers of indecipherable meaning (and you didn't like, say, Pirate Freedom), you might not enjoy this book. The tautness of the genre and the nature of the book will *seem* to deny you those myriad pleasures. I say "seem" because I think he's doing something pretty remarkable without the sundry tricks. I don't love it quite as much as some of Wolfe's earlier works. But I was steadfastly entertained and I liked where this went, indeed indeed.