Customer Reviews

Endangered Species

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Wolfe! Three intense pleasures!

I would advise readers not to read straight through *any* collection of short stories, but to savor them. More to the point, in his preface to his collection _Book of Days_ (also printed in _Castle of Days_) Wolfe advises his readers not to read his stories the way we eat potato chips (one right after the other), but to read, reflect, reread, consider. In this collection, too, Wolfe has a thoughtful, intriguing, and all-too-brief introduction.

I don't know another way to read Wolfe. The man taught me how to read.

The stories in the collection:

A Cabin on the Coast
The Map
Kevin Malone
The Dark of the June
The Death of Hyle
From the Notebook of Dr. Stein
Thag
The Nebraskan and the Nereid
In the House of Gingerbread
The Headless Man
The Last Thrilling Wonder Story
House of Ancestors
Our Neighbor by David Copperfield
When I Was Ming the Merciless
The God and His Man
The Cat
War Beneath the Tree
Eyebem
The HORARS of War
The Detective of Dreams
Peritonitis
The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus
The Woman the Unicorn Loved
The Peace Spy
All the Hues of Hell
Procreation ( i -- Creation; ii - Recreation; iii - The Sister's Account)
Lukora
Suzanne Delage
Sweet Forest Maid
My Book
The Other Dead Man
The Most Beautiful Woman on the World
The Tale of the Rose and the Nightingale (And What Came of It)
Silhouette

Some notes:
"The Map" and "The Cat" happen in the world of the "New Sun" series (Urth)
"The Dark of the June" "The Death of Hyle" "From the Notebook of Dr. Stein" and "Thag" form a sequence
"Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" and "Woman the Unicorn Loved" are linked.
The titular "Nebraskan" of "The Nebraskan and the Nereid" also appears in Wolfe's "The Eleventh City" (available in his _Innocents Aboard_) and in his "Lord of the Land" (available in his _Starwater Strains_.)
"War Beneath the Tree" also appears in Wolfe's _Book of Days_ (pb in _Castle of Days_)
"The Detective of Dreams" shows the influence of G.K. Chesterton
"When I Was Ming the Merciless" is thought by many readers to have been inspired by the Stanford prison experiment.

Gene Wolfe is a thinker. His intricate fiction demonstrates a mind that is crammed with ideas which hurl themselves into the souls of his characters and the ideals of his stories with forceful abandon. So insightful and varied that it usually defies the overapplied label of science fiction, Wolfe's work is not for the shallow reader; for those who desire food for thought, on the other hand, this is the richest of feasts. Yet in spite of his subtly interwoven social commentary and his consinstently profound innovations, Wolfe's most valuable trait is his skill as a pure storyteller. The quality of the material in these stories and the adeptness with which their themes are transferred to prose is enough to entice even the most bored bookworm

How is it this man is not better known! Perhaps short stories, mr. mcdorman, aren't meant to be read by the plenty. I for one can't help placing the book down after reading a great one (and that applies to almost every story in this collection) to sit back in wonder as the story unfolds again in my mind. Enjoy this,you, anybody. And find the rest of his stories, which none are small or without ardor.

Almost no Science Fiction in that book. A collection of stories that quickly got me bored. I even lost hope of finding anything of interest by the middle of the book. And I was proved right; it went on worse and worse. Now I realised I should have written my review right after my reading (I read it three months ago) because I can't even remember anything notable that I could report here. Yet, a word still lingers in my mind: surrealism... For what it's worth.

Wolfe's second short story collection is packed with excellence, but it goes on too long. At over five hundred pages and twenty stories, it is hard to maintain interest while reading straight through the book. The book is still worth reading, containing many stories of the highest quality, but I suggest reading through it at a slower pace.