An Evil Guest

Lovecraft mets Blade Runner. This is a stand-alone supernatural horror novel with a 30s noir atmosphere. 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 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."

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Signature
Reviewed 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.
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“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 21st century pulp adventure thriller with SF and horror elements that nobody else could possibly have written.”
--Neil Gaiman on *An Evil Guest

*

“Vast, formless things astir behind a seductive dark romance of Broadway stardom . . .  our feet leave Terra Firma unbeknownst, till mythos titans ring us round and we are star bound, lost . . .   Wolfe is  a grand master, the king of sly and incremental sorcery.”
--Michael Shea on
An Evil Guest