It will help a lot if you read Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao before tackling An Evil Guest. I can say that much with certainty. And I’m fairly confident that if I’d ever read any of Wolfe’s work other than Pirate Freedom, which I enjoyed very much, I’d have known better what the hell I was getting into when I sat down to read his latest book. It does draw you in and compels you to read, and bits of it are brilliantly done, but . . . as I read on I was sitting there with my head cocked on one side, like a puzzled dog. Cripes, I thought, what leaden dialogue . . . oh, no, wait, it’s a pastiche of pulp thrillers, right? So leaden dialogue is appropriate. The book opens with an interview between a dumb cowboy president of the U.S.A. and a dark suave Arrogance who speaks in stock guru phrases. Let’s see where he’s going with this, I thought. And when is this set? The 1930s? The 1960s? Now? Ten or a hundred years from now? Well, it’s a Gene Wolfe book, so that part doesn’t matter. Just trust the man and go along for the ride, I said to myself.
So the dumb cowboy tries to enlist suave dark Gideon Chase, who is a sort of wizardly fixer, to help the U.S. government track down the most Evil Man in the World Today. Bill Reis is supposedly a super-wealthy criminal mastermind with some sort of superpowers. Chase’s father was once the ambassador to a planet named Woldercan, and Reis has also been the ambassador to Woldercan. Chase agrees — conditionally — to find Reis for the government. He goes out, locates a struggling actress named Cassie Casey and enlists her in his search. She will help him lure in Bill Reis, and in return Chase will make her a superstar. He does this by sort of tweaking others’ perception of her. She is instantly dazzling, desirable and fantastically talented in the eyes of all who see her.
From this point on the book is Cassie’s, with Gideon Chase gradually fading and morphing out of the story. He doesn’t vanish, though, before he, like Bill Reis, falls in love with Cassie. Apparently he falls under his own spell. Cassie is a stock ditzy redhead, a nice person and reasonably brave, but nothing to get that excited about. The story shifts gears and concerns itself with show people trying to get a new production ready, with elements of danger and mystery in the plot — ominous stranger keeps trying to see Cassie! Nice people who get in his way are murdered! The show, Dating the Volcano God, is a musical farce about a missionary’s daughter in a tropical paradise with volcano-worshipping natives. The stranger turns out to be Bill Reis using the alias of Wally Rosenquist, and he’s bankrolling the new production because he wants Cassie to be the star. He’s infatuated with her. He adores her. He acts like a stalker. He keeps arranging Howard-Hughes-like dates. He knows perfectly well Gideon Chase has set her up to lure him in.
This bit of dialogue here had me on the point of throwing the book across the room: “I’m going to win you, Cassie. I doubt that you believe me, but you’ll see. When I first heard of you, I wanted to find and destroy you. It was to be an exhibition of my power, something to frighten Chase. . . .”
No, actually, that wasn’t what provoked my violent reaction. I thought it was a badly-written speech, but if Wolfe’s intention is to riff on pulp style, it fits. It was Cassie’s reaction to it that blew me out of the water. She smiles at him and tells him she’s flattered! “I wanted to find you and destroy you”? Hel-LO! Cassie, honey, this is the point where any real girl starts sweating and wondering whether she’s got cab fare in her purse or whether she should just climb out the powder room window now and run for it, and, by the way, how exactly does one go about getting a restraining order? It is a false, false note.
There follow a lot of scenes in which show people have lunch and talk. There are murders, apparently now by the F.B.I., and Gideon resurfaces long enough to have an affair with Cassie, take her to a restaurant where the staff are supernatural creatures, and mention that he’s working for Reis now and if Reis wants to take her on a torrid South Seas weekend, she should probably go. She goes.
Now the book shifts realities again and Cassie appears to have entered a dimension where Dating the Volcano God is a reality. It is revealed that she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, which might, I guess, explain her lack of self-preservation instincts around dangerous men and her passivity. Bill Reis, it turns out, is, de facto, the Volcano God — the High King over several tribes of natives who worship him as a wise and just ruler for whose money and protection they are grateful. Just as this plot line appears to be taking shape, another plot intrudes and Cthulhu comes calling, destroying Bill Reis, destroying the happy natives, and Cassie is only saved by a band of night gaunts who are friendly enough toward her to fly her off to an uninhabited island, where she lives for a year before being rescued. When she leaves the island, she is so prematurely aged and grayed that no one recognizes her, just like one of those mortals who lingered a year in Fairyland and returned to our world to discover ages have slipped by. Broken-hearted, Cassie decides to travel to Woldercan. She visits a former ambassador and asks him for information. He tells her, among other things, that women have certain needs and she should bring plenty of sanitary napkins. I swear to God. The creep factor doesn’t end there. Cassie takes off through the stars to Woldercan, praying for Bill Reis to come back to her.
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Good Christ, I thought, I have to review this! What’ll I say? Looking at the cover blurbs, I can see that Neil Gaiman thought it was great. What did he get about it that I missed? Hmmm . . . well, no, he didn’t exactly say it was great. He said it was a strange sort of genre meltdown that nobody else could possibly have written. Certainly true. I looked up other reviews on the Internet. Adam Roberts had about the same reaction I did, and objected more strongly to the ghastly fake-British dialogue used by the Oxford-educated King Kanoa (it’s on the order of “pip pip, cheerio old bean”); I think he missed the pulp pastiche intention, there. I went to that nadir of opinions, the Amazon Customer Review page, and saw that people either loved it or hated it. I also got an unnerving look at Wolfe’s greatest fans, one stating bluntly that there are two type of people: those who love Gene Wolfe and those who suck. Another snippily dismissed Pirate Freedom as mere boys’-own twaddle, whereas in her opinion An Evil Guest is “beautifully written.”
Well, parts of it are. The man does keep you reading. In the end, however, I have no idea what the story was supposed to be about, what he meant, why he kept setting up plot elements and dropping them. Is it just me? Am I, a mere writer of boys’-own twaddle myself, unable to comprehend the great plan here? I mean, I adored Pirate Freedom. How did I feel about An Evil Guest, in the end?
Imagine a — oh, let’s say a middle-aged redhaired writer who goes out on a date with a handsome bald writer gent. She’s dazzled by his expertise, his charm, his effortless brilliance. He knows all the right wines to order. His conversation scintillates with intelligence. She goes home thinking to herself that he’s the second coming of God at least, and maybe the Dalai Lama too.
Then she goes out on the second date with him. He appears to have smoked crack just before picking her up. He ignores her, he disappears for long periods into the toilet, he tells crude ethnic jokes, he spends half their meal talking on his cell phone with someone else, he leaves her with the check, and as she runs out into the parking lot after him he peels out in such haste he runs over her foot. As she’s standing there, cursing, a crowd of his fans approach her and make nasty remarks about her intelligence. Is she bewildered and angry? Jesus H. Christ, what do you think?
(Tor Books, 2008)
