An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe is rightly famous for the epic world-building of future-history tetralogies like Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun. And while these books are unparalled in the scope and complexity of their imagined worlds, my favorite Wolfe book is There Are Doors, a deceptively simple tale of a department store clerk who falls in love with a woman from another world. Two other recent works, The Wizard Knight and his Locus Award-winning novella, “Golden City Far,” are concerned with love: true love, knightly love, adolescent love. Though arguably simpler than his “solar” cycles, Wolfe’s more “grounded” works leave a deeper emotional impression.
The publisher describes An Evil Guest as “a novel in which Lovecraft writes Blade Runner,” which is superficially correct but also misses the point entirely. At its core, An Evil Guest is a romance, a notoriously tough sell to the genre crowd. The three corners of our love triangle Cassie Casey, a struggling musical actress who appears in kitschy off-Broadway shows; Gideon Chase, a dashing detective-wizard who gives the U.S. government the brush off to follow his own investigations; and Bill Reis, former ambassador to planet Woldercan, recently returned to Earth and somewhat changed. Chase needs to use Casey to get to Reis, and he uses his magic to unlock her inner star. Reis wants Casey because she is beautiful and Chase because he is useful, and he finances Casey’s latest production (”Dating the Volcano God”) to get closer to them both. Casey wants them both because — well, she’s not sure what she wants.
The jacket flap claims the story is set “100 years in the future,” but the calendar year is irrelevant. The world has a hard-boiled noir atmosphere — the musicals and showgirls, the diners and automats, cars and trains, and South Pacific island getaways — but it also has interstellar travel, shapeshifting aliens, and superluminal communications. There’s also room for werewolves, fairies, and alchemy…despite the varied sources, the novel isn’t a pastiche; Wolfe’s world is entirely consistent with itself, if entirely confounding to expectations.
And it is, in the end, Lovecraftian. Though only in the end; the first four-fifths of the book will have you scratching your head about why that particular adjective was invoked. The truth lies so far beneath the surface that for most of the story, it’s completely invisible. When elements of the mythos do start to appear, they’re surprising, but also startlingly effective - the lurking horror is unnerving, but the invisible horror is terrifying. The sudden introduction of unknowable evil into Wolfe’s strange-but-rational world has a powerful effect on the reader; having spent the entire book trying to understand the rules of this strange world, it turns out that none of it matters. The surface strangeness was only a distraction from the true forces, both good and evil, at play.
An Evil Guest is not Wolfe’s greatest work. But the way it seamlessly combines Lovecraftian horror, pulp, romance and science-fiction into a cohesive whole could make it his most personal. It’s hard to imagine another author that could keep this many balls in the air.
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