by Gene Wolfe
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Product Description
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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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 A completely confusing mess, 2008-11-14
This review saddens me very much to write. Gene Wolfe is my favorite author and I have read every one of his novels. With Wolfe you expect that his books will often not be straightforward but this book is just completely confusing. I mean seriosly does anyone really have a clue as to what actually happened in this book? This book very much reminds me of Castleview since it brings fantasy elements into everyday life. Castleview is not rated highly for a reason as it is confusing if not entertaining. If you thought Castleview was not good, and I would rate it as one of his least satisfying novels, then you will hate this book. I would not recommend this book to even the most hardcore Gene Wolfe fans of which I am one.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 An odd one among his many odd books, 2008-11-02
So sure I am that I will love them, that I buy all of Gene Wolfe's books in Hardcover as soon as they are released, and have done so for quite some time. Many of his earlier works and short story compilations are among my favorite for this genre. And everything about this book screamed I would love it - a masterful author writes Lovecraftian hard-boiled sci-fi... not something you find everywhere.
I have to admit though, that this story was even more obtuse than expected, and seemed more like an outline of a good story needing completion than the engrossing and ultimately understandable mind-rides I've come to expect from this author. Admittedly, my opinion may change upon a few re-reads, but I usually follow the slippery time sense and wild plotting the first read through, more or less.
I found the main characters here pretty unlikable. I found it hard to care if any of them achieved their goals. And I was a little disappointed at the very minor role the "Cthonic" aspects of this story played... the jacket led me to think there might have been more of that, but it was late and light.... just a subtle touch of the tentacle.
I don't regret picking it up, but new readers to Mr. Wolfe might be advised to start with some of his earlier works. Any of the various "Books of the xxx Sun" are brilliant and highly recommended of course.
I'm probably also ranking it a bit low just because I expect so much from this terrific author. : )
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Easy Read, Difficult to Understand, 2008-10-20
"The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions." Be sure to keep that in mind while reading the novel. It may help...or it may not. It's easy to read, too easy in fact--there is barely any narrative or description, mostly dialogue, and that is delivered with deadpan directness. The conversations in the first part of the book reminded me of an old Thirties film and they were a little disconcerting since the characters seemed to have a habit of saying the same thing several ways in case the reader didn't understand it the first time. A genius wizard, whose father was ambassador to a planet called Woldercan, is asked by the government to help find and kill a former ambassador to the same planet who's become a spy. The wizard enlists the aid of a young actress with whom he immediately falls in love. She in turn falls in love with both him and the spy while the genius becomes a turncoat and takes up the spy's cause, also. There's such a lack of passion revealed in the scenes these people have with each other and this utterly blinding desire is professed so coldly it just might be overlooked. I confess to liking the first section but then, confusion set in. Somewhere along the way, the original premise seems to have been lost or forgotten or something...what with all the Shark Gods and aliases and innocent bystanders and ex-husbands getting killed just to show that it can be done and human sacrifices... Like a good meal that doesn't settle, it needs something--I just don't know what. The ending is so sad as to be almost poignant and I had to reread it several times to make sure I understood what was happening (refer back to that first sentence) and I'm still not certain I have it correct. Perhaps the fact that Gene Wolfe is called the Greatest Writer in the English Language Alive Today daunted me a little. Perhaps I'm just too dense to get all the ramifications. Using the blurb alone, a totally new and different novel could be written. All I know is that I went into reading this with the idea that it was one type of story and immediately discovered it was nothing like I thought. I'm not even certain I liked it. I don't think I did. It definitely left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction and unease. The villain (if there is one), the hero (if there is one) and the girl (she's the only one who's definite) all deserved a more thorough explanation and better than they got.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 An Evil Guest...with interesting recreational drugs, 2008-10-15
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 A return to form, 2008-10-10
Recommended - a return to form after 'Wizard Knight' and 'Pirate Freedom' which struck me as a bit boy's-own-story-ish. This is classic Wolfe in the 'Free Live Free', 'Castleview' style: combining mundane reality and mystery, beautifully written, not yielding everything on the initial reading. Terrific.
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