An Evil Guest

In response to those who replied re An Evil Guest, I haven't started reading the book yet. It's third person, near-future, which squares with "Memorare", and shapeshifters appear to be involved. --Nick Gevers.

I've always thought it would be interesting for Wolfe to do a story with shapeshifters in it. It will be interesting to see what he does with the concept. - Rostrum

I think he already did.

uh. Alright, I think this post is completely full of win. But there is a chance it is completely full of fail. Either way, it's amazing that I can even type this email considering I have these floppy hands.

Just have your clone write your letters. Don

I think Wolfe should write a book about a torturer who does all sorts of horrible things except - get this - he's the hero! Of course it would have to be in the first person. .

Funny story; I JUST finished Fifth Head two days ago. Very cool book.

Fine with me, as long as he does his pirate book first.

It's up on amazon, with a cover illustration. Nifty. http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Guest-Gene-Wolfe/dp/0765321335 Don The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=178109961

The blurbs make it sound pretty great, though I didn't read through all of them - I want to be surprised with the book after all. Great cover art though. And I believe we already knew it was a September release date; Amazon puts it at the 16th of September. One just wishes they could get it out a bit sooner. And have we heard anything new on Wolfe's other projects? I recall hearing about a few other novels he was working on? And as I know some readers like hearing about books Wolfe likes, he has a blurb on this: http://www.amazon.com/Space-Vulture-Gary-K-Wolf/dp/0765318520/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206247765&sr=8-1 -Matt

Back in the beginning of December Neil Gaiman posted the following on his blog: "For the last week, a few chapters a night, because you don't want to eat it all at once, I've been reading Gene Wolfe's next novel AN EVIL GUEST. I think I need to read it again. (This is a perfectly valid way to feel on finishing a Gene Wolfe novel.) I'm going to write about it here by way of setting my thoughts in order. It's set about eighty years from now, sort of, although the future feels like a high tech 1930s (intentionally, I assume, because in Gene Wolfe fiction it is safe to assume that things are intentional), so much so that one finds oneself reading the book trying to find a key to open it. The obvious key is Lovecraft, whose initials are dropped early, and further inside the book we find Miskatonic University and Great Cthulhu Himself (although not quite by name) , although that still doesn't really help figure out what kind of thing it is one is reading. The book is the story of Cassie, a minor stage actress who is just about to become a major Broadway star thanks to the wizardry of Mr Gideon Chase, a high tech mystery man and problem solver, and Cassie is also about to become involved with a multibillionaire named Bill Reis, who may be trying to murder her. (It also has Hanga, the shark god from Wolfe's chilling story "The Tree Is My Hat" in it, from the Wolfe collection Innocents Abroad.) The point that I felt I was getting a key to what kind of book this was was the point where the name Cranston was dropped. As in Lamont, and The Shadow. Which made sense of a few things, as both Gideon Chase and Bill Reis get to cloud mens' minds in their own ways, have high tech gadgets and adventures. And when I realised that then the book sort of shook and shifted in my head and it seemed right and sensible that the future was a sort of 1930s future, that the book moves from horror (sort of) to spy adventure (sort of, with FBI agents and competing government agencies) with a tech sometimes indistinguishable from magic, that Chthulhu's in there and a stage Musical called Bride of the Volcano God, that Cassie is a sort of actressy Margo Lane, that the very real Polynesians of "The Tree Is My Hat" have been replaced with larger than life characters who feel like they could have stepped down from a movie screen, that there is at least one werewolf (there are hidden wolves in most Wolfe books, perhaps all) and a zombie and things like huge bats that I'm still not sure what they were. It's a pulp thriller -- and that's a compliment, because Wolfe knows from pulp thrillers (he wrote a wonderful pastiche of one in "The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories") 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." Hope this helps everybody --Brian