Shades of beige

Mr Thalassocrat · 07 Oct 2008, 03:47 · from 2008-October.txt.gz

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From: thalassocrat08 at gmail.com (Mr Thalassocrat)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2008 14:17:57 +1030
Subject: (urth) Shades of beige
In-Reply-To: <410C7F2E-C485-429C-9EAE-4A9E9DC7B032 at io.com>
References: <410C7F2E-C485-429C-9EAE-4A9E9DC7B032 at io.com>
Message-ID: <b12d82080810062047g57dc3798q519206c66cadbc1e at mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 2:54 AM, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:

> Forget food in _Evil Guest_; anyone else notice how many exotic shades of
> off-white through light-brown (or perhaps I should say birch through
> caffe-latte) are mentioned?  What's up with that?  (if this has been
> discussed before, I'm sorry--I've been trying NOT to read _EG_ posts until I
> got a chance to read the book, which I now have)
>
> SPOILER below:
>
> And is there agreement on what sort of beast-woman Cassie *is*?  I like
> "Robin" because of the red plumage, the "the alien food isn't *really*
> worms", and of course the execrable Batman-cub joke.  I  don't think it's
> the right guess, though.
>

We get an explanation from Gid for at least one character's preferred colour
styling: werewolves wear shades of grey.

I don't think Cassie is a beast woman, is she? She's gone up from human, not
up from beast.

Unless I've missed something, which is more than likely - this is a *damn*
strange book.

Eg: Almost all of the story is tightly focused on Cassie - we see what she
sees, and so on. But there are three scenes where the focus is on Gid sans
Cassie: at the start, when he's shot, and when he's spirited away from
Cassie's apartment after being shot. After that: no more Gid-focus. I really
don't understand that. If you're going to shift focus to another character
at some points, why not at others, and why not to others?

A bunch other things. Overall, either there's a lot of hidden stuff going on
here  (and Wolfe has taken some scary risks that people will just toss the
book without caring enough to puzzle it out); or else he's jumped the
Shark-God (except for the beautiful writing in the last third).
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