Oh, Gene. I was so excited when I read the dustjacket. Pulp 1930s Lovecraftian noir fiction by Gene Wolfe? I was salivating. But what's here does not deliver the goods -- not even slightly.

What this really looks like is two novellas mashed together with mostly the same characters, and only one of them is any good. The first two-thirds of the book reads like a [b:Raymond Chandler|2052|The Big Sleep|Raymond Chandler|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41AGA624Z5L._SL75_.jpg|1222673] detective-noir piece. It's almost all dialogue, and while the suspense is great and the characters interesting, it's like reading a sketch of a novel. So little information about anything is there that one keeps reading to learn something -- anything -- that will put the dialogue in some kind of context.

The last third of the book we suddenly get the Lovecraftian elements we've been waiting for, but only as stage props. Only two or three times does Wolfe manage a passage that's Lovecraftian in language or effect. That said, we also find out a lot more about what's going on, which makes this part of the book far more interesting.

But wait. The conflict from the first two-thirds of the book is rendered null and void by fiat in part two. So Wolfe has to concoct an entirely new conflict -- warmed-over HPL -- that ultimately fails to deliver the goods.

I wanted to like it, I really did. But if you truly love Gene Wolfe, go read "Shadow of the Torturer" again. You'll be far, far happier.

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A cross-genre clusterf*ck. Would not be so bad if the "main" genre story was not horribly boring. ( )

This book charmed me, then took a few left turns without, I think, enough clues to bring me along. It's worth a little more puzzling out, and it was certainly fun while it lasted, but.... ( )

I had added this to my to-read list a long, long time ago after seeing rave reviews along the lines of "Wolfe does Lovecraft right", and it's been gathering dust for a while.

I had really enjoyed Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series (despite how much it made my head spin); An Evil Guest surprised me with how little I enjoyed it. It has its moments, but getting to them is a slog through a boring story. I'm aware that Wolfe's whole thing is an ostensibly simple surface concealing something complex, but...well, even when I didn't understand what was going on in the Book of the New Sun, I was able to sort of drink in the scenery as Severian wandered about. Cassie Casey's future America fails to produce that same sense of wonder and discovery. (I have to say that even looking up analysis of this online doesn't drive me to reread it the same way that looking up information about Book of the New Sun did) The ending is pretty interesting, but it's just too little, too late.

Maybe it's unfair of me to compare a big, dense series like New Sun to a single novel, but that's all the Wolfe experience I've got, and I just feel like this one failed to grab me.
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A brilliant, complex novel dealing with deep concepts of time, space, and love, packaged in a deceptively pulpy mystery/horror framework. ( )