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Cargando... An Evil Guest (2008)por Gene Wolfe
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. 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. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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Lovecraft meetsBlade Runner in a stand-alone supernatural horror novel. 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 stunningPirate 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 the story of an actress who becomes the lover of both a mysterious private detective and an even more mysterious and powerful rich man, a 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. The rich man is the angel of a play she stars in. But something is very wrong. Money can be an evil guest, but there are otherevils. As Lovecraft said, "That is not dead which can eternal lie." No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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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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