There Are Doors, by Gene Wolfe ***

This is a solid Wolfe offering, with enjoyable prose for a narrator who is interesting but not brilliant. As I've said before, I prefer Wolfe's more intelligent narrators, but this guy is pretty good. I liked the overall atmosphere of the book; it's got a playfulness that's sometimes but not typically present with Wolfe, and the world he creates with gangsters and cops and hospitals is cool. It's more of a regular story in one sense - it feels like it could take place in an American city in the 40s or 50s - but it possesses a fascinating otherness that I can't quite describe. It's kind of a Wolfe-lite, in that the subject material of a love-story/adventure is a bit smaller in scope than some of his grander epics. In a way, it feels like it could have been a solid medium-length novella, but it just happens to go on for 300+ pages. Though I don't mean to say that the book overstays its welcome; it's just that the subject matter is not as intense. Nonetheless, this book challenges the ability of the reader to figure out what's going on, and this makes the reading experience work on more than just basic levels. Because the narrator has some mental health issues, it's very difficult to tell what exactly is happening - are the issues imagined or real, or possibly even somewhere in between? Wolfe plays these games better than any author I can think of, and he does well with them in this book. I'd recommend this to Wolfe fans and possibly to readers who don't normally like fantasy or sci-fi but enjoy unique and imaginative stories (though do those people exist?).
(Winter 2006)

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