Gene Wolfe
The Sorcerer’s House
Tor, 2010. $24.99
So, once again I’m faced with the problem of how to review a Gene Wolfe book. This is much akin to explaining to radio listeners what a great dancer Fred Astaire is: For those who have seen him, such an explanation is unnecessary; for those who haven’t, such an explanation is impossible. (“Aw man, you should have seen that move! It was totally graceful! Trust me…”) I’ve managed (somewhat) the feat before, having reviewed The Knight in The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Such it is with The Sorcerer’s House. I started a standard review, with a standard plot description (educated man just out of prison mysteriously given deed to house he was squatting in), discussed Wolfe’s literary experimentation (the book is told in epistolary format), and generally tried to jump through the usual hoops of a book review. Then after about three paragraphs, I read what I had written, and went “Damn, this is awful! If I had never heard of Gene Wolfe, this review certainly wouldn’t inspire me to pick it up!”
So: You should read The Sorcerer’s House, because it’s very good, it’s tricky, and it’s better than An Evil Guest. It’s got a fox woman, antique dueling pistols, an impossibly old samurai sword, a trapped vampire, werewolves, and a house that just seems to get bigger as it goes along, and, strangely, it all works.
But most of all you should read it because it’s Gene Wolfe.
Oh, it also has a scene where the protagonist tells his newly incarcerated twin brother that he shouldn’t go on about how excellent to food was, since he knows prison food is bad. And then he spends the next page or so describing what he ate.
