#15: An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

A Broadway stage star is convinced by a wizard detective to spy on a powerful industrialist recently returned from an alien planet, causing romantic and dramatic complications, in Gene Wolfe's genre-bending pulpfest An Evil Guest.

Wolfe's wholly original Book of the New Sun opus (which begins with The Shadow of the Torturer) stands as one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy series, though its density may not be for all tastes.  The same might be said of this stand-alone outing, a tribute of sorts to the pulp era, an oddball mash-up that might have happened if H.P. Lovecraft and Cornell Woolrich decided to put on Ziegfield's Follies.  If you know what I'm talking about, rush out and get this right away.

I'm a big fan of Gene Wolfe and thought this was a solid entry to his, I think, somewhat underrated body of work.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana.