![]() Then, a year or more later, and for reasons I can no longer remember, I picked them up again to reread them. I worked my way dutifully through the New Sun books only to feel baffled at the praise lavished upon them. My experience with him is that it is in re-reading his novels, and rarely just reading them, that they reveal their excellences. If she were to marry Chase would she change her name to Cassie Casey-Chasey? What if her middle name were Jessie? Thoughts like these plague the heat-oppressed brain as it attempts to fathom the strange undercurrents of Wolfe's novel.īecause, as we all know, Wolfe's titanic reputation in the genre is mostly due to his novels' complex undercurrents, not to their often diffuse and awkwardly choreographed surfaces. Gideon Chase has also fallen in love with her, as she has with both men, and this peculiar love triangle is the main structuring principle of the novel. Indeed Reis has fallen in love with Casey, and wants to marry her. She is then hired by Reis (who is using the name Wally Rosenquist) to be the female lead in a musical he is putting on called Dating the Volcano God. It's sketchily described, but after the process Casey manifests a glamour previously only latent within her and becomes the starriest of stars, the toast of the town. He does this by taking her to a Canadian mountain and using magic to awaken her inner charisma. Chase in turn recruits Cassie Casey, winning her over by promising to make her a megastar. government approaches Gideon Chase to investigate Reis. government does not trust Reis, who has returned from the distant alien world of Woldercan having picked up from aliens there the ability to turn base metal into gold (though lethally radioactive gold, which seems to me of limited usefulness) and possibly the ability to shapeshift, either downwards from humans into wolves, or else upwards from humans into. ![]() There are two other important characters: Gideon Chase, who is a sort of wizard-cum-private investigator, and Bill Reis, a billionaire supervillain (or. The main character is Cassie Casey, a not-very-successful actress in what reads very like Damon Runyon's Depression-era Broadway. It's a sort of future-as-1930s-America soldering together of pulpy noir and Lovecraftian horror dusted lightly with some of the props of Golden Age science fiction. I don't want to overstate matters on one level Wolfe's new novel is perfectly comprehensible. Since reviews are largely in the business of giving readers a sense of what a novel is about and whether it is any good, this may prove problematic. I've now read this novel twice and I'm still not entirely sure what exactly is going on, or whether it's any good or not.
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