"The rich are his clients. Rich people, governments—they're all rich, never let anybody tell you different—and rich corporations. Nobody else can afford his fees. He takes the money and does what they want. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it isn't. He's a wizard. I'll give him that."
An Evil Guest is set in an alternate/future Earth where mind-reading and necromancy are real, cancer was cured a year and a half ago, and the human race has developed a warp drive, with the result that rich people own private "hoppers" the size of automobiles and can explore the universe on their own and the United States is in diplomatic contact with an alien civilization on planet Woldercan. We readers don't learn all this stuff immediately from the omniscient third-person narrator or in blocks of exposition, but in dribs and drabs in the conversation of our characters. The text of An Evil Guest consists largely of dialogue, snappy repartee made up of brief and clever sentences in which characters offer the reader and each other info in an ofttimes oblique manner, and often involuntarily--again and again characters do that Sherlock Holmes thing in which they intuit something from clues within another character's speech.
An Evil Guest has three principal characters, and they form a love triangle. As with the setting, we learn about these people's personalities and lives through dialogue, in bits and pieces, sometimes learning very important things about them quite late in the game, and, since our info comes from the spoken words of people who are all experts in art of deception who are trying to manipulate each other we have every reason to doubt the truth of everything we learn. We've got our protagonist, Cassie Casey, an attractive stage actress based in some northern American city. (We eventually learn it is the New England town of Kingsport from H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre.) We've got Gideon Chase, a famous college professor, a philosopher who is also known among the elite as "a wizard" who can solve almost any problem for those willing to pay his astronomical prices. In the first of An Evil Guest's chapters the President of the United States hires Chase to help the Feds deal with our third lead character, Bill Reis. The President considers Reis terribly evil, and so elusive that the federal government can't seem to keep track of him or figure out just what he is up to. Or so the Commander-in-Chief and his chief lackey say. Reis is like the richest man in the world and owns many businesses of all types--banks, restaurants, you name it--often under assumed names, and he is in close contact with the aliens on Woldercan, people who have a large supply of gold, which they can apparently create via molecular manipulation. (This novel is all about taking something and changing it into something else, or at least making it look like something else.) Cassie is almost always "on screen," but Chase and Reis just show up occasionally, though their actions drive the plot more than Cassie's, and Cassie and minor characters are always talking about and acting in response to these two mega-rich operators.
What unites Cassie, Chase and Reis is that they are all famous important people whose names, identities, and appearances are constantly changing, Cassie must mundanely, she being an actress whose assumption of other names and identities is (initially, at least) overt and expected by those around her. False names, shape shifting and people assuming multiple identities are a major theme of An Evil Guest, with even the many minor characters often pulling such shenanigans--a cop looks like one of Cassie's two ex-husbands; two people with the same name show up, one impersonating the other; people whom we have been led to believe are good turn out to be evil or vice versa; and on and on. A werewolf even makes an appearance.
I won't go into all the twists and turns of the plot, which includes in its first two thirds lots of detective story elements like minor characters getting kidnapped and murdered, leaving Cassie and us readers wondering who committed these foul deeds and why, and then science fiction stuff like hyperdrive travel and interaction with alien; in the final third the scene shifts into Weird Tales territory and Cassie finds herself on a tropical island near R'lyeh where she must contend with worshippers of Cthulhu.
Early in the book, Chase, wanting to use Cassie to help him get a hold of Reis, takes the actress to the top of a mountain and performs some manner of eldritch ceremony there--afterwards Cassie is irresistibly beautiful and charismatic, and attracts Reis to her like a moth to a flame. Both Chase and Reis quickly fall in love with Cassie, and compete for her at the same time they are trying to use her to learn about each other and perhaps control or destroy each other. Though the Lovecraftian elements of An Evil Guest are in-your-face obvious, we might also see Wolfe's novel as having a plot much like an A. E. van Vogt production--the main character gains special powers and becomes embroiled in the conflicts and machinations of the superpowered elites who run the world behind the scenes and things get crazier and crazier as the story proceeds. But as I have already suggested, Cassie, in contrast to many of the Canadian madman's heroes, is closer to a puppet or a victim than to a genius who masters the omni-science of Nexialism or prepares mankind to rule the sevagram or otherwise willfully launches a paradigm shift.
In the second third of the novel Cassie is the star of a musical financed by Reis to be a vehicle for her--thanks to Chase's sorcery, Cassie is a brilliant singer and a top-class dancer and makes a success of the show, which I think Wolfe intends us to think is silly and stupid, though at the same time its tropical island and volcano god content foreshadows the final third of the novel. New players, significantly government entities, stride on to the scene and themselves try to manipulate Cassie--the aforementioned kidnapping and murdering are part of this manipulation. This portion of the novel makes explicit that this America is one in which federal agencies are totally corrupt, ignoring the elected political leadership and acting independently as they compete with each other for power; these agencies are not above murdering innocent people. Gideon Chase and Bill Reis, fabulously wealthy and ultracompetent businessmen, swim with the government entities in this same pool of jockeying elites who ignore the law, where alliances are ever-shifting and the economy of which is based on exchanging favors. A local police official tells Cassie, referring to Chase, that
"Our friend helps me out sometimes, and I repay him whenever I can. There's a lot of that in my business."
Another of the players among these corrupt elites is the news media. One of the things that makes Wolfe an exciting and unusual writer is that in a genre full of atheists who are libertarians and atheists who are commies, Wolfe is a committed Catholic and a conservative, and in An Evil Guest Wolfe takes some swipes at that perennial punching bag of all right wingers, the mainstream media. Cassie has a friend who is a reporter who (like just about everybody) seems more interested in using Cassie to further her career or other desires than being her friend. Early in the book Gideon Chase remarks that "Newspapers are not notorious for their painstaking accuracy." One of the starkest but also subtle ways in which Wolfe suggests the world he is depicting, in particular its government and the media, is corrupt and reprehensible is through a TV news report that indicates that in this alternate USA women who regret their pregnancies are allowed to kill their children up to one year after birth and left-wing activists are pushing for the right to kill children up to age five. A TV news reader presents this little tidbit this way:
"In an unrelated story, the Supreme Court has extended the period for post-parturition terminations to one year. Civil rights organizations continue to press for five for defectives."
This news story comes after a commercial in which a bottle of ketchup uncaps itself and pours out its own contents in a "crimson fountain," perhaps Wolfe priming us to think of blood and perhaps even self-destruction (a society that murders its children is one that is killing itself) and a report about the collision of a train and a school bus. (Putting "In an unrelated story" between two different stories about dead children is one of Wolfe's little jokes.) This news program, delivered dead pan and casually by the talking head but gruesome to us readers, also includes notice that famous philosopher Gideon Chase was injured in an assassination attempt. (One of An Evil Guest's many instances of shape-changing is Chase having to have a limb amputated after he is shot and getting a battery of prostheses for use in different circumstances.)
The euphemistic references to the murder of children is one of the grimmer examples of wordplay in An Evil Guest, which includes some lame puns and plenty of jokes and clues within people's names. Cassie's agent has the last name "Youmans;" one woman's first name is "India," a source of jokes, and her assistant's full name is "Ebony White;" Cassie calls Gideon Chase "Gid" which of course looks a lot like "God," and another man is named "Gil" which is only one letter away from "Gid"--is it Chase in disguise? One of the more clever pieces of wordplay is an adage Cassie whips out during a one-sided discussion of religion and good and evil with her perplexed journalist friend: "add nothing to God and you get good." Did Wolfe come up with this or is it famous? Are we supposed to think Cassie, who is often portrayed as ignorant, came up with this, or that she got it from Chase, the philosopher who has proclaimed that good and evil do not exist?
The final third An Evil Guest is more fantastical and has more of the flavor of horror fiction than detective fiction, and is less dialogue-oriented, with more images and more action. Reis has Cassie brought to a Polynesian archipelago of which he is king--Cassie is considered queen by the inhabitants, Reis's subjects, whom we hear again and again are tall and fat. Also among these islands we find that among the secret elites always negotiating or fighting a shadow war with each other behind the scenes and determining Earth's fate are various monster gods, including a shape-shifting shark god and Great Cthulhu himself, whose sunken city R'lyeh rests nearby. Wolfe delivers a good horror sequence involving a woman killed by a shark and two very good horror sequences involving, first, a female Cthulhu worshipper who tries to get Cassie to betray Reis, and, second, a female private investigator hired by Reis to infiltrate the Cthulhu cult. This poor P.I. becomes a living dead tool of Cthulhu and has horrifying experiences down in R'lyeh and back on the surface; her adventures are probably the most immediately effective scenes/or in the novel.
Who will live and who will die in the cataclysmic battle that erupts when Reis manipulates the US Navy into attacking R'lyeh? Who is a Cthulhu worshipper and who is willing to die to save humanity? Will Cassie end up with either of the two powerful men who love her? Will the reader be able to figure out the significance of all the vague complicated hints in the Afterword about time travel and cloning? Can it be that people who have died are going to reappear, and/or that some of the characters we have met are in fact clones or younger or older versions of other characters?
What else can we say about An Evil Guest? Well, there is a theme that wealth and gold are perhaps more trouble than they are worth (the quote from which the novel's title is taken and which serves as its epigraph suggests as much) but then there is also the suggestion that businesspeople are more honest and better stewards of society than politicians and other government bastards. Is the world depicted in the novel, one in which infanticide is the norm and, apparently, Cthulhu is the real ruler of the Earth, some kind of satire of our real world where abortion is common and dictatorship and terrorism are rife?
Then we have the fact that our main character is an attractive woman who has been victimized and exploited her entire life and who has two failed marriages behind her. Like all the novel's characters, our feelings about Cassie must be ambiguous. Is she a heroine, or just a pawn, a victim, of others? Does Cassie ever really make a decision, ever accomplish a goal, or is she just pushed hither and thither by others, used by others and rescued by others? The difficult experiences she endures after the battle between Cthulhu and the US Navy change her looks, but do they teach her how to be self-sufficient? At the end of the novel Cassie is about to start a new phase of life; can we safely hope she will be happy and/or the mistress of her own fate, or is this new phase of life just the product of her being rescued by others yet again and should we expect Cassie to pull another blunder and enter into a third unhappy marriage?
An Evil Guest is a novel about dangerous space aliens, dangerous technologies and dangerous supernatural powers, but at its core it is a story about sexual relationships (and, after all, what could be more dangerous than sex?) Wolfe offers theories of sexual relationships that I assume are pretty mainstream among regular people but perhaps not the kinds of theories that would be voiced among the educated, as Cassie and Wolfe acknowledge. Why do Reis and Chase fall in love with Cassie? Because she is good looking! And what inspires Cassie's love for them in return? It seems like she likes them because they are wealthy, successful, big and strong, and offer her gifts and attention. Cassie seems fascinated by Chase's hi-tech automobile, and as for Reis, Cassie says to another character (referring to Reis by using one of the man's numerous aliases, "Wallace")
"Wally's strong, really strong. We're not supposed to like strong men, but we do. Or most of us do. I do. I know too many wimps already. Wally says he loves me, and he means it. I can tell. It's hard not to like somebody who loves you."
An Evil Guest is a (take your pick) realistic or cynical book that tells you the world and people are the way you fear they are, not the way you hope they are. Yikes!
Finally, can I recommend An Evil Guest? Well, I like it, but I don't love it. The style is smooth and easy to enjoy even if you have trouble keeping track of what is going on with all the detective parts in the first half or so and with all the time distortion and clone elements in the ending. The horror stuff in the islands section is remarkably good. And Wolfe gives us quite a bit to think over on the level of philosophy and when it comes to what actually happens in the story--some will embrace all the mystery and ambiguity, while others will complain that there is no real resolution of some of the plot elements and that we don't really find out what happens to many of the characters. We don't even know if Cthulhu is OK!
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