Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Wolfe at the Door by Gene Wolfe

The Wolfe at the Door, Gene Wolfe (Tor 978-1250846204, hardcover, 480pp, $29.99) October 2023

Arriving just a few months after the publication of The Dead Man and Other Stories (my Locus Online review here), this mammoth compilation from Tor Books also helps to ensure—by its high-quality catholic selection (pun entirely intentional)—that Gene Wolfe’s reputation will continue to be justifiably burnished for future generations. There can be no legacy without accessibility of the texts. The range and reach of the fiction on display here, intelligently curated into different sections, proves once more that Wolfe deserved every iota of his Grand Master status.

From nearly 500 pages of riches, I shall have to confine myself to commenting on one or two stories per division, hoping to impart the whole Wolfean spectrum. The division headers are more allusive and symbolical than prescriptive, but still provide some good delineations.

Prior to jumping in though, let me acknowledge a touching and insightful and warm-hearted introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson, a fellow lucky enough to have been friends with Wolfe for three decades and more.

Fittingly enough, given Wolfe’s reputation as a labyrinth builder, we first encounter the header “Entering the Wood”, a fairy-tale invitation to lose oneself and emerge the wiser. A focus on the tale “Memorare” reveals Wolfe stretching from his usual public image and ambit into a kind of Solar System-confined space adventure that one might imagine, say, Allen Steele penning. A team of explorer-media celebrities, led by the irascible March Wildspring, open up orbital tombs, with results shattering to their interpersonal relationships.

The section titled “Monsters in the Trees” gives us the classic “Tarzan of the Grapes”. I read this story upon its arrival forty years ago, and had hazy memories of a mere punning jape. But upon reencountering the tale, it proves itself to be a very hard-edged political parable about power structures and the time-lost “greening of America.” You might call it a sociological version of “yesterday’s tomorrow.”

The knockout tale in the section titled “A Howling Wind” is “Christmas Inn”. A low-rent holiday resort run by a feisty family of malcontents somewhat Blaylockian in nature, the inn is visited by another set of oddballs, supernatural to some degree. Angels or aliens, demons or delusions, the visitors provoke breakdowns and epiphanies, sometimes quite carnally. This would have made an excellent Twilight Zone episode.

Next we traverse the terrain labelled “Out of the Darkness”, and find “Dormanna”, full of Kuttneresque whimsy and strangeness. Ellie’s imaginary playmate, Dormanna, not so intangible after all, leads the girl to revelations and wisdom—a rare instance of benevolence from higher entities rather than malevolence, and indicative of Wolfe’s worldview, I think, regarding grace and joy.

The slightest section, but still enjoyable, “Musing Under a Tree” consists of three poems—a mode of Wolfe’s I was unfamiliar with.

The last three sections are jam-packed with goodies, so we should delve doubly deeper.

“Travelers Along the Road” hosts “Remembrance to Come”. A despairing professor of literature is persevering through a class of ignorant and abrasive students when he spots an unusual auditor:

In the last row, in the seat nearest the door, sat a figure completely draped in black cloth. Instead of the sandals worn by most students the feet were shod in black, very formal and rather old-fashioned, masculine shoes; and under the cloth, apparently, something like a box was worn over the head. Its square outline could be seen just above the triangular holes which allowed the wearer to see.

This apparition continues to haunt the man after class until an eerie sea-change occurs—leading to death, or to a new life?

Two stories show Wolfe at his naturalistic, detective-fiction best. Both “The Largest Luger” and “The Last Casualty of Cambrai” feature savant Pitney Phillips, solving baffling crimes in a manner halfway between Holmes and another Wolfe—Nero.

Our penultimate venue is “A Different Part of the Wood: Steel Tipped Branches”. “Mountains Like Mice” features an apprentice mage named Dirk, who must undergo a severe initiation. But what starts out as sword and sorcery soon transitions to pure science fiction.

Channeling Barry Malzberg’s insane astronauts, Wolfe delivers similar outer space psychotic shenanigans in “Thou Spark of Blood.”

Finally we land in “Through the Mists and Out Into the Void”—a phrase not exactly congruent with happily-ever-after, but altogether typical of Wolfe’s destinations. What might be my very favorite selection is here: “The Magic Animal”. Our protagonist, Vivianne, gifted with the ability to understand the speech of all creatures, finds herself transposed into a Carrollian version of the Arthurian legend. Playing her part wisely and bravely, she earns her just rewards. Her depiction is one of Wolfe’s triumphs.

And to conclude, “The Hour of the Sheep” is macabre mannerpunk that John M. Ford or Ellen Kushner might have loved to claim, about a master swordsman, Tiero, going to his doom unwittingly. The fact that Tiero is also an author lends irony to his condition, as he fantasizes vaingloriously about his new book.

As for binding . . .

He let his eyes rove over his own books, bound for the most part in dark cloth or darker leather. Vellum. He had seen a vellum-bound book somewhere, surely. No doubt in a bookshop. A leather thin but tough—like a good swordsman—and tan in color, like the face of a man who spends the greater part of each day outdoors. That was it. The title gold-lettered on the spine: Swords for Peace. Beneath it, in letters somewhat smaller, Tiero of Trin. Almost, it seemed that he could see it before him.

Emerging from these variegated chambers of storytelling, the reader should have an expanded appreciation for Wolfe’s finesse, range, verve, and largeness of soul. Not as madly capricious as his contemporary, R. A. Lafferty, Wolfe nonetheless exhibited a similar out-of-the-box and off-the-charts mode of thinking and storytelling. And like Lafferty, one gets the sense that Wolfe endorsed the famous saying of the classical Roman author Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me.”

One final comparison though came to me for the first time only after concluding this volume, although I have been reading Wolfe for decades. He resembles another famous auteur in possessing a certain aloof chilliness and supernal loftiness. That fellow traveler would be Alfred Hitchcock. I can instantly picture Wolfe performing the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: stepping into the outline of a rotund physique, then intoning a sepulchral “Good Evening!” from behind his desk, before opening the trapdoor beneath us.

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