Paperback, 313 pages
English language
Published Feb. 8, 1988 by St. Martin's Press.
There Are Doors is a speculative fiction novel by American writer Gene Wolfe, published in 1988. The narrative follows a department store salesman as he tries to track down his short-lived girlfriend. The title alludes to gateways between two worlds whose nature are explored throughout the book. There Are Doors was nominated for a Locus Fantasy Award in 1988.
Unreliable narrator, but the in third person. A man chases after a goddess, but is she real or is he just delusional? Is he really moving from one world to another, or just hallucinating?
I had a bad experience with Gene Wolfe. I read his Book of the New Sun a long time ago, and found it both confused and confusing; I didn't like it.
I can enjoy complexity in a novel, but I like there to be a point to the whole thing. There needs to be some sort of fundamentally coherent plot. Too many books lack that. I hate books in which the protagonist (if there is one) is insane, or reality changes in arbitrary and unexplained ways...much as I love the 60's, I don't care for a lot of the writing that came out of that era. I don't like psychedelic works for the most part.
Music, of course, is a different story. And I loved the movie The Yellow Submarine, which is about as psychedelic as you can get without actually dropping acid. But I detest books which …
I had a bad experience with Gene Wolfe. I read his Book of the New Sun a long time ago, and found it both confused and confusing; I didn't like it.
I can enjoy complexity in a novel, but I like there to be a point to the whole thing. There needs to be some sort of fundamentally coherent plot. Too many books lack that. I hate books in which the protagonist (if there is one) is insane, or reality changes in arbitrary and unexplained ways...much as I love the 60's, I don't care for a lot of the writing that came out of that era. I don't like psychedelic works for the most part.
Music, of course, is a different story. And I loved the movie The Yellow Submarine, which is about as psychedelic as you can get without actually dropping acid. But I detest books which are basically incoherent ravings written while the author was high (or even if he wasn't).
I don't remember a damn thing about The Book of the New Sun except the mercury-filled sword Terminus Est (which was a cool concept, but seemed structurally unsound), but I know I didn't like it. It was confusing and unsatisfying. So I avoided Wolfe for many years, despite all the raves.
But I must have picked up There Are Doors for free or almost-free some time ago, and I grabbed it at random when I needed a new book to read on my commute.
And it actually wasn't bad! True, there were changes in reality (actually, switches between two realities) that happened without much explanation until near the end of the book. True, the hero was somewhat passive and a bit stupid, and spent a fair amount of time in an insane asylum under the influence of electroshock and drugs. The whole thing was a bit confused. But all in all it actually worked reasonably well, and by the end I found myself wishing for a sequel.
There isn't one, of course. Oh well.
On a ten-point system I'd give this one a 7.4.
