Gene Wolfe has mesmerized me. I really should know better - I’ve been a Wolfe junkie before. But there I was in a bookstore, again, and there it was…
Sitting innocently on a bottom shelf, ready to bite my ankle…
A hardback with a glossy black cover bearing the rather trite name of “The Knight”.
I already have two books sitting, waiting to be read, from my local used book store. So I really didn’t need another book. But I was in a bookstore, so I looked around. And it snuck up on me.
Oh, what the heck, I thought. I’ll read a few pages, and I’ll know if I want to buy it when it comes out in paperback. I should have known then I was deluding myself. Wolfe is, after all, on my “buy unseen” list, and there was no doubt I would buy a paperback from him. This was merely a weak rationalization to give in to my addiction, open the cover, and begin.
And he put a spell on me. It should be illegal.
In a scant few pages, with only tantalizing hints of the setting, and an informal first-person conversational style from a clearly unreliable narrator, I was hooked. I read three chapters before putting it down. It was time to go.
Then I walked back and picked it up again. Perhaps it was the charming parallels between his setting and our myths, twisted to not only make them new, but also reflect something back at us - something that isn’t pretty. No, I told myself, it was just that I should reshelve the book. I did so, and walked away again.
And came back. They had two copies, after all. Enough that I needn’t feel guilty taking the last one, but few enough that they might run out. Now, understand this, I just don’t buy hardback books. I wait for the paperback. Perhaps it was the main character - likeable, innocent, and yet with a savage undertone that tells you he doesn’t have the experience to feel guilt over the violence he will inflict.
I couldn’t set it down a third time. I bought it. Not because I wanted to, you understand. In fact, I felt guilty, as if I were somehow cheating on the two books I had at home by buying this third one before reading them. Jilting the old, used paperbacks for a younger model. Not a sleek thin one, either, but a hefty, cover filling, attractive one with some meat on it. That almost freed me of the book. But one of the books at home was by Steven Brust, and the Wolfe book had a recommendation from Brust on the cover: “I believe I’ll spend the rest of my life here.” I knew then, that they wouldn’t mind, they would welcome the new book like a younger sister. My last resistance was worn down.
I took it to the checkout and paid, as I never do, for the hardback.
Because Gene Wolfe put a spell on me.
Again.