mellonbread reviews The Wolfe at the Door

Gene Wolfe's posthumous collection The Wolfe at the Door collects a bunch of Old Man Wolfe's short stories that were never included in previous collections, or in collections nobody read and are long out of print. I'd read one of them before and the rest were all new to me. 

Gene Wolfe has a handful of dedicated scholars who have produced a body of secondary works attempting to solve  the puzzles and mysteries he litters his books with. As much as I deride these talking heads for dressing up their confabulations as authoritative interpretations, they've undeniably put in a lot of work to help people understand what the hell is happening in the stories. Due to being uncollected and unpopular, the stories in Wolfe at the Door do not have a large body of critical work yet. You're on your own and it's up to you to figure out what's going on - or decide there isn't a mystery at all and you should just enjoy the ride.

I'm going to go story-by-story and pick out my favorites. This review will not make sense unless you've read the collection.

Introduction

The introduction is by Kim Stanley Robinson. I've read the Mars Trilogy and the Years of Rice and Salt, both of which I thought were pretty good. Robinson apparently knew Wolfe well and provides a mix of anecdotes and biographical details. 

Korea fucked Wolfe up a lot worse than I thought. There's a specific anecdote that Robinson cites as the beginning of Wolfe's fascination with torture and death - watching a pair of Chinese artillery observers get shot with a flamethrower. In recalling the event, Wolfe was really adamant that these guys were artillery observers. I can't remember where I heard it but I vaguely recall Wolfe saying in another interview that getting hit with artillery was the worst thing that ever happened to him. It's definitely the worst thing that happens to Severian in New Sun, whose military service always felt a little bit autobiographical. In the lazaret in Autarch when he finally makes friends, who like him for reasons unrelated to his capacity for torture and violence, who want him to sit and listen to stories - his favorite thing in the world! - and then they immediately die in an artillery strike. 

Artillery observers, men responsible for evil deeds against Wolfe and his friends, who then die a horrible death. Justice as torture. It feels a little thin, but in writing it I immediately understand how it feels to be one of the aforementioned talking heads, starting with a plausible sounding premise and spinning yarns. This is fun!

On a Vacant Face a Bruise

A kid from a farm on a colony planet runs off to join the space circus. All your Wolfe-isms are on display here. A rustic future setting full of poverty and crime, a play within a story, men lusting after doll-women, women who go back to abusive men over and over, aliens and monsters kept as slaves, cycles of abuse where children go up to reenact things that happened to them growing up in the guise of mentoring the next generation. An excellent introduction to the collection. Favorite.

Bea and her Bird Brother

The title says it all. A woman hears her father's deathbed confession that her mother was actually an alien bird-woman, and that she's one of two hybrid offspring. A weak premise, the strength is in the telling. Even lesser Wolfes usually have something that sticks with me, an image or a single line. Here the line is 

How long would the knowledge that her father had died insane tear her up?

For the rest of her life, probably.

Memorare

A washed-up filmmaker goes to space and makes a documentary about booby trapped tombs carved out of asteroids while juggling his ex-wife and his current lady love. This is the only story in the collection I had already read, it was posted online somewhere. It didn't make much of an impression last time, but this time it really hit home.

Here's my bullshit armchair psychoanalysis on this one. I think Wolfe spent much of his life around men who beat their wives. I think he grew up around men who did it, and a lot of the guys he knew in Korea probably did it. So here are all these guys who were good and decent by every other standard of measurement, courageous and loyal and self sacrificing and so on, who casually do something evil and never see a problem with it. And that's the ending of Memorare, the guy who beats his wife is also the one who sacrifices himself so that the protagonist can escape, and he has to live with that. That's Wolfe grappling with evil men doing good things, or good men doing evil things.

This story might take place in the same setting as An Evil Guest. They both use commercial faster than light space-RVs called "hoppers" to travel the solar system, and traditional religion has to compete for airtime with weird death cults. Either way, it's a Favorite.

Justinas Vitkus

A Method Bit in "B"

A policeman in a small English town notices his life feels like a scene from a movie. I didn't love this one. Wolfe has some absolute bangers that play with metafictional concepts (Melting is my favorite) but this isn't one of them. I got a lot of Twilight Zone from the scene where the cop realizes that everyone in the bar is drinking ginger ale and tea, which look like beer and whiskey. I'm thinking of the episode where the cowboy movie actor gets stuck in a real Western bar and pounds a whiskey thinking it's colored water.

Tarzan of the Grapes

An outlaw journalist is drawn into a story he manufactured during a labor action at a California vineyard. I like this one a lot. The sense of place is superb and the characters are fun despite all being clichés. Favorite.

The Little Stranger

An old woman living alone in the woods hosts a caravan of strange guests, who she ropes into a scheme to quiet the ghost haunting her house. This one's a puzzle I haven't cracked yet. In the last couple pages you quickly realize that the narrator either has a deeply distorted view of reality, or all is not as it seems. There's a suggestion that the POV character is a witch, and that the mysterious family that stays at her house are also somehow magical. At the end we get a riff on Hansel and Gretel, which I'm positive also happened in one of the Endangered Species stories. Was she a witch the whole time? Is that why nobody wants to let her near their kids? It reminds me of Peace, a rambling anecdote about mundane events with a sinister undercurrent. Difference is, Peace had cool anecdotes mixed in with the memoirs.

I listed a bunch of Wolfe-isms at the beginning so here's another one: dark skinned, morally ambiguous, magically-knowledgeable traveling people. Other examples off the top of my head are the lady from Free Live Free and Mister Fee from Castleview. The woman in Free is a Roma or Gypsy, a tribe which gets a brief but unkind portrayal in an anecdote relayed by the James Bond style villain in An Evil Guest. I don't know what the deal is here, if this is a reference to something or just a trope Wolfe liked from the pulp adventure stories he read as a kid. It could just be racism on Wolfe's part, but even if that's true it doesn't explain anything.

Either way, with a big stack of stories in the queue I wasn't about to reread Little Stranger with a critical eye, and now that I'm writing this review I still don't feel like going back.

Christmas Inn

A failing bed-and-breakfast hosts a carload of mysterious guests and supernatural phenomena on Christmas eve. This one is an improvement over The Little Stranger, the events of the story are more interesting and the puzzle feels more obviously connected to them. Who are the guests? Who is the child? How does the vote at the end of the story turn out? Every member of the family who runs the inn is trivially entrapped by sex with the mysterious guests. Do they actually undergo any personal development as a result, or is that just cope for how easily they were seduced?

I like this story because it's a novel spin on A Christmas Carol and on the more modern "forgotten the meaning of Christmas" premise. Wolfe's other Christmas stories are real downers. War Under the Tree, and that one where the kid's parents are stuffed in the freezer in the basement and he gets diddled by a guy in a Santa outfit.

Much has been made of the two separate hotglue scenes in the Wizard/Knight series. It's time for hotglue!Wolfe to step the fuck back, because it's hyper!Wolfe's time to shine. Doug Winger eat your heart out.

The Gunner's Mate

A pirate ghost falls in love with a woman vacationing on an island resort. Like in Pirate Freedom, we get a romantic view of pirates and piracy alongside an unromantic depiction of piratical reality - in this case their propensity for gang rape. We could explain this with my bullshit psychoanalysis from earlier about Wolfe struggling to reconcile apparently good men inflicting violence on women. Or we could say it's a general trend (seen also in Wizard/Knight and basically everywhere else) to combine a romantic adventure with a brutal and unglamorous reality.

The story ends with a classic Wolfe dig into possession, identity and memory. Is the pirate ghost possessing the POV character's fiancé? Did he kill and replace him? Has she merely confused the two?

The Grave Secret

A necromancer animates a body and sends it to kill his wife. This one felt like a weaker version of the excerpt from the fake John Dee Necronomicon in Peace (which is my favorite part of Peace). I think I'm going to say that about a lot of these stories. Wolfe has produced novel-length works that felt like rough drafts of his better stories (Castleview felt like a first attempt at Wizard/Knight) and it stands to reason that he'd explore a lot of themes in his short stories that would later go on to feature in his most famous published works.

The Old Woman and the Young Woman

A teenage pioneer leaves home and sets out into the post apocalyptic wilderness, seeking shelter with a cunning woman and her young assistant on the way to the frontier. It's got an open ending and a mystery I really like.

1. The old lady might have just got tired of living by chop-shopping clones of herself, and decided to go out on a high note rather than enduring the horror of doing it all over again. She says at the beginning that the brain is the one part she can't replace, and it inevitably spoils. Better to make way for a fresh version than slide into dementia.
2. The potion could have effected a Charles Dexter Ward style personality swap, transferring the old lady into the body of her younger clone. That would explain how she got the voice and evil laugh down perfect.
   
3. The teenage clone might have just given the old lady the wrong potion on purpose. There was no suicide or personality transfer, the teenage assistant saw an opportunity to escape with the gullible but strong young man, and did unto the witch before the witch could do unto her.

This one's a Favorite.

Albert Bierstadt

Dormanna

An elementary school aged child hosts an alien sprite, come from space to impart wisdom and gather knowledge about humanity. Like The Little Stranger, this one seems innocuous until the ending, which puts a strange and sinister spin on the antics of the friendly alien (although its brief and terrifying appearance on the last page doesn't necessarily mean the creature is evil). And like The Little Stranger, I didn't enjoy it enough to dig into it further.

Easter Sunday

A priest talks with a devil on Easter Sunday. We're going to see a bunch of short mystery stories later in the collection. This one isn't my favorite but I'll give it credit for giving the reader enough information to figure it out before the ending - which not all the detective stories do.

Archangel Gabriel

I got nothing intelligent to say about this one. I'm not the right person to critique religious verse. I assume "orbiting Mare" with Mare capitalized is meant to refer to the lunar seas, which fits with the "moon's long sweep" in the previous line. That's the only part that jumps out at me.

Last Night in the Garden of Forking Tongues

I like this one, I'm going to reproduce it here in full.

Maybe We've Been Doing It Wrong

I like this one too. It's got that same blend of romanticism and unglamorous reality. Based on an anecdote from the intro, and a story we'll see later in the collection, Wolfe was fascinated by riots and street brawls - he could literally watch teenagers loot a hardware store for hours.

Connect the Dots

This one went over my head.

Planetarium in Orbit

This one was a delight from start to finish. The POV character injects so much flavor into the cliche-ridden story, and the willingness to embrace absurdity stops it from being predictable. It's like if Wolfe wrote a Xavier Renegade Angel sketch. He am dee mon.

Besides recurring character Doctor Death, the hero archetype character I think is supposed to be Brick Bronson, who appears in various incarnations in the Endangered Species collection. At one point Wolfe browbeats him for not acting like a generic pulp adventurer, a performance he puts on admirably in Planetarium. Favorite.

Leaves In His Face

A humanities professor at a future university is haunted by a strange figure while trying to teach Proust. Someone more familiar with the source material would probably get more out of this one. I love Wolfe's depiction of a future-university. The students are badly behaved violent sex crazed freaks who start riots over nothing, but they all do their assigned reading and have spirited debates about the content and themes. While the POV character experiences events as a circular hell, the world depicted sounds like the author's vision of paradise.

The On-Deck Circle

A baseball star from the halcyon days of the sport is conscripted into a future televised baseball event - a mix of staged reality television and Blood Wake style speedboat combat. This is my favorite depiction of jazzed-up future baseball, sorry Futurama. There's not a lot going on with the plot, but the action scenes racing yachts in the cyberCaribbean are cool. Favorite.

David A Hardy

Hopkins Dalhousie

A robot car explains why it killed its owner. I thought this one was going to be like the opening of the Second Renaissance short from Animatrix, but it turned the premise on its head - recasting B1-66ER as the beloved companion of the murdered owner, sticking with him until the end. At least, that's what the robot car tells us. Wolfe never had any doubts that intelligent robots are people, and people have the capacity to lie. Or to distort the truth in order to shield themselves from reality.

How I Got Three Zip Codes

A writer converses with an old guy in a bar. This is what Planetarium In Orbit would be without a good frame narrative to hang it on. It's got the same sense of humor and sense of wordplay, but it just comes out as a stream of patter rather than an interesting story. Not a fan.

Screen Test

A wealthy buyer has an ancient Chinese silk screen authenticated at an antique shop. I decided to start checking publication dates here, because this story felt like a first stab at one of the central plot arcs in Peace. Screen Test was written in 1967, and Peace came out in 1975. The fraudulent antiques dealer and the way clever forgeries become accepted as the genuine article presage the bookseller Louis Gold and his fake tomes of magic. If not for that connection I don't think I'd really care for this one.

Volksweapon

A groundskeeper walking the woods finds a woman murdered in an attempted carjacking. There are a few detective stories in this collection, a genre Wolfe enjoyed and occasionally delved into in his novel-length works. This one gives you half the information needed to solve the case, putting all the pieces together with a last minute revelation at the end. The murder of the woman could have been solved by the reader after the groundskeeper returns to the car, but the presence and motives of the poachers rely on the groundskeeper just telling the reader that's what's going on. As long as we're counting Wolfe-isms, we got a pretty lady with big pale thighs.

The Largest Luger

An expert in firearms authentication is asked to authenticate a rare .45 caliber Army trials Luger, and later to help in a murder investigation of a party involved in the transaction. Again, the solution to the mystery is revealed at the very end with details that were invisible to the audience up to that point. I think Wolfe had a different idea of what made a fun mystery story, compared to modern day aphorisms about how everything must be solvable prior to the end with information given to the reader. It's fun to just read about a detective doing detective stuff, even if I can't do all the detecting myself. And it's another example where the stamp of an expert could turn a fraud into an authentic example worth millions of dollars.

According to the publication information, this one first appeared in Young Wolfe in 1992, which means it was actually written much earlier.

The Last Casualty of Cambrai

A murder mystery set amid a series of dioramas and miniature soldiers, with a particular focus on the  most famous tank battle of the Great War. I feel similar to this one as I do the Largest Luger. Other stories in the book have dark skinned people, but is the only time in the whole collection that a character is specifically mentioned to be Black. He's a janitor who speaks with a phonetically rendered accent, but his dialect isn't that far off from how the other Chicagoans in the story talk.

Last Drink Bird Head

A humorous anecdote about a writer who liked to play tricks on barkeeps, and a cabal of other writers who decided to give him a literal taste of his own medicine. Wolfe describes a good cocktail as a lost art that died around the end of Prohibition in America. He spent most of his life in what the How To Drink guy refers to as the "bad old days" of cocktails, an era that mostly produced undrinkable sugar slop. Last Drink Bird Head was written around 2009, when things were starting to turn around. Some things do actually get better over time.

Mountains Like Mice

An initiate into a monastic order of adventurer-mages sets out into the wilderness for an escape-and-evade practicum to cap off his education. I liked this story right up until the old master gave the protagonist an info-dump that explained what was really happening. I don't mind the future world being a partially terraformed Mars, or any of the other plot details, I just wished we had gotten them in some format other than a prepared speech. Low quality lore filibusters interrupting the cool mysteries and imagery is something I expect out of Laird Barron, not Gene Wolfe.

Having said all that, I do like the central conflict between the human survivors of the failed colony and their engineered slave race - and the implication that the "human" survivors are themselves also leftover bioroids. The old master asserts that the little servitors were made without hearts, and resent humanity for having them. This is clearly bullshit the character believes, rather than the author talking. Wolfe has always been quite clear that weird monster races and robots are people just like us. Mountains came out in 1966. Wolfe revisited monster-people yearning to be human throughout his career, most notably with the cannibal goblins from Wizard/Knight and the Inhumi from Long/Short Sun. Favorite.

The Green Wall Said

An admittedly non-representative sample of humanity is trapped in a mysterious alien room. Text on the walls explains what's happening and why they've been abducted, but none of them pay any attention. This one was published in 1967 and I wonder if Wolfe was thinking of the Twilight Zone episode from 1961, about the toys trapped in a bucket and tormented by the sound of the Salvation Army man drumming on the side.

Thou Spark of Blood

Astronauts on a long mission to Mars go crazy and kill each other. I just wrapped Universe Day, a collection of short stories from the same era, and this one feels downright Malzbergian. I loved that collection, but nobody I've talked to likes Malzberg or his stories about human beings going insane and failing in space. Has anyone ever actually gone crazy in space? I remember a Twilight Zone episode about that too, I wonder if it was the inspiration for both.

Unrequited Love

Two girls and their two dogs, one cybernetic and one human, plus the narrator. This is Wolfe's take on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a microtragedy about replacement animals and replacement humans. I couldn't finish Do Androids Dream when I first tried to read it as a kid, the part about the cat dying and replacing it with a robot made me sad. Wolfe's riff on the concept is transparently emotionally manipulative, but that doesn't make it bad.

Loco Parentis

A pair of new parents coo over their infant son and deliver exposition/social commentary about the future world they inhabit. This one is Unrequited Love, but as a comedy rather than a tragedy. Disturbing and whimsical in equal measure, tonally similar to Planetarium but not as memorable.

Going to the Beach

A dystopian world where people who score well on an aptitude test in high school are given a lifetime basic income to do as they please, while everyone else works for a living. This one had great atmosphere and I loved the ending. The POV character is an editor. Robots can produce reams of incomprehensible lorem ipsum, but boiling it down to something readable can only be done by humans. And the robot who drops the incomprehensible manuscript on the protagonist is "the engineer" - Wolfe's caricature of himself.

This one's got a sexbot (take a drink) and I like this character because she shows off Old Man Wolfe's conviction that 

1. Advanced robots will be people
2. Humans will treat them like people - by enslaving them.

Hookertron has to periodically recharge her batteries, and in order to afford that she has to fuck for a living. Rather than create a utopia where the robots are happy to take care of the humans, they made the robots motivated by fear of poverty and death. When the protagonist offers to buy the sex robot, does he want to save her or own her? Or both? Is it an allegory for marriage, rescuing a woman from the daily grind but also turning her into a piece of property? Or was she already property, if he's buying her from someone else?

Incidentally, "We turned utopia into a day job" was my favorite part of Rajaniemi's Summerland, where the British afterlife is an office and you have to work to avoid dissolving. Favorite.

Hajime Soroyama

It's Very Clean

A guy goes to a brothel full of sexbots to lose his virginity. I'm going to skip right to the ending here, where the guy learns after sex that the android was actually a human woman. Rather than being happy that he fucked a real woman, he's enraged by what he feels is a betrayal of trust. He wanted to fuck a robot so he wouldn't have to feel vulnerable or have his inadequacies judged. Or maybe he feels guilty about doing whatever he did (we don't know, exactly) to a human rather than a machine, and takes it out on her violently.

This story is from 1972, far predating Wolfe's most famous depiction of sexbots in 1988's There Are Doors. The 'bots in Doors are used by guys in the alternate reality because if they fuck a real woman they die instantly, but the most common reading of Doors is that the whole thing is the tortured imagination of the psychotic drunken protagonist, projecting his difficulties with women and his mother onto external reality. Off the top of my head you've also got Hethor's weird rant about having his "paracoita" stolen in Shadow of the Torturer, though that could refer metaphorically to the incident in Urth where Gunnie chooses Severian over him as a young man. Either way, all these unstable, violent men turning to machines or pornography or whatever to avoid dealing with the real world is obvious social satire. One wonders if sexbots might be an improvement over the status quo, sparing human woman from their attentions. But does that just create a further class of degraded slaves for them to abuse, as we saw in the previous story in the collection?

Frostfree

A surly salesman is gifted a robot refrigerator that doubles as a domestic servant and dating service. This story is deliberately placed by the editor to polish off the sequence of stories about robot parents, robot kids, robot hookers and robot wives. My reading is that the male lead Roy Tabak is more or less indifferent to the human woman the fridge sets him up with, and prefers the company of the fridge. But does he actually feel bad about inflicting himself on "warmhearted" women? Or does he just prefer the robo-woman with a dump truck ass because she slavishly obeys his every command? 

If we look at the story through the same lens as Doors, the whole deal with the curse prevention society and the entire existence of the talking fridge could just be a psychotic delusion that reflects the protagonist's depression. The text invites us to consider the possibility, even after the main character exhaustively cross checks the existence of the talking fridge with other characters. The fridge tells him that he's one bad day away from insanity and suicide if she doesn't pull him out of his death spiral. He conceptualizes himself as cursed and any women who comes near him as likewise cursed. He can't have the woman he actually wants because she's a cyborg from the future and her mission is to set him up with a sacrificial lamb instead.

Frostfree was written in 2013, decades after the two previous stories in this sequence. It's a more sympathetic treatment of sexbot enjoyers than It's Very Clean. Roy is kind of an asshole but he doesn't resort to violence when he feels uncomfortable. His flaws are relatable human failures brought on by weakness and exhaustion, and the fantasy of someone else putting in the work to make him happy.

ibid

The Giant

A children's book writer wanders out into the wilderness to seek inspiration, but ends up caught in a sinister fairytale. I didn't like this one at first, but on reflection I dig how the protagonist inadvertently casts himself as the villain of a children's story, instantly resorting to violence to "discipline" a bunch of random kids playing in a building in the woods. Despite the rough treatment the kids-who-aren't-kids warn him what's going to happen next, and like a fairy tale antagonist he doesn't listen until it's too late.

The Magic Animal

An adolescent girl who can talk to animals is dragooned into a fairy plot to save the future. The basic plot is Wizard/Knight if the kid conscripted by the fairies was a girl. But rather than being brainwashed completely like Abel, Viviane keeps her wits about her. The characters are fun, the tone is both whimsical and melancholic. 

There are a lot of Wolfe stories where a character gets stuck living a lifetime only to be deposited back where they started. Peace has two (the genie's orange garden, the Chinese pillow) and there's also one in Endangered Species (or was it Best of Gene Wolfe?) where the guy signs on with a crew of fairy pirates to save his fiancé. This one is like those, but the ending is hopeful rather than a cruel twist. Favorite.

The Hour of the Sheep

A lightsaber duelist goes looking for a street fight to gain some practical experience for his book. I love the dangerous area of the city that's been so gentrified he can't find any street toughs to battle with, only other bohemians slumming it for a good time. I also like how the protagonist is genuinely good at swordfighting, he doesn't just eat shit the second he gets in a street brawl versus multiple opponents. And I love the way the ending is not only presaged by his own advice given in the unfinished novel at the beginning of the story, but by the title of the story itself. Favorite.

The Woman Who Went Out

An ancient Greek woman uses magic to conjure a lover who will fuck better than her miserly husband and shower her with gifts. It's a short and simple tale but I love the bait and switch. When the husband casts a spell of his own you expect it's going to be a Gift of the Magi situation, where the characters realize what they're doing and reconcile somehow. Then the woman discovers the husband's deception and likes the conjured lover better than him, and you think that's going to be its own happy ending. Then they all fucking die! Brilliant, 10/10. Are there any other places in Wolfe where we see a sexbot service a woman? I can't think of any.

I recall Phye is one of the hookers from the first Latro book, and the POV character relating the story to the best of his memory might be Latro. The characters at the beginning are playing kottabos, an ancient Greek dexterity game where you use your empty cup to throw the dregs of your wine at a target. I don't remember if this is in Latro or if I learned about it while looking stuff up for Unknown Armies. Anyway, Favorite.

Leif in the Wind

A space explorer goes mad on an alien planet and brings his contagious madness back aboard the ship - or carries genuine supernatural phenomena with him. This one reads like a weaker version of Silhouette. The "madman"s description of the planet can't compete with Erik describing the dead city on Neuerddraht, which is my favorite page of prose ever. At the end, the drops of "vanilla extract" emitting alien birds when placed on the skin imply that they've actually been dropping acid the entire time.

The Sea of Memory

A group of explorers set up tents on a strange island and try to remember how they got there, or what they're supposed to be doing. This one feels real because of the sheer amount of effort it takes for the protagonist to make conversation with all these people, who expect her to explain things in detail even though they're not really paying attention, or be impressed by things she doesn't care about. We've all been on both sides of that equation.

Dying and ending up in a labyrinth of memory is the basic conceit of Peace. But what if you shared that labyrinth with other people? Sea of Memory was written in 2013, was Wolfe's wife already sliding into dementia by then, giving him a new crop of hard experiences to inform his writing about death and memory and death of memory? I know he incorporated at least some of that experience into his work, based on the ending of his last novel Interlibrary Loan.

At The Point of Capricorn

An eclectic cast of characters huddle in a cave and tell stories at the end of the world. I don't think I'd have remembered this at all if it came in the middle of the collection, but placed at the end it's good. It was written in 1985 but it feels like Late Wolfe in a good way, reflecting on lessons learned and trying hard to face death with something more than stoic sadness.

David Hardy

Wrapup

I liked this collection, I didn't love every story but it was fun to see a broad spectrum of work spanning about fifty years. The pacing and arrangement are spot-on, opening with a strong entry and distributing the other bangers throughout so that there's never a string of duds. 

Much of my enjoyment came from drawing connections between the stories here and Wolfe's more popular work. I'd be interested to hear from someone who hadn't read him extensively if Wolfe at the Door was as much fun for them.