SEVEN AMERICAN NIGHTS - GENE WOLFE

I went back and forth on whether or not to include this since it is technically a novella, at around 60 pages, and I don’t review things like long articles or short stories. But, it is a fully contained story, I read it twice back to back, and, ultimately, who cares? If your a Wolfe-head (in the Wolfe-pack?) you know the thing that makes his shit special is the puzzlebox quality of his stories. There is always the story itself, which is always wildly inventive and incredible, and then there is the mystery of “what is really going on.” One technique that he likes is embedding issues of authorship into the text itself (i.e. one of the characters in the story is “writing” the story you’re reading, though it’s often of question of who exactly as well as their motives and biases). This text does that, the story is the journal of an Iranian tourist who is visiting America in the far-future, when it is a mutant-plagued wasteland. But the journal admits that some of the pages have been removed, though it isn’t exactly clear where. There are only 6 nights described in the book, but the title tells us one must be missing. Additionally, the character buys and does some sort of drug during his time in the US, but he takes it Russian Roulette style so it’s not clear when he’s dosed and when he’s sober (he also might not ever take it? The book is a mind-fuck). Anyway, like all Wolf stuff, it causally and quickly hints at much deeper doings than what’s on the surface. There’s a fun game to play where you try to identify the locations in DC the character are at based on the ruins he describes. The Washington Monument being mostly pulled down and the scattered stones being used as tables in a large bizarre was a nice touch. There’s tons of gross deformities and (maybe?) werewolves. There’s Iranian moon bases and chemical warfare. There’s hints of a sinister plot to “make America great.” After reading it twice, I looked at some theories online and thought more about it; there really is a feeling of trying to piece together the “deeper” or “true” story that you only get from Wolf. If you’ve been interested in him but the 12 volume Solar Cycle seems like too much (and I’ve only read that once, and, given the “to read Wolfe is to re-read Wolfe” you could argue that I haven’t even read it for real) I’d say this a pretty good starting place.