THE WARREN - BRIAN EVERSON

The skeleton key to understanding this book is the dedication. Everson dedicates this book to Gene Wolfe, and it really sealed the deal for me picking it up. Well, that and the length. I needed a quick little book to get me out of a bit of a reading slump. And this was a nice quick little thing, almost a novella, though I did not read it in one sitting. But, back to Wolfe, this thing has a very Wolffian hook, the main character/narrator has hundreds and hundreds of personalities stored inside of him. Now, the obvious connection to Wolfe is the Alzabo from the Solar Cycle, which itself seems like a riff on the Other Memory/Abomination thing from Dune. Which is a great sci-fi trope, it is weird but understandable. It lets you explain why a character could know something that they couldn’t know and it presents an opportunity to do some crazy writing trying to portray what this would be like. On this count, the book is successful, there are some cool parts where the narrator, X, experiences this as a black room with faces forming out of the darkness. Everson sets this character in a dilapidated compound called “The Warren” which seems abandoned and destroyed. The narrator and reader, in classic Wolfe fashion, are trying to figure out what is really going on. But this is where the Wolfe comparison works against him. There are a few twists and riddles in the book (why is everything destroyed? Where is the Warren? Is X a human? Which personality is in control of X?) but they resolve and they are pretty explicitly evoked. In Wolfe, a question like this would never resolve but instead open up a dozen other subtle readings and interpretations. Which is to say that this is weird and good, but just not as weird and good as something like a Wolfe short story.