From the TBR Shelf #19: The Sorcerer's House by Gene Wolfe

The Sorcerer's House (2010) by Gene Wolfe

WELL.

I must admit that I hadn't read fantasy in a very long time, and when fellow book blogger Andrea sent me Gene Wolfe's novel about an ex-con who inherits an abandoned house and encounters all sorts and kinds of...ummm.... creatures, well, I wasn't about to pass that up!

And I must say, The Sorcerer's House does a very good job of offering up werewolves, face-foxes, and other creatures from "faerie" without so much as a how-dee-do, inviting the reader to plunge headlong into the story that is a world unto itself. 

But let me ask you: if you decided to move into an abandoned house and you had just gotten out of jail for fraud and you realized that the house changed its shape sometimes and it was littered with magical apparatus, would you stay there? And what if someone told you that it was actually left to you by a mysterious man in his will? Hmmmm?

Yeah. But what makes this novel especially interesting is that it is of the epistolary persuasion: letters, letters, letters from end to end. It takes skill to tell a story only through letters, something that was done more frequently when the Novel came into its own in the 18th century. I'd love to make a connection here between form and content, but my brain is very tired, so maybe another time. Off to check my house for shape-shifting foxes bye.