The Outlaw

In General, there will be no plot synopsises on this site, if anyone ever comes to this site I may start writing them but really, this is just a good way of forcing myself to write something. I realised the necessity of this particular post when I noticed a reviewer on Amazon had mentioned Steven King as a genius, as opposed to the writer of There are Doors. I found this comment  utterly incorrect, uninformed and ludicrous so if you share that view this is not the blog for you.

 I hereby write my first ever book review on a piece by that  enigmatic writer Gene Wolff. This, probably is a poor choice. Despite being relatively well read, I found this book utterly confounding and mysterious. Other sites are divided. Some of us (obviously the cleverer ones) deem the book a masterpiece that rewards rereading (a feature common to Wolff’s books), others a dismal failure hung on two-bit gimmickry (practically blasphemous).

Well, I have just finished the book, I may rewrite this review in a years time, a decades time.

For now: With regret, and an intense feeling that I am speaking wildly out of turn, I did not like the book. It is so fractured that, frankly, I found myself wishing for its’ end. Having pushed myself to get there, I found the ending no more rewarding than the start. Wolff generally can be so oblique, you almost find the truth slanting in on an angle, almost as if the right turn in the highway is the one leading down the bumpy road. When one reaches the destination (the truth, or a version of it you can live with), despite Wolff’s deliberate obfiscation, his writing leaves one deeply satisfied. 

 Alas, this is not the feeling this book invokes. There are Doors is a bumpy road that never stops, it is a loop, there is no abandoned quarry to discover. Now, if there anyone out there who can explain why I am a fool and a pretentious dilletante, I would be quite happy to hear from you.

Outlaw Rating: 3/5. (Still Gene Wolff)