There Are Doors (Magill Book Reviews)

Suppose there were a parallel world that functioned according to different biological rules, a world in which sexual intercourse means death for a man. Suppose this world at times became accessible through the most ordinary looking doors. While entertaining these suppositions, suppose a man from our world fell in love with a woman from the other. Suppose he were a mental patient.L Gene Wolfe’s THERE ARE DOORS presents a situation as jarring and unreal as a paranoid’s delusion or an invalid’s fever dream. Green, searching for Lara, his beloved, stumbles into her world through one of many unmarked doors that connect his domain and hers. In her world, she is the Goddess, beautiful and feared. In her world, as in his, biology is destiny--and sex, for a man, is the doorway to death.

Green embarks on a winding, circuitous journey in which he encounters unexpected danger, unregenerate evil, and unlooked-for friends. In his quest for his love, he enters a world in which everything has significance. He receives messages from the television, random phone calls connect with the right party, everything is ultimately connected to everything else.

Green’s adventures have an obsessive, insane edge to them. Can this really be happening? Will the protagonist wake up at the end? Eventually the reader succumbs to the magic. Everything takes on a manic edge. All things are forgiven, gifts are received. There are mysteries; there are answers. Perhaps there are even doors.