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Gene Wolfe is not an author for the meek. If he drives like he writes, he probably waits until he gets up to highway speed and then boots his passengers out the door. Mr. Wolfe seems to think his readers are getting some sort of existential experience here; in actuality, he's having the experience and his readers are winding up in body casts.

This is not to say that Gene Wolfe is not a good writer. There are spots where he's brilliant. His style, though, often seems to decry the strictures of conventional fiction. His short stories are earthworms: no front end, no back end, and juicy in the middle.

I am not even opposed to this kind of plotless fiction, but too much of anything is annoying, and I got tired of muttering "What the devil?" every other page. ( Actually, that's kind of a bowdlerized version of what I was muttering). I don't like finishing stories before I'm fully aware that I've started one.

In "La Befana," a six-legged alien has a conversation with a family of humans about the baby Jesus, but it all ends before it has really begun, and the reader is left with the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Wolfe only wanted to hang something around a great opening set-up: "When Zozz, home from the pit, had licked his fur clean, he howled before John Bananas' door." Great scene. No story. By the time I'd figured out who and what the characters were, I was already headed out that passenger door with Mr. Wolfe's boot impression on my ribs.

There is some really good stuff in here. "Seven American Nights" is an excellent look at a post-holocaust America as seen through the eyes of a young Muslim traveler. There is a plot to go along with the story, and there's some tension created by the protagonist's ingestion of some hallucinogenic eggs.

Mr. Wolfe furthers one of his favorite motifs--a world where genetic manipulation and degradation have led to a state of catastrophe. In fact, this, along with cannibalism, is a theme that recurs through many of Mr. Wolfe's short stories.

Even in stories that didn't work for me, there is much to be said for Mr. Wolfe's writing. Here is a small bit from the story collection's title-piece:

You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock. Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying your work.

Steve is faculty member in the English department at Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, S.C. He holds a master's in English Literature from Clemson University. He was voted by his high school class as Most Likely to Become a Young Curmudgeon.