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1Aramini
2# *AN EVIL GUEST*: “HERE’S A COCONUT”
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4>“I heard the readings, Zelda. And it sucks. I told you that. … People make speeches. *Everybody* makes speeches. Brian makes speeches about God. Norma makes speeches about whatever pops into her head. I make speeches about Kansas, and I don’t even get to holler for Auntie Em. Vince makes speeches about coconuts for Pete’s sake! My sailor makes speeches about love. You want more?”
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6>“She needs to measure your hips.” (Wolfe 107)
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8Upon arriving at the 2013 Nebulas at which he was named Grand Master, Gene Wolfe held a question and answer session in conjunction with a reading. Of all the many novels and short stories he has written, amidst all the critical praise he has received, on the eve of what might be his most prestigious recognition, Wolfe chose to read from Chapters Twenty and Twenty-One of *An Evil Guest.* The reading proved ultimately informative, for it became infinitely clear, amidst the repeated, “Where the hell are you, Cassie?” in Wolfe’s pleasant but slightly reedy, whistling voice, with the many *non sequiturs* that followed, that *An Evil Guest*, at least in those chapters, is intentionally comedic. In Wolfe’s voice, it is pretty funny, too. In what Wolfe called the climax, Cassie is taken up a mountain via sedan chair on the island of Takanga, accompanied by King Kanoa. Kanoa assures her:
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10>“I’m your friend and your most loyal subject, Your Majesty.”
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12>“And I’m the queen of – of paradise. I can’t get used to it. Maybe I will, eventually.”
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14>“Here’s a coconut.” (244)
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16At this point, I found myself one of perhaps two or three people in the room laughing. (Was humanity always so humorless? Perhaps the Squid God did nothing wrong.) In any case, back to the reading: soon Cassie glances down upon the fabulous city that has been built by the people of Takanga, a paradise that exists to serve her and the High King, though for far too short a season. Yet even knowing that *this* represents a kind of pivotal finale in Wolfe’s mind, *An Evil Guest* still seems a novel cobbled together from many disparate influences. While third-person narration did not prove an insurmountable barrier in “The Ziggurat” and in *There Are Doors*, the presentation of the main characters’ troubled viewpoints and subjective illusions in third-person made the narratives untrustworthy. The sensations of the protagonists were presented as practically omniscient fact, including their delusions and fantasies. Might we come to the same understanding of *An Evil Guest*, or should we trust the surface narrative more?
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18While the novel involves a kind of begrudgingly symbiotic competition between two powerful male characters, it spends most of its time following an actress who is herself transformed by their power struggle, to admittedly ambiguous ends, as she continually seeks for fulfillment – where, then, can the potential subjectivity of the narrative voice be pierced? What are we to do with this third-person novel that depicts the rise and fall of Cassiopeia Case? Cassie herself says it best when she has one of the most manipulative and powerful characters, the elusive Gideon Chase, in front of her, willing and probably able to explain what she does not understand: “It’s just that I don’t know what questions to ask” (196). If some readers have difficulty relating to Cassie as a character, I think I speak for everyone when I say we can all relate to this particular sentiment in reading *An Evil Guest*. Of course, Gideon soon issues a challenge that readers should take seriously:
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20>”There was a wise man not too long ago who used to talk about needles and haystacks.”
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22>”Finding one, you mean?”
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24>”Finding several. He said that if you told most people to find a needle in a haystack, they looked until they found a needle. Then they stopped. He would search the entire haystack, trying to find all the needles.” (197-8)
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26Gideon himself has set forth the parameters which shall govern this essay: an attempt to find all of those tiny but penetrating needles in our attention to detail. I have found that for this particular novel, many of the scenes contain a second (and perhaps even a third) level of connotation beyond their surface implications. Thus, for example, Cassie’s theft of Gideon’s car parallels and mirrors the infiltration of R’lyeh by Pat Gomez, and the after-play cast party held at Rusterman’s elucidates the aftermath of Cassie’s experiences on Takanga. This necessitates an almost nauseating attention to small details of the text.
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28At this point, I would like to acknowledge some other scholars who have worked extensively on *An Evil Guest*. Robert Pirkola has compiled a massive concordance for the novel and copious notes that may one day result in something more. He was also kind enough to allow me to bounce ideas off of him during the gestation of this particular essay, and while I think the thesis that emerges typifies my allegorical approach to Wolfe, it would not have been possible to come to any conclusions without his thoughtful input and assistance. His work traces many of the more obscure allusions, from Nero Wolfe novels to pulpy noir radio serializations like *The Shadow*. (I wasn’t entirely convinced by the Nero Wolfe allusions until Pirkola mentioned a meeting at Rusterman’s restaurant in *The Doorbell Rang*, when I had to admit that many of the plot details from that novel, from a woman being shot at by a sniper to a man concealing himself in a small compartment, truly did resonate with *An Evil Guest*. There was even mention of anchovy butter, which is paralleled in at least two scenes of *An Evil Guest*. However, Nero Wolfe is not the only allusion in this novel, and the hardest part in executing this particular essay involved determining the appropriate level of detail in exploring those references: how vital are they to understanding the structure or theme of the novel, overtly or subtextually? I am primarily concerned with presenting an accurate understanding of what happened and why. I will not trace every allusion in this essay unless I feel it adds to a greater theme or plot point, but I am more than happy to acknowledge my debt to Pirkola and to other early excavators of the text such as David Tallman on the Urth List. It is likely that some of the observations I make below originated with them, though I may not credit it directly in every case.) While I have mentioned many allusions in exploring Wolfe’s work, I have always felt that “spotting the reference” can easily become a descent down an infinite well of darkness unless there is sufficient textual reason to seek out extra information. Many who seek to interpret Wolfe tend to go to allusions first, anxious to identify potential references, often at the cost of searching for the unified theme, structure, or the importance of a minor detail already concealed in the text itself. For me, the time to seek out those allusions for holistic understanding of the narrative involves exhausting the repetitive motifs and symbols already contained in the text: what is still possibly unexplained after we have considered the totality of the work literally, spiritually, metaphorically, and allegorically?
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30In *An Evil Guest*, however, Wolfe’s intertextuality becomes a dominant theme of the work. He clearly enjoys playing with some of Lovecraft’s plot elements, mixing them in with other genres to create a book that is in its own way as hard to pin down as *Free Live Free* or *Castleview* are, though it is slightly more science fictional than either of those two novels. Wolfe had previously used Lovecraft’s rather monstrous Migo, unnamed, in the short story “The Friendship Light;” in that case, the title of the story forms a pun on the Spanish *amigo* – the titular light attracts *a Migo* (or, more accurately, several.) In addition to detective fiction and tales of cosmic dread, *An Evil Guest’s* influences include texts as disparate as Charles Finney’s *Circus of Dr. Lao*, the origin of Woldercan, and even relatively contemporary novels such as Cory Doctorow’s *Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town*. To make matters even more complex, events in this novel occur in the same fictional milieu as several of Wolfe’s other stories, including “The Tree Is My Hat,” “Memorare,” and “Christmas Inn.” Both of the plays that Cassie stars in within the novel seem to bleed into reality, somehow, as we shall discuss below. Yet what is the big picture behind all of these textual echoes?
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32I think it is wise in Wolfe to begin as early as possible, and usually that means starting with the Greeks. It is worth noting that the name of the protagonist, Cassiopeia, is not an arbitrary one. In myth, Cassiopeia is a vain queen who boasts both of her own beauty and the beauty of her daughter Andromeda at the expense of the Nereids. Her denigration of those sea-nymphs brings the anger of Poseidon down upon Ethiopia. In order to appease the wrath of the sea god and stop the monster Cetus from destroying their country, Cassiopeia and her husband Cepheus are told to sacrifice Andromeda, who, in most depictions, is chained near a sea-side cliff to await her fate. Fortunately, the hero Perseus manages to arrive in time to save her and destroy Cetus on his winged horse. Even though Andromeda is saved, Poseidon still extracts his revenge on the queen, banishing Cassiopeia to the constellations and chaining her to a throne, a reminder of her daughter’s chaining. In some depictions, Cassiopeia holds a mirror to symbolize her vanity, while in others she holds a palm leaf. Wolfe’s Cassie Casey will also have to deal with both her own potential vanity and with a sea monster in the form of the eldritch Storm God, certainly Cthulhu, whose underwater city resonates with R’lyeh, in Lovecraft’s lore a sunken city in the South Pacific which serves as the ancient entity’s prison. Cassie’s sedan chair on Takanga will even feature palm fronds, and she will spend great portions of the text seated gazing into a mirror in her dressing room or hotel suite. However, there is little indication that an Andromeda cognate might be found in the tale without speculating that Cassie might also fill that particular role. And where is our Perseus, the hero who will swoop from the sky to save the day? With all the hoppers and flying cars in the text, either the wealthy William Reis or the humbler but possibly more Machiavellian Gideon Chase might fill that role. Bearing in mind that Cassie will be constrained temporarily on Takanga’s throne and that the expensive bracelets she receives as gifts might also be construed as chains, let us take a closer look at the basic plot after reviewing just a few more details about Perseus.
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34In what is surely a thematically relevant detail, the origin of Perseus involves a shower of gold. Fearing a prophecy of displacement, the King of Argos imprisons his daughter, Perseus’s mother Danae, in a tower, where Zeus comes to her as gold, conceiving the great hero who would give his name, as the story goes, to the Persians. [Towers feature subtly in the novel as well: Gideon Chase lives in Pine Crest Towers, and the Storm King “dens in the tower from which he ruled before the first man walked” (81, 245).] Perseus and his mother were both cast into the sea when he was born in a kind of casket. This will also resonate with the overarching thesis of this essay, once we determine exactly who the Perseus cognate in the story might be. A fisherman frees them from their cask and raises the boy as his own. Perseus’s life contains other meaningful events, as related in Ovid’s *The Metamorphoses*, including the slaying of the gorgon Medusa with the aid of Hades, Hermes, and Athena. Hades (or Pluto), the king of the underworld, lends his helm of invisibility, Hermes his winged sandals, and Athena her mirrored shield. In striking the killing blow to the gorgon, Perseus uses a weapon which also has some resonance with the plot of *An Evil Guest*: a diamond or adamantium sickle. [The assassin who attempts to kill Cassie names herself Diana Diamond, and the second bracelet Cassie receives from the disembodied and spectral head of Reis is primarily composed of diamonds rather than plain gold.]
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36After his triumph, as the legend goes, Perseus seeks rest in the land of Atlas. This scene from Ovid is worth looking at in its entirety, for gold, dragons, and a mountain will all also play prominent roles in *An Evil Guest*:
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38>The most remote land was under Atlas’s rule, and the ocean, into which Sol’s panting horses plunged, and where his straining axle was welcomed. He had a thousand flocks, and as many herds of cattle straying through the grass, and no neighbouring [sic] soil was richer than his. The leaves of the trees, bright with radiant gold, covered branches of gold, and fruit of gold. Perseus said to him ‘Friend, if high birth impresses you, Jupiter is responsible for my birth. Or if you admire great deeds, you will admire mine. I ask for hospitality and rest.’
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40>Atlas remembered an ancient prophecy. Themis on Parnassus had given that prophecy. ‘Atlas, the time will come when your tree will be stripped of its gold, and he who steals it will be called the son of Jupiter.’ Fearful of this, Atlas had enclosed his orchard with solid walls, and set a huge dragon to guard it, and kept all strangers away from his borders. To Perseus, he said ‘Go far away, lest the glory of the deeds, that you lie about, and Jupiter himself, fail you!’ He added weight to his threats, and tried to push him away with his great hands, Perseus delaying resolutely, and combining that with calm words. Inferior in strength (who could equal Atlas in strength?), he said, ‘Well now, since you show me so little kindness, accept a gift’ and turning away himself, he held out Medusa’s foul head, on his left hand side. Atlas became a mountain, as huge as he himself had been. Now his hair and beard were changed into trees, his shoulders and hands into ridges. What had been his head before was the crest on the mountain summit. His bones became stones. Then he grew to an immense height in every part (so you gods determined) and the whole sky, with its many stars, rested on him. (Ovid IV:630-662)
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42[As we shall re-examine below, Gideon takes Cassie to a mountain in order to complete her transformation; Atlas’s golden trees and the dragon mentioned in this myth are also worth remembering throughout *An Evil Guest*. Reis, who can alchemically produce rather dangerous gold, admits that part of his plan for making the world a better place relies upon the fact that “dragons,” as he calls them, tend to selfishly keep wealth near themselves: “There are dragons, Cassie. Real dragons. […] Some are human beings, Cassie. Some aren’t. The Storm King is a dragon in the sense I mean, and one of the worst. A dragon, and not remotely human” (Wolfe 270-1).] In the myths, Perseus also uses an adamantium or diamond sickle to destroy the monster of the sea Cetus and rescue Andromeda. Eventually, he, too, would become a constellation near Andromeda and Cassiopeia. While Gideon performs some things resembling Perseus’s deeds, it also appears that Reis is the one who struggles with the sea monster in the form of the Storm King at the end of *An Evil Guest*. Both have access to hoppers that might be considered technologically advanced cognates of Pegasus, but there is one further detail which will help ground our reading of the text. The name Perseus, stemming from the Greek verb “πέρθειν" (*perthein*), meaning "to waste, ravage, sack, destroy," is generally considered to mean “the Destroyer.” In Biblical terms, the Destroyer denotes a more tendentious spirit – Abaddon, described as “a king, the angel of the bottomless pit” in Revelations 9:11, the lord of a plague of locusts. Alas, different commentators view Abaddon differently: some say he serves Satan, others that he destroys in order to do God’s bidding. While William Reis is described as India’s “angel” at multiple points in the text, and his last name means “King,” Gideon himself has an even more suggestive connotation to his name: “the Destroyer.” Surely, in a book featuring Cassiopeia as the main character, the meaning of Gideon’s name demands that we consider him in the role of Perseus.
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44Yet the allusions to Greek and Roman myths might not stop there, for Cassie becomes associated in her raised form with the Green Goddess, the Goddess of Spring. In Greek myth, this is Persephone, who spends half of her time in the underworld with her husband and abductor Hades, whose name means “unseen.” [Reis has a name which means “King,” and he happens to have the ability to walk unseen. The Roman designation for Hades, Pluto, comes from the word for “wealth,” which is also applicable to Reis, called at several points one of the wealthiest men in the world.] Persephone is associated with the changing seasons. Most importantly, Persephone’s name stems from exactly the same root as Perseus’s, as a bringer of destruction. We shall be on the lookout for suggestions that Cassie might also be filling some of Persephone’s roles throughout our close analysis of the text. We know from the myth that Perseus is born in a shower of gold, and Reis happens to shower R’lyeh with his radioactive gold at the climax in order to draw the fire of the American military. How could this possibly give birth to Gideon? It is certainly worth noting that the title of *An Evil Guest* raises some very strong suspicions of Gideon as soon as we open the book.
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46## Our Story Begins with a Guest …
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48The novel is preceded by an epigram, supposedly from Simonides of Ceos: “Gold is the kindest of all hosts when it shines in the sky, but comes as an evil guest to those who receive it in the hand.” Thematically, this is already setting up the idea that hopes and dreams are worth striving for as sheltering ideals, but their reality, when grasped, often leads to, if not disappointment, a kind of corruption, which might be realized through avarice, ingratitude, a lust for more power and wealth, or the manifestation of some other misfortune. Insatiable desires can consume someone once he or she gets a taste of them. In myth, Cassiopeia is almost undone by her vanity. Cassie, too, struggles with her need for attention from her audience and perhaps from her suitors. Possibly talking about her father, near the end of the book, Cassie says, “When I was a little girl […] he said that pride was the greatest sin, but that I could be proud of good grades and new clothes, that there was no sin in that. I knew from what he said that there was another kind of pride, but I don’t think I ever really knew what it was…” (260). However, even on the last page of the novel, readers are left wondering if Cassie’s quest for fame and stardom might resolve happily.
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50The conflict of the novel begins on the level of a national security leak, descends to casting for a play, and concludes with a stormy battle with an extraterrestrial eldritch being and his followers in the Pacific. At the very start of the novel, when Gideon Chase sits with the President and the de factor power behind the FBI, John Ferguson, he is identified as a guest: “[The president’s] guest shook his head; on Earth, this guest was known as Gideon Chase” (13). His eyes are described as “the night looking out through a mask” (13).
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52[The titular “evil guest” of the novel who has come to Earth long ago is the Storm King, Cthulhu. Given some descriptions in a few of Lovecraft’s short stories, it is worth taking special note of the imagery associated with Gideon; his very face is described as a mask. In Lovecraft’s “Through the Gate of the Silver Key,” the mysterious Swami Chandraputra has dark eyes similarly described: 
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54>The fourth man was non-committal in age—lean, and with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahmin and having night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance behind the features. He had announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benares with important information to give; and both de Marigny and Phillips—who had corresponded with him—had been quick to recognise [sic] the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. (Lovecraft and Price)
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56This is pertinent because “the Swami Chandraputa” is the alias of Lovecraft hero Randolph Carter after he becomes trapped in an alien body (though the opening meeting of these four men is ostensibly to seek out the missing Randolph Carter, who has disappeared into the past). Carter is associated with Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University, where Gideon has a faculty position in *An Evil Guest*, as chair of the department of “Modern Gramarye” – which connotes magic or necromancy (Wolfe 293). Given that both Gideon and the Swami would seem to be associated with fey powers, they are also connected through the initials R.C. – Gideon’s supposed father, Robert Chase, was once ambassador to Woldercan. The most fascinating aspect of “Through the Gate of the Silver Key” involves its metaphysical framing of identity: in that story, individuals can also be considered manifestations of greater beings and even resonate with their entire familial line; Lovecraft’s hero Randolph Carter actually meets a version of himself in the Swami Chandraputra who is also, somehow, hinted to be Yog-Sothoth. In its prequel, “The Silver Key,” Carter lost the ability to enter the Dreamworld that granted his life such meaning and wound up discovering a key, which allowed him to visit the past to rediscover that childlike wonder.
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58This is not the only possible reference to Lovecraft in this scene. In “The Dunwich Horror,” Yog-Sothoth mates with a human woman and has twin sons. Only one appears consistently throughout the story, and he looks human, though villainous. The climax of the story involves the killing of an invisible building-sized monstrosity, the other son, who, the punchline goes, took after his father a bit more. In this opening scene, the president says that Gideon looks nothing like his father: “Every man in the world gits certain traits from his folks. As I told John, your not resemblin’ your father on the surface tells me you’ll be like him down deeper” (16). That could be a fairly sinister condemnation of Gideon – by now it should be obvious that Lovecraft’s Storm King, down deep below the water, might have more impact on the plot than is first apparent, even as Gideon walks on the surface.
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60There are several readings of *An Evil Guest*, such as those found on the *Wolfewiki*, which rely on someone slipping back in time to affect events throughout the book. (For example, one theory has Margaret Briggs, who becomes Cassie’s assistant, as a future version of Cassie returning to the world of her youth – the primary justification for this involves the fact that Cassie plays an M.B. in one of the plays: Mariah Browlea.) At first, I was reluctant to accept the possibility of any time distortion. However, the very structure of the book, as we will discuss below, offers a strange image of reversal. Here in the opening chapter, we see the future ambassador of Woldercan (Gideon) look at an image of William Reis at the end of his tenure there. The scene occurs in the White House. In the final chapter of the book, we will see the past ambassador of Woldercan (in his own sprawling white house) give Cassie Casey an image of Reis from when his post began. This grounds the beginning and ending of the text around Reis’s ambassadorship, but *in reverse*. The future Wolfe envisions for the novel is extremely invested in the pulp of the past, with the return of smoking and the resurgence of stage acting amidst other regressions into noir and early twentieth century staples. It is difficult to deny one of the central design elements and themes of the book: *the future is the past.* As the ambassador Harold Klauser will say at the end of the book, “The discriminations we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. … The robin another robin fights in a clean window seems terribly real to him, too” (298). We should keep these words in mind throughout our entire review of the plot, as these two scenes mirror each other so precisely. It is absolutely vital to notice that Klauser and Chase maintain the same position in that reflection. Once upon a time, after all, Klauser, suffering from some unnamed (but inferable) sickness, was much bigger than he appears in the final chapter.
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62It is also important to remember the description of darkness peering out from behind a mask as a description of Gideon at the end of the novel, when Cassie is surprised in her room on Takanga to find a woman on each side of her bed: “To her right, the assassin’s large, pale eyes seemed luminous in the dim light; a faint smile played around her mouth. On the other side, the dead woman stood erect and motionless, her face a mask, her eyes two darker stains upon that mask” (279). Black and white, darkness and light, are thematically essential to this novel. Even the genre warns us of this, in its use of noir, or black, elements. How is Gideon related to the figures of Diana Diamond and Pat Gomez from the conclusion of the novel, given this almost identical description?]
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64Returning to the novel’s plot, in his bargaining with the president, Gideon reveals an interesting moral philosophy that seems to embrace absolutes, but it so happens that one of the absolutes he is pushing in this introductory chapter involves the denial of good and evil. The president is quick to identify Bill Reis, whom he wants Gideon to ferret out, as a definitely evil man, though he looks so ordinary. Reis stands accused of spying and releasing sensitive information, as well as blackmailing individuals, sometimes for “Sexual favors …. Introductions and information” (17). Gideon promptly asserts, “There are no ordinary men, although so many believe themselves so” (14). He also insists, “There is no good. … My belief or disbelief will not change the truth” (14). Chase similarly disavows the existence of evil men, and goes on to attempt to define evil:
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66>“Today, most people think evil the mere absence of good. Darkness – which many confuse with evil – is the mere absence of visible light, after all, just as silence is the absence of audible sound. If these people were correct, there would be no evil, only a lack of good. They are wrong, and when they discover they are wrong, they leap to the opposite conclusion.” (15)
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68[Since the first chapters in Wolfe’s novels are often thematically central to the conflict and plot, it is worth looking at this statement more closely. Is the opposite conclusion Gideon mentions that good must be defined as the absence of evil, or is he suggesting that people disabused of their notion of evil as the absence of good generally assume that there is no good at all? This seems to be his own stated position, though it could probably do with some expansion, and Cassie will later add her own moral understanding of his philosophy to the equation, involving God. As Cassie articulates it, the lack of belief of the people in God prevents them from goodness: “Add nothing to God and you get good” (179). These articulations regarding good and evil prompt some interesting things to think about regarding the philosophies and actions of Reis and Chase. However, the Christian possibility that evil is not a true “thing” might even stem back to St. Augustine and perhaps even before him: for Augustine, at the risk of oversimplifying, it is the loss and absence of good which is evil. While we do not get a full exploration of this theme, it seems that if we suppose that Chase were a being inclined to evil, then the growing absence of evil in him might be construed as an approach to goodness. To Augustine, something evil merely lacks greater goodness, and thus things which do injury deprive good. The choices of humans can involve turning away from a greater good towards something less good, and thus evil becomes an act of choosing lesser goodness (or turning away from the absolute goodness of God). The characters of William Reis, Gideon Chase, and Cassie Casey could be understood through thinking of them in terms of greater or lesser goods. The title of the novel implies the reality of evil, and, if we were to codify Lovecraft’s own fey and eldritch beings, perhaps their moral philosophy, denying good and evil for something more primal and sometimes terrifying, would match up very well with Gideon Chase’s. Now we must ask ourselves: does the conflict in Chase’s philosophy with Augustine naturally make him the “lesser good” in this novel? He makes Cassie’s “dreams” come true and puts the gold of success in her hand, after all, and here he is, being called a “guest,” quite ominously. However, given the mythical Cassiopeia’s tendency to vanity, is Gideon merely allowing Cassie to indulge her deadly sin? The much later possibly incomplete “redemption” of Hanga, the “Shark God,” who also appears in Wolfe’s short story “The Tree is My Hat,” might also be pertinent to this discussion of absolutes and the possibility of change, and we shall return to it soon. One other thing to note is that Gideon here invokes darkness, and the black and white imagery throughout the novel is pervasive and, once the shadows are pierced, quite illuminating. Here, the president accuses Reis of *black*mail. There is one more reference in Gideon’s position on good and evil that is essential to our reading, from Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu”:
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70>[T]hose first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim areas from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
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72>In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. (Lovecraft)
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74Cthulhu’s freedom from R’lyeh will engender a time when classifications between good and evil become irrelevant, and it is, this essay argues, no coincidence that Gideon spouts something which resonates with this moral indeterminacy.]
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76In any case, the president and the head of the FBI are interested in exactly how William Reis has learned and disseminated secure information, and have exhausted their own resources:
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78>“Wild guesses are of no use. We’ve made plenty ourselves, and they haven’t helped.”
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80>The president grinned. “John’s guesses, mostly. Wild as blue quail, every one of ‘em. Thought readin’. Talkin’ to ghosts.” (18)
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82Gideon responds that neither are beyond the realm of possibility: “I have done both in the past, and will doubtless do both in the future. One or both may well explain Ambassador Reis’s success, although I doubt it” (18). [In a novel framed as this one is, it could be that past and future from Gideon’s point of view are much more contiguous than we would initially think. Here, the idea of talking to ghosts is associated with “blue quail.” There will be several more instances of blue imagery in the text, including the blue sky above Takanga Ha’i and a blue bottle of spring water, which, the text notes, seems to be more expensive than many wines. Of course, the most important of these blue images is Reis’s metaphor of Earth as a blue island he has become interested in preserving. Later, before Cassie speaks to some strange disembodied voices in Gideon’s black car, she and Gideon will stand in its blue-white head-beams as Cassie takes the wheel in a pivotal scene. However, other explanations might also contextualize those voices.]
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84In this first chapter, we also learn of the planet of Woldercan. The president is certain that the Wolders have somehow turned Reis during his tenure as ambassador there and taught him their strange tricks. However, he and Ferguson disagree on whether Reis is actually a spy. Another important theme involving time is introduced in this chapter. In communicating with that planet, the president notes that ethermail exhibits odd properties: “Sometimes a second message gets there before the first one. Sometimes, well …”
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86Gideon finishes, “One picks up messages that have not yet been sent” (18). Indeed, it seems that congratulations from Earth on the birth of one ambassador’s son reached his father on Woldercan before the child was even born. Even though the president was just talking about Gideon’s birth, he does not seem to link Gideon’s birth to this anachronistic missive, though Gideon suggests that the name of the child in question was his own. [In the final chapter, we learn that Gideon sends an ethermail from Woldercan to Cassie in anticipation of her arrival – a response to a message she had not yet sent, further linking the opening and closing chapters.] Gideon already knows about Reis and his activities, which include alchemy, the transformation of dross matter into gold. He suggests a simpler solution to the government’s problems: “Pick up Reis. Take him to a safe house. You wouldn’t have to employ torture. There are drugs. There is even hypnosis, with which a skillful operator can do much more than the public has been led to believe” (20). [This talk of hypnosis, coupled with Reis’s ability to walk unseen save for the projection of his shadow, truly does resonate with the pulp hero The Shadow, who, rumor has it, knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. The text will eventually mention the Shadow as a living character in its world, just as Charles Finney and H.P Lovecraft seem to be. Reis manifests the ability to turn invisible, but he leaves behind a shadow that can be detected under bright light. We should also recall that the name of Hades means “unseen” and that Perseus borrows invisibility from him to complete his tasks.]
87
88Gideon is skeptical of his potential employers and demands a huge sum for his service, but he manages to sneak photos of Reis out with him. [In what is certainly a symbolic act, Gideon makes copies of Reis’s images before he destroys the pictures he took. In our final argument, presented gradually throughout this summary, Gideon will copy Reis’s character even as Reis dies for his principles. Some might read this as Gideon taking Reis’s place in the final sacrifice, but we have a more particular redemptive purpose necessitating the high king’s death in our sights, involving the reformation of Cthulhu.] Now that we have set up the basic themes present in the opening chapter, we can accelerate our tour through the rest of the book.
89
90To begin his struggle with Reis, whom it is later revealed that he once worked for, Gideon selects the actress Cassie Casey as the perfect bait – he noticed glimpses of potential striving to rise to the surface in her. As he later tells her: “Nine-tenths of the time you seemed a very ordinary thirtyish actress, but there were flashes of something more – of an indescribable something that electrified me and, I believe, the whole audience. … People like you want to be the higher thing they cannot quite become” (207).
91
92Gideon relies upon her desire and perhaps her pride to entice Cassie into attempting to actualize her self-desires: “I want to be – I want to matter. I want to be somebody, not because I’m Wallace Rosenquist’s woman or because I’m Gideon Chase’s woman. Because I’m Cassie Casey.”
93
94Gideon will eventually reassure her, “You *are* someone, Cassie. You just don’t know it” (211). The novel settles around its primary point of view with a note from Chase tossed into Cassie’s bedroom door. It promises to make her a star if she will assist him, asking her to meet him at Baskin and Robins. Chase seems to have no problem entering her house and remaining unseen at will. Indeed, later details insinuate he is present in her apartment the entire time, even if she never detects him. [We shall extrapolate this to Gideon’s inexplicable disappearance later in the novel, at about the time that another huge and overwhelming force seems to enter the text for the “first” time: Great Cthulhu, as he is often called in Lovecraft’s fiction. We argue that Gideon is always the main character, and indeed the titular one, though he is the good hero Perseus, too. Diana Diamond the assassin and the dead Pat Gomez are also already “in” Cassie’s room when she notices them. We eventually learn that the Storm King has been on Earth since before mankind’s civilizations arose, metaphorically pre-occupying their house unseen.] Gideon’s note reads:
95
96>*You may see a man there who resembles your second husband. Look well, and not hurriedly. When he comes, he will show you where you may find me. When you do, I may confide the means by which you can become the mistress of a small fortune within a year. I may also make you a star.
97
98Tonight. Tell no one.* (23-4)
99
100Of course, after locking her door and determining that Chase printed the note on her own paper, Cassie immediately calls up a journalist, her friend Sharon Bench, and tells her all about it. Over the phone, Sharon reveals that she was trying to go through shades of lipstick alphabetically to put herself to sleep. “Apricot Passion, Bathsheeba [sic] Pink, Coral Number Ten” (24). [Gideon’s mention of hypnotism might be related to this listing, and later, many of these images will be repeated in the text, such as the coral island in the South Pacific where Reis and Cassie make love and where she is stranded after the Storm King unleashes his fury on the Takanga Island Group. This is where the image of the Volcano God can be found. Of course, we know the biblical story of Bathsheba: though she was married, King David saw her bathing and desired her, eventually making her pregnant. When her husband Uriah did not have sex with her to conceal David’s sin in a timely fashion, David had him placed on the front lines so that he would surely perish. After Uriah’s death, David’s son by Bathsheba was stricken with an illness and died. Furthermore, the rebellion of David’s son Absalom is usually considered to be further punishment for the transgressions committed out of lust for Bathsheba.]
101
102In any case, Sharon describes Gideon as “some kind of wizard … somebody who can do stuff other people can’t even begin to do” (25). [It does not take long for the theme of an afflicted son to come up again: Sharon reveals in this conversation that she has an acquaintance who once employed Gideon to “fix” her young child, who “wasn’t right” (26). At the very end of the novel, Reis seems to admit that Gideon helped his own sixteen-year-old son Rian Reis: 
103
104>His mother named him. … She raised him, and I’ve got to say she did well with that, too. He was very ill as a child. A defective heart valve was what they said, although I think it was really something else. His mother got your friend Dr. Chase. Chase fixed it, whatever it really was. I’d never heard of him until then” (277).
105
106Certainly, Sharon’s friend might be Reis’s ex-wife, and Sharon says that her child “was a little piece of a man she loved and lost” (26). [The name Rian means “little king,” while one of the meanings of Reis, as we have said before, can be “king.” After Chase fixed Sharon’s friend’s son, he was fine: “Maybe a little too brave, but normal for sure” (26). Gideon could have fixed the boy’s heart beyond its mere physical parameters – giving him too much metaphorical heart. At the very end of this essay, we shall discuss the possibility, suggested by Robert Pirkola, that Rian Reis maps to Zagreus, conceived by Zeus in the form of a serpent with Persephone. The climactic scene where Reis is sacrificed will compare the trail Cassie follows into the mountain to a snake. Zagreus is often syncretized with Dionysus, god of wine. The greatest resonance with this includes the fact that after being roasted and eaten, the heart of the god is preserved by Athena, so that he is reborn through Semele. The yacht which saves Cassie after she has been abandoned on the coral island of the Volcano God is called *The Athena*. In this scene, Sharon also sums up Chase’s philosophy as “God’s quit on us because we quit on Him” (27). Eventually, the winged and possibly bat-like creatures that Cassie sees periodically throughout the text will discuss divinity with her, and we should also remember that the Storm King goes by the appellation of the Squid God as well. We shall return to the question of Rian Reis’s mother after our rather exhausting look at the plot and the symbolic details of the novel.]
107
108Cassie proceeds to the Baskin-Robbins, where the young girl at the counter is getting anxious to close. Just as she is locking up, a man resembling Cassie’s ex-husband Scott manages to strong-arm his way inside. Later, his name will be revealed to be Lars Aaberg. [Lars means “crowned with laurels,” while Aaberg means “river hill or mountain” or “on the hill by the river.” Cassie will eventually think of him as Berg, which would denote a hill or mountain. Within a matter of pages, the concept of mountains will become infinitely more mysterious.] Aaberg’s entrance here is also important because it introduces a rapping motif that is repeated later at a key moment, as well as the color green:
109
110>The knocking became pounding. Something as hard and heavy as a carpenter’s hammer was striking the door.
111
112>The girl pulled the green shade an inch and a half to one side and peeped out. After a moment she unlocked the door and stood aside. (28)
113
114Here, Aaberg introduces himself as “Scott” after telling the young employee to shut up. [Later, when Scott actually arrives in the text in a rather villainous role working for the ATF, he will be very rude to the waitress serving them. The carpenter’s hammer has an obvious association given Wolfe’s Christianity: reformation, body and soul.] Aaberg takes Cassie in his own car to meet Chase, instructing her to get in the passenger side of a dead black vehicle. When Cassie claims to have a gun, he rifles through her purse, pausing at her lip stick. Aaberg says that its ultra-natural ash rose color will “put you to sleep,” which certainly suggests he was able to overhear, or has since learned of, Cassie’s telephone conversation with Sharon Bench (30). [On Takanga much later, Cassie will respond over the telephone to Sharon’s question about her location by saying, “On this cute little chair. It looks very French, to me anyway. I don’t know much about furniture. It’s all spindly and gilt, with an ashes-of-rose plush seat” (237) We shall return to the significance of burning and ashes later when we discuss different cultural myths associated with volcano gods, but this gilt chair should also be considered in terms of the throne the mythical Cassiopeia is chained upon. Gold has many connotations in *An Evil Guest*, and the most important one will be a shower of gold dropped by Chase into R’lyeh, disturbing Cthulhu, who rules from a tower under the sea, which results in a cataclysmic storm that leads to Reis’s sacrifice. As we have already noted, Perseus’s myth involves his birth via a shower of gold in a tower.]
115
116Amongst Cassie’s possessions are three hundred dollars; she also claims that a pen is missing from her purse. [Later, when Gideon foils an assassination attempt on himself by breaking into an apartment and wielding a cleaver from its kitchen, he will leave three hundred dollars behind for the absent tenants in remuneration. That act would seem less chivalrous if he took it from her purse, but there is reason to think that they are only symbolically resonant amounts: Cassie’s assets are to be used to pay a debt that Gideon believes he owes for breaking into someone’s house. Gideon probably plans on paying Cassie back for trespassing in her own house, seeing it as a necessity. Soon, Cassie will be signing a lot of autographs, though she can’t see her pen yet.]
117
118When she enters Chase’s car, Cassie falls asleep. When she awakens, Chase is already driving at high speeds towards Canada. They discuss an opportunity for becoming rich, and he suggests that, while he does not plan on murdering anyone himself, nor for her to kill, murder might be involved, as the man he seeks (Reis) has certainly killed people. Gideon also implies that even if she does not choose to help him, Reis might kill her. [They share a coffee prepared by the car’s computer; Cassie usually drinks it black, but she makes an exception with creamer for Gideon. The black and white imagery of this moment is going to become crucial as the novel progresses; it is worth noting that Gideon has a dark complexion and very dark features – his black car will be juxtaposed against the white limousine in which Cassie encounters an image of Reis’s disembodied head. One of her friends is even named Ebony White. Dark Gideon likes his coffee with cream, and, rather than hard alcohol like Reis, he usually offers coffee or tea when he dines with Cassie. We should also keep in mind that wine and hard alcohol distilled from grain like whiskey might have connotations given the possible mythical allusions to the god of wine in Zagreus/Dionysius and to the fact that Persephone, the wife of Hades, is usually depicted with a sheaf of grain. Robert Pirkola even suggests that the salad dressings used throughout the novel might correlate to general directions and to the various seasonal winds in mythology. This will all become complicated immensely by Cassie’s intermittent belief that some of her experiences are dreams, though they certainly have real consequences in the rest of the narrative.]
119
120Gideon reveals that in order for him to achieve his promise of making Cassie a star, he can work most efficiently at a mountain across the Canadian border. [We should remember that Cassiopeia will become a constellation at the hands of the sea god Poseidon. Here, Gideon makes her a star. Hey … does that mean he is a sea god or Perseus? Wolfe’s syncretism and the themes which emerge from the text will suggest that Gideon is both. How could Great Cthulhu and Gideon Chase possibly be related?] Gideon says:
121
122>“Every human being contains a whole grab bag of qualities. Some are inactive, others active. You have the quality that makes stars, but it is latent. The old mesmerists called it personal magnetism. We who think ourselves so much wiser have no better term for it. … One of my own qualities is the ability to manipulate qualities in others. … My mind will reach into yours, find that [star] quality there and drag it into the light.” (33)
123
124Cassie responds that she would walk barefoot for a night and day to become a star. At the Canadian border, Cassie quips with the Mounty checking them out. After claiming to be an undocumented national cherished by the American government, he guesses that she is Mexican. She immediately puts on a Russian accent and he responds by grabbing her purse and rifling through it. [While it seems irrelevant, when she goes to visit Klauser at the very end of the novel, his Hispanic caretakers and mention of some tragedy involving Russia might echo this scene. Russian salad dressing will also play a role in one of the pivotal scenes of the book, when Reis finally reveals his ambitions to Cassie and her ex-husband Scott encounters his doom in the form of a lycanthrope. It is at that moment when Reis declares that *he* is Scott’s replacement. I think that this is a fairly clear use of the primary mythical cycle emphasized by Sir James Frazer in *The Golden Bough* - the old king is sacrificed so that the new king can take his place, but only until his own fate ripens.]
125
126Gideon’s plan requires that Cassie be able to return to star in the final show of her play, *The Red Spot*. [While some early critics thought that the Lovecraftian elements seemed disconnected from the first half of the book, the title of this play already invokes the Storm King: the red spot is the huge storm on Jupiter, named after the king of the gods. The plot of this play will resonate even more strongly with the final chapters of *An Evil Guest*, as we shall soon see.] It is at this point that Cassie realizes that Gideon always knows the time without glancing at his watch. Gideon also reveals knowledge of what Cassie said to her friend Sharon over the telephone, but he denies planting a bug. Instead, he claims to have been in her apartment before she returned and to have left after she did. [According to the surface plot of the text, Gideon was hiding in a very small hole carved between Cassie’s living room and the next-door neighbor’s apartment, which has a mirrored floor plan. The novel, too, has a mirrored structure. Unfortunately, some comments Gideon makes later complicate the timeline of damaging her apartment, and this can be read in several ways. One involves assuming that Gideon has a non-linear relationship with time, another that someone is impersonating Gideon or that he feels compelled to lie for little obvious reason, and a third that the small detail is perhaps a symbolic hint that the timeline has been disrupted somehow. A fourth possibility involves the use of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands: a reflection of the waking world representing an alternate reality, in which the dreamers can often experience some transcendental power. In addition to the four points of the compass, the Dreamlands also include the underworld and the moon.]
127
128It is at this point that Gideon brings up something which most other analyzers of Wolfe (besides me) revel in: a multiplicity of explanations for how Aaberg might have learned what Cassie and Sharon talked about, after Cassie suggests he tapped her phone: “Or he had tapped Sharon’s … Or your talk was broadcast at some point. If the number you called was that of a cell phone, it had to be. Or he spoke to Sharon afterward. I could go on” (38). [Gideon himself could have spoken with the detective. Given that Aaberg will later be seen watching Cassie’s apartment in hopes of finding Gideon, supposedly working for Reis, his allegiance is never clear – one might even say that it reverses. Gideon later says that he enlisted Aaberg’s aid here by dangling the capture of Reis in front of him for some unspecified crime. There are many, many conflicts of interest in this book.]
129
130In what I consider to be a definitive moment concerning Gideon’s morality in the text, Cassie suggests that working for Gideon might entail setting Reis up “for a neat little murder.” Gideon stops the car and responds, “No. I don’t do murders. … Bill Reis does, however” (38). [This is the primary element of disagreement between Robert Pirkola’s initial take on Gideon’s character and my own: I insist that, somehow, these statements of character must be true. We shall discuss Pirkola’s more sinister opinion of Gideon and of Reis himself after our summary. Gideon is not a murderer at this time, whatever else he is. While he may be tangentially involved in the sacrifice of Reis to the Storm King at the very end of the story, I believe this has far more mythological (and theological) connotation than simply representing a coup by Gideon.] At this point, Cassie also declares that she trusts him: “I don’t know why, but I would [trust you.] You’re a wizard. Sharon said that, and she was right. But you’re a good wizard” (39).
131
132Gideon’s response, that he is famous for saying that there is no good, is immediately qualified by Cassie: “I think I understand that now. You mean it’s extinct. I never did before. … Now I’ve got it. Or I think I do” (39). [The question of whether Reis or Gideon is the “good” guy is one of the central mysteries of the text.]
133
134The president and Ferguson offered Gideon a professorship at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or wherever else he wanted to teach. It is clear by the end of the novel that his true aim is to return to Woldercan. Gideon refused their offers, which eventually matched his fifty-million-dollar request, since they all had strings.
135
136In any case, they reach the mountain, and Gideon claims that it is alive, comparing the necessity of bringing Cassie there to a surgeon operating in a hospital. He says:
137
138>“Once I looked across a wide, dry landscape and saw bushes. … Some of those bushes were bushes and some were ostriches. All mountains are stone. Most have no life. This one is alive. You won’t believe that, and I’m not going to prove it to you. But it is. … It is alive and sentient. It can speak, though it rarely does. It has a wife who lives in one of its many caves. She is – a laundress. Let’s leave it at that. She isn’t important, but he is. Important to us, here, tonight” (41).
139
140[Way back when this book was first published, I happened to have recently read Cory Doctorow’s *Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town*. In that novel, a sentient mountain is married to a washing machine. It was set in Canada. In addition, the characters were constantly called by different names, even though their different names always began with the same letter of the alphabet. When I asked Wolfe about this, he confirmed that it was indeed from Doctorow’s book. I have written about Wolfe for almost two decades, and, in that time, I have come up with a lot of major thematic and, at least in my assessment, important ideas. This is not one of those moments: the realization was of a minor allusion that somehow spread forth into the popular consciousness, which has become one of the most frequent things I hear repeated about the novel, almost every time it comes up. I hope something else from this essay and this volume saturates the public consciousness just as that bit of trivia did. However, at this time I would like to state that Wolfe is first and foremost a synthesizer of past and present, and not only does this mountain refer to Doctorow’s book, it also refers to the myth of the giant Atlas, transformed into a mountain by Perseus, upon which the stars rest. Cassie, in her transformation to stardom here, will drowse on the mountaintop, “resting” there for her transformation. Wolfe likes to triple up on his allusions if possible in this novel, so I would also suggest we remember that Randolph Carter’s goal, the glorious city of Kadath from his dreams, is an ancient mountain-tower in the north, in the Cold Wastes, home of the Earth Gods. This mountain is pretty far north, comparatively.]
141
142Cassie verbalizes that perhaps Gideon might be crazy and hears the ground tremble; her surprise prompts the following interesting accusation from Gideon: “You were born on this planet. … You live on it, yet you know nothing about it” (41). According to Gideon, the vibrations signal the mountain’s displeasure. Here, he asks if she has heard of the Silent Woman. [This is a true pub in the United Kingdom, and its sign does, as we will see later in the novel, often feature a headless woman. Wolfe seems to syncretize this with various myths as well, but for now it remains a vague allusion to a future event as Gideon metaphorically suggests that silence would be best; other and more sinister things also live in the mountain’s caves, and those might include creatures akin to Lovecraft’s Night-gaunts, as we shall discuss later.]
143
144They eventually come to a flat rock at the summit, which Gideon identifies as an altar, though he assures her he will not sacrifice her on it. [This scene will also mirror the stone upon which Reis will be sacrificed to the Storm King at the climax of the novel, though that mountain is in the south, where the seasons are reversed.] Chase prepares sticks and honey, saying that it will help him communicate with “certain persons” and instructing her to “sit down – that high stone over there. I’ll sit on the low one facing you.” (42) [This, too, echoes the placement of the constellations, in which Cassiopeia sits high in a grouping with Perseus and Cepheus. As Gideon’s name should suggest, Perseus faces her in the sky. The stars are literally resting on this mountain, as they do for Atlas. The burnt honey might also resonate with several of Persephone’s epithets: Melindia, Melanoia, Melivia, and Melitodes, all derived from the word for “honey” (Rhode). We shall discuss the implications of that for the black and white imagery of the book (far) below.]
145
146Cassie notes that there seems to be an odor she describes as “Dark … [with] a bitter undercurrent” (43). Gideon instructs her to look at the moon. [This is another nice contrast between darkness and light, which are the dominant competing motifs of this book. We should also note that here dark is associated with an undercurrent, literally something under the sea. Gideon will eventually play the part of a sailor and, even before that, feel compelled to sing an old sea chantey.]
147
148It appears that Gideon is hypnotizing Cassie, telling her to sleep now and on their drive home: 
149
150>“You should sleep all morning, if you can. I know you must be very, very tired….” Behind him: great, dark wings.
151
152>The moonlight, Cassie reflected, streamed down upon this barren mountaintop as upon no place else on Earth. (43)
153
154[We should remember that besides the winged creatures which Cassie will encounter later, Cthulhu is also featured in most of his forms with wings, either as an octopus-like creature or as a dragon. Here, the dark wings are juxtaposed against that extreme moonlight, obviously very bright on this mountaintop. Gideon’s later pseudonym will be Gil Corby – which might be a gilded raven. Is the moonlight purifying that dark, bitter undercurrent? We should also keep in mind one of the names of the moon in mythology, Diana, as compared to the crazed assassin Diana Diamond. Dark wings will also help Cassie escape to the coral island after Reis is sacrificed and Cassie kills King Kanoa.]
155
156Cassie awakens under the impression that she has had a dream of some kind, and she notes that her door and windows are locked. One picture of Reis that Gideon gave her the night before further describes Reis, in Gideon’s hand, as someone with a cell phone watch who often wears sunglasses and sports clothes, with the ability to walk unseen. The back of the other picture reads, “*Up to something big. Find out what it is, Miss Casey. Be very careful*” (44). [To reiterate, the name Hades, known as the King of the Underworld, means “unseen.” In addition, Perseus and Persephone come from the same root word, implying destruction. Hades is famous for abducting Persephone, the goddess of spring. It could very well be that Cassiopeia Fiona Cassie does double mythological duty as Cassiopeia and Persephone, the green goddess, just as Gideon is Perseus and Poseidon rolled into one, as we hope to prove. While Fiona can mean “white” or “fair,” its Irish root is “vine.” The goddess of spring and flowers is known as Flora in Rome.]
157
158Cassie calls up Sharon once again, who seems to think that her friend’s voice has changed somehow. [Sharon also asks if Cassie remembers the name of Sharon’s mother, Martha Grossman, who flew up from Florida. Much as Mexico and Russia will come up again in the text from the previous chapter, Scott, Cassie’s ex-husband, will also be coming from Florida later in the book.] They agree to meet at Walker’s to eat after Cassie gets ready.
159
160When Cassie arrives there, the girl at the front seems to instantly realize that Cassie is a star of some kind, “Only I c-can’t think of your name.” (45) [Chase’s manipulation of her star quality seems to have worked: the girl might have no idea who Cassie is, but she *knows* she is in the presence of a celebrity. One of Pirkola’s interesting early insights into this scene was that Gideon Chase had paid the restaurant worker to act in such a fashion, but I think the thematic implication of the novel is that *transformations are real* even if they are not permanent.] Cassie signs a paper napkin for the girl, “*Cassie Casey, with all good wishes*.” (45) [This scene might also be juxtaposed against the poor treatment Cassie received in the ice-cream shop before her ascent to true stardom.] When Cassie is led to her table, she is surprised to encounter Gideon Chase, described here as “a slender, olive skinned man” (46).
161
162Cassie accuses him of tapping her phone, and Gideon denies it. [If we believe that Chase lies, he may have been hiding in the space between rooms again, and perhaps left while Cassie was getting ready. However, his explanation promises otherwise: “It will at least be truthful” (46).] Gideon says that he contacted the local newspapers asking after Sharon until he reached the *Sun-Tribunal*, where two women named Sharon worked. The wrong Sharon was able to direct him to the correct one, and Gideon, something of a celebrity himself, offered to give Cassie’s friend an interview if she would keep Gideon informed. Gideon reveals that Cassie’s voice sounded “*spacey*” to Sharon (48). [And why wouldn’t it, given her newfound status as a constellation? Gideon contacting the wrong Sharon before the right one is echoed later with two men claiming to be FBI agent Martin: the “false” one is seen first. This might have even more wide-reaching implications for the novel, especially surrounding Reis and Chase.]
163
164Gideon warns Cassie not to mention Reis at all when Sharon arrives. [Given her possible connection to Reis’s ex-wife, Sharon could also be in a position to contact Reis himself.] Gideon is quick to declare that he and Cassie are “an item,” and Sharon takes a picture of them clasping hands under the table. At the end of the scene, another waitress proclaims that Cassie is a star. Gideon subtly threatens her by emphasizing his relationship with the management, and those who want to read something sinister in Gideon’s character might find some support in this exchange after Cassie whispers, “I thought you didn’t lie.”
165
166Gideon responds:
167
168“Of course I do. … I’ve been mistaken for various things at various times, but never for a saint. Though I suppose they must lie, too, now and then. What I meant to say, and should have said, was that I could not think of you without feeling a trifle dizzy. You are, after all, the most desirable woman in the world. And I was, after all, holding hands with you just a moment ago.” (50).
169
170Later, in Gideon’s *other* car, a small brown convertible, Cassie asks if her phone is tapped. Gideon says that if it is, he didn’t do it, though Reis might do so soon. He suggests that Aaberg probably spoke with Sharon. Cassie’s response is worth noting for the sudden presence of the color white in her reaction: “‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Small white teeth nibbled at Cassie’s lower lip. “I didn’t know she knew him” (50). [Later, when she goes to interrogate the assassin Diana Diamond and meet with Reis’s plant Pat Gomez in the Storm King’s cult at the hospital on Takanga, Cassie will ask if the lipstick she has just put on has gotten on her teeth.]
171
172Gideon suggests that after Sharon got off the phone with Cassie, the reporter started calling other people. He gained the assistance of Aaberg by telling him that Reis might have committed a crime the cop was investigating, and they promised to help each other.
173
174Gideon also says that there is something in Cassie’s apartment which he must show her. 
175Cassie assures him that their romance will be all over town soon thanks to Sharon’s televised gossip program, and Gideon reveals that his plan is for Reis to come to them, since he cannot be found. When they arrive at Cassie’s apartment, Gideon knocks next door (at apartment 3B) to see if her neighbors have returned from their vacation. 
176
177[The cut here is interesting, as the scene shifts to Cassie in her dressing room. The elderly security guard James K. Warshawsky is waiting behind the door she opens, smiling even more strongly than normal. We do not learn directly what Reis wanted to show Cassie in her own apartment, but we might suspect that it has something to do with the passage he has cut in the wall. James, or Jimmy as he is most often called, will soon die mysteriously after accepting money to deliver a gift to Cassie. Pat Gomez once worked for Presidio Security and attempts to gain access to R’lyeh on behalf of Reis before “dying.” Otherwise, it is difficult to see the significance of Jimmy to the overall plot – save that the quick cut somehow aligns Gideon and Jimmy. There might be another mythical resonance associated with a messenger, but this is difficult to see clearly.]
178
179Cassie performs in the play as the character Mildred, but her entrance seems to draw jealousy from the lead actress Alexis Cabana and open lust from Bruce Sandoz, whose “eyes were devouring her alive. He was (his eyes declared) a famished lion. She was a strawberry ice cream cone” (52).
180
181At this point, her performance seems to truly bring the play to life, though the plot does not change:
182
183>[T]he play had become far more serious and real, a real life – *hers* – watched not at all strangely by several hundred people sitting in the dark. A real life (still hers) in which she herself was the center of every silent watcher’s attention.
184
185>Brad Kingsley was determined that he and Jane Simmons would tour the moons of Jupiter in his new hopper on their honeymoon; while she, knowing all they risked, was equally determined to stop them. …
186
187>She stole a glance at the audience while Brad was arguing and stamping around. A second-row seat that had been empty a minute before was occupied now – occupied by a big soft-faced man who wore glasses. (52-3)
188
189[This is the first time she sees Reis, and it is important because the play is enacting their later “honeymoon” on the Takanga Islands. We have already discussed how the Red Spot invokes the Storm King, but the next detail, the death of Cassie’s character, will directly map her “Mildred Norcott” onto Pat Gomez, whom Reis may have already sent to infiltrate the Storm King cult. The name Brad Kingsley also directly links to Will Reis, whose last name means “king.” Of course, like everything in this book, this detail is also complicated by the Storm King’s designation; however, one king is probably much bigger than the other, in the play and in reality. Does the appearance of Reis here foreshadow his failed invisibility during the sacrifice scene at the culmination of the book?]
190
191The next scene is also worth looking at: 
192
193>Seurat strangled her – Act Two, Scene Two – and she lay gasping and trembling on the darkened stage until he helped her rise and supported her as he led her into the wings. In real life, Donny Duke was small and swishy and reeked of Nuit de Marseilles; but Cassie clung to him until he had to leave to take his bow. (53)
194
195[The assassin, called Seurat here, is played by Donnie Duke. Late in the book, the assassin Diana Diamond will be freed from her *chains* by Pat Gomez, who refuses to stay in her grave on the Takanga Islands, and they will leave during the storm together, each picking up a corner of Cassie’s trailing robe, with the stated intention of stealing Reis’s hopper and returning to California. The dark stage here should also remind us of Gideon, as well as the small size of Donny Duke. In addition, the scent of Gideon’s burnt honey offering resonates not only with the “honeymoon” on Jupiter but with the smell of Donny Duke’s cologne – named night of Marseille, a large port city in France. Unlike some previous commentators on *An Evil Guest*, I do not believe that Donny Duke is actually Diana Diamond – rather, this play merely serves as an allegorical representation of what is to come, and, more importantly, these actors will continue to act as the characters they represent in the play at the cast party afterwards, so that we are privy to an ending to the plot lines of the novel that would otherwise be practically inexplicable. One question that we should also consider involves Cassie’s acting now that she has reached her potential: does it make her plays real? Do her wishes and desires have the power to alter reality? Seurat was the name of a Post-Impressionist painter famous for chromoluminarism, also called divisionism – the separation of colors into individual dots, and pointillism, in which a conglomeration of dots and points form an image. One might argue that this novel operates on the same principle, especially in the separation of black and white motifs. Has a greater darkness been separated into smaller points? Of course, Cassie injects a fair amount of red and green into the novel as well.]
196
197After the play, “The applause rose as surf rises when a storm races toward the coast,” also invoking the Storm King and the climactic weather in which Reis is seemingly killed (53). The applause does not continue for the leading man, Bruce Sandoz, or for Alexis Cabana. Cassie flees to her dressing room to behold her “smeared mirror, ignoring both burned-out bulbs.” (53) [Later, the mirror/window imagery will become very important. In this scene, something which was once light has gone dark. It should also be noted that mirrors present images in reverse.] Cassie puts on her perfume in an act which is treated baptismally in the text:
198
199“That done, she stripped and practically bathed in her favorite cologne, a baptism of the new self by the new self: a ritual cleansing in Lily Delight performed while someone tapped very softly at her door.” (54)
200
201[It is our argument that this baptism and purification is exactly what happens, though it could be that this ritual refers not only to Cassie but to the cognate of the character she played, Pat Gomez. The lily is the most common funeral flower – a white lily implies that the soul of the departed has achieved renewed innocence in death. The hospital room of Pat Gomez will have many flowers, including, possibly, a Passion Flower, named after the passion of Christ. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that such a transformation occurs for Cthulhu as well when the military strikes blast his underwater realm.]
202
203This time, rather than the harsh tapping of Aaberg, small and gray Margaret Briggs is on the other side of the door. She identifies herself as an “expert seamstress and laundress” now looking for work since the play has ended, and with it, her service to the leading woman, Alexis Cabana (54). She says that she also used to work for Easter Sinclair. [It might be important to note that we could still be dealing with the events after the storm hits Takanga metaphorically. Easter is of course famous for the risen Christ after his descent into death. Sinclair is a name derived from St. Clair, an Italian monastic who gave up her secular life on Palm Sunday shortly after hearing St. Francis preach, trading her finery for plain clothes. She founded the Poor Clares. Margaret’s identification as a laundress might also link her to the mountain at which Cassie’s transformation was accomplished, whom we have asserted is a cognate of Atlas. Eostre is also the name of a Germanic goddess of spring, light, and resurrection. Margaret’s small size might even link her to Gideon Chase, somehow.]
204
205As they negotiate an appropriate price for her services, Cassie notices that neither cop has taken the money from her purse. She gives Margaret an order for food (including a black coffee with sweetener, which also resonates with the earlier experience Cassie had with Gideon). The director of the play, India Dempster, also enters to talk to Cassie, taking her chair. India indicates that Cassie should definitely go to the cast party, at which Alexis Cabana will be absent, and also tells her that she has an “angel” who is backing a new musical play (55). Jimmy once again raps at the door, saying that a man in the alley wants to deliver a present to her. Jimmy pales when India dismisses him. As India is leaving, she asks if Cassie is coming to the party. Cassie says she will, but Jimmy responds, “I won’t be” (56). [This moment seems strangely prescient, given that readers will learn of Jimmy’s death during the cast party, and another character who will perish by the end of the novel, Norma Pieper, also says something which seems to indicate that she, too, has some presentiment of her demise. Later, we will suggest that India’s actions resonate with the Storm King’s, so this dismissal of Jimmy and his subsequent paleness might make sense, given the paleness of Diana Diamond and her strange claim to be the other half to Pat Gomez, who will be referred to as a “dead woman” frequently at the end of the book. Are Jimmy, Pat Gomez, and Norma Pieper metaphorically linked? Are they symbolically related to the character Cassie played in “The Red Spot,” who sought to keep the main characters from going on their honeymoon to a dangerous locale?]
206
207Jimmy was paid to tell her that someone who “sounded big” was waiting in the alley for her with a nice gift, but Cassie refuses it: “You can’t deliver me like a package. Nobody can. Call the cops if he gets ugly” (56). Jimmy’s only other description of the encounter was that “It was real dark.” [While this certainly sounds like Reis intending to give Cassie the tainted gold bracelet, the darkness that Jimmy mentions is usually associated with Gideon, though not exclusively. We shall return to Jimmy’s death later. The Volcano God promises Cassie that he has given her a gift towards the end of the novel.] When Jimmy leaves, Margaret returns, reiterating that Cassie asked for Thousand Island dressing. [There is a sense that the orders of the various characters are important, but the salad dressing that resonates with the plot most obviously is the Green Goddess variety, which is made from mayonnaise, anchovy, green onion, and other ingredients.] Since Margaret is owed back pay by Alexis, Cassie agrees to advance her a week’s pay. She also asks Margaret to get someone who can help her exit the building without being seen. [This “advance pay” might also indicate that the normal order of time has been reversed – normally, work is paid for after it is completed - I feel that this further resonates with the position of Gideon Chase in the novel, who might, through his association with Woldercan, have been freed from the linear constraints of time’s passage.]
208
209The cast party is held at Rusterman’s, a restaurant from Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. When Cassie arrives, she sees Ebony White eating. Cassie warns her not to get fat: “What are you going to wear when you can’t fit into a size four?” (59) [In this scene, we suggest that Ebony White also resonates with a part of Gideon Chase’s character, also known for his slenderness. There is some indication that she and India might be in a kind of lesbian relationship, even if it is casual. This might be echoed in the union of Diana Diamond and Pat Gomez at the very end of the novel. The most important dialogue in associating large India with Cthulhu in some of these symbolic set-pieces involves Cassie’s joking small talk to Ebony: “How’s life in India?” (59) When Pat Gomez infiltrates R’lyeh, the text indicates that the Storm King is somehow actually the city itself, and that his followers, the “living dead” as they are called, exist inside him on white slabs (264). These scenes truly do seem reflective of other scenes in the novel.] Brian Kean (who will play Reverend Brownlea, Cassie’s character’s father in *Dating the Volcano God*) comes and offers to get Cassie something to drink, ignoring Ebony. Tabbi Merce, who will replace Norma Pieper after she is killed in playing Cassie’s character’s aunt, Jane Brownlea, notes that during the play the audience was “throwing flowers at the stage” while Cassie was distracted by empty chairs (60) [The final request of Pat Gomez and of the strange Volcano God who speaks to Cassie are that flowers be placed in remembrance of them. This makes the most sense if we also associate Cassie with Persephone as the green goddess of spring and flowers, often portrayed robed with a sheaf of grain, a scepter, and a small box. Cassie will receive two small boxes over the course of the book.] Brian brings Cassie white wine. [Once again, Cassie most often drinks alcohol with Reis, who is associated with the color white.]
210
211Here, Cassie expresses a desire for an anchovy fritter, which resonates with the Green Goddess (salad dressing) imagery. She goes to sit with Ebony, where Porter Penniman is also waiting at the table. This is actually the central moment of our essay, as it provides the key imagery, along with the final chapter, which points to Gideon Chase’s identity as a reformed and possibly redeemed Great Cthulhu:
212
213>With a smile as broad as a piano’s, he raised his exceedingly impressive four hundred pounds and indicated the chair on his right. Like all of Rusterman’s chairs, it was massive and looked medieval.
214
215>Cassie managed to drag it back while Margaret squirmed into the chair on Cassie’s right.
216
217>“De-lighted. Ah’m mos’ surely de-lighted, Miz Casey.” Porter Penniman’s voice belonged in Walker’s, blackstrap molasses drowning a cinnamon waffle.
218
219>Cassie smiled. “You know, Mr. Penniman, you’ve always seemed a little sinister to me, onstage and off. You’ve changed now, and I like the new you.”
220
221>He raised a hand that looked as large as a dinner plate. “Ah mos’ solemnly swears, Miz Casey, that Ah shall never agin enlist no smelly li’l foreigners to wring your pretty li’l neck.”
222
223>“Friends forever.” Cassie offered her hand. “And call me Cassie, please.”
224
225>He took it, grasping it rather as an ogre of unusual size might have held a dove. “An’ you mus’ call me Tiny, which all mah other fren’s already does” (61).
226
227It is at this moment that the anchovy fritters arrive for Cassie. [There are many important things to unpack here. Without this lynchpin scene, my reading of *An Evil Guest* might hold no water. Here, Porter Penniman, who played the “bad guy” in *The Red Spot*, seems changed somehow. This huge man goes by “Tiny” to his friends. Later, we will see Hanga from “The Tree is My Hat” appear, and when he is not hostile, he “walks small” in pygmy form. Besides Ebony White and Margaret Briggs, the most prominent small character we have met so far is the mysterious Gideon Chase. The southern accent which Porter Penniman has resonates with the conflict in the South Pacific at the climax of the novel, and the description of Penniman’s voice as *black* molasses also reminds us of Gideon. In addition, it was at Walker’s, where Porter Penniman supposedly belongs, that Cassie took her rather intimate picture with Gideon. The Storm King and his followers may have sent Diana Diamond to kill Cassie in an act anticipated by Cassie’s character’s strangulation, but this “after party” implies that he will never do so again. In addition, the alliteration on display in Porter Penniman’s name resonates with the double identity of Gideon as both Perseus and the offended sea god Poseidon. When Cassie’s phone rings, it plays “Pigs in Paradise.” This is another image which suggests, possibly, the Gadarene Swine – possessed pigs which were cast into the sea. Perhaps someday they get to leave the sea, redeemed. We will talk more about Cthulhu’s possible redemption below, but it is definitely worth noting that it is at this point, when Porter Penniman turns from a sinister figure to a friendly one, smiling like a “piano” (which has black and white keys), that Cassie gets her first anchovy fritters. In this scene, Rusterman’s is also identified as a new restaurant “chain,” which might also echo Cassiopeia’s binding as a constellation. Like a dark angel on my own shoulder, Robert Pirkola reminds me that Cassiopeia means “Cassia juice” and that Cassia means … cinnamon. Is that blackstrap molasses “drowning a cinnamon waffle” merely referring to the fate of Pat Gomez, whose cognate Cassie played, or is this even more sinister in its implication? We shall return to this below, but I suggest that it actually refers to the fate of Pat Gomez, whose infiltration into R’lyeh will have far more consequences than is at first obvious.]
228
229Soon, they begin discussing India’s angel. She arrives promising that “Wallace Rosenquist” will be along shortly. [Reis’s names all seem to have the initials WR.] 
230
231Cassie fills India in on her escape from the theater, and it ends with a *non sequitur*: “I don’t mean to be impolite or anything, but where’s the Jane?” (62) [While this obviously refers to the bathroom, it should be noted that the lead character of the previous play was named Jane, and the aunt in the next one, who will first be played by the doomed Norma Pieper, has the same name. Alexis Cabana disappears from the text at this point except for a later reference to a waitress, who seems to resemble her but is described as even more beautiful. Alexis’s complete name means a helper or defender of a shelter, especially one near a beach. The name Jane means “God has been gracious.”] In the bathroom, Cassie tells Margaret that she needs to find Gideon Chase quickly.
232
233Deciding not to return to India’s table, Cassie heads elsewhere:
234
235>She was halfway to the bar when Palma pounced [*note those alliterative Ps – Palma will play the Volcano God in his next part*]. “You were marvelous tonight, Cassiopeia Fiona Casey. … You made my poor scheming detective look very poor indeed, and that was all to the good. I know the audience, God bless ‘em!, made bold to let you know how *mervilleux* you were; but none of these hams will, so I intuit that I should do it myself. One strives, one endeavors, you know, to leave our poor old Earth a better place, eh? You have, and I do my own threadbare trifle by telling you how greatly you dazzled us. Come sit by me, and I’ll tell you much, much more.” (63)
236
237[We should also notice that here, for all his artificiality, Palma is stressing Cassie’s greatness and the quest to make the world better. In the very opening quote of this essay, Cassie complains that Vince, in his role as Volcano God, will make speeches about coconuts, which are dark on the outside and white on the inside when they are cracked open, while her sailor will make speeches about love. This will become the dominant imagery dictating our reading of the text, and it is of course mapped to the traditional associations of good and evil with darkness and light, as Gideon himself mentioned in the very first chapter. While Gideon will “play” the sailor as Gil Corby, the name Reis goes by on Takanga is said to mean “Sailor of Heaven.” Cassie “dates” both Gideon and Reis over the course of the book, according to Sharon Bench’s sensationalism. Vince Palma might actually be playing the part of “scheming” detective lieutenant Lars Aaberg in the play. Also, we should note that the “hams” Vincent mentions will be construed differently if we think of the major players of Cassie’s own life as the “Pigs in Paradise.”]
238
239Palma steers Cassie to a table at which Donny Duke “sat sipping something green, and at which Norma was in the act of sitting” (63). Palma tells Cassie that Donny will get her a drink, and she asks for something strong, to knock her “panty hose off.” [Given the reference to Bathsheba earlier and a few other portents, it is entirely possible that there is a pregnancy of some kind in Cassie’s future. However, this remains one of the most nebulous aspects of the text, and we shall return to it much later. It is important that the cognate for the assassin is actually drinking something green here – at the climax, Diana Diamond will expectorate green spittle into Cassie’s face.]
240
241Palma then makes a joke about Cassandra and her prophecies: “Cassie shall prophesy evil … but she shall not be believed. Save by me. Alone” (64). [On the previous page, he was likened to a cruel tomcat, and here, he brushes “an invisible yellow feather from his lips with a manicured and be-ringed paw” – the cat that ate the canary. Gideon will later assume that Cassie is short for Cassandra, the prophetess whose words were never believed.] He says, “She has heard the banshee” (a spirit whose voice offers the premonition of tragedy – usually the death of a family member) and then clarifies that banshees are not necessarily female, though they should be “numbered amongst the Grey Neighbors” (64). Margaret returns at this point, (with some banter indicating that Norma thinks Margaret is Cassie’s grey neighbor), as does Donny Duke, bearing a drink and the news of James’ death, though he does not yet reveal it. Despite his sinister imagery, Palma says, “I had supposed you celebrating, Cassiopeia darling. I see how mistaken I was. Rest assured, I beg you, that your friends – and everyone at this table is your friend – will stand by you through thick and thin” (64). Norma, however, realizes that whoever Margaret was sent to find is not coming to help. Donny starts to let them know that the security guard at the theater has died, and Margaret finishes more assertively, getting his name right. [It could be that Margaret here somehow does achieve a resonance with the bat-like creatures we shall encounter later in the novel, but this link never becomes explicit. As we have mentioned before, her initials, M.B., have been used to suggest that she might be an older Cassie returning to her timeline, since Cassie plays Mariah Brownlea in the next play, but there is little reason to assume that this is the case. Given Margaret’s disappearance later, she might even be a kind of allegorical representation of Gideon. As the novel progresses, the allegory becomes more obvious and easier to see. The death of Jimmy deserves more scrutiny; I fear it might be a symbolic set-piece which might only become clear in holistically re-evaluating the quick cut between Gideon’s and Jimmy’s knocks.]
242
243Cassie says, “Let me guess. … They found him in the alley outside the stage door and he’d been shot. Maybe stabbed. Is that right?”
244
245In another *non sequitur*, Norma exclaims, “Oh, shit! … I’m back in the show” (65).
246
247Neither Donny nor Margaret had heard of a shooting or violent death. [Norma’s strange comments seem to take her own death into account – how exactly does Jimmy’s death put her “back in the show”? Cassie has just verbalized the manner in which Norma will die, but the means of Jimmy’s death is never verified.]
248
249At this point, India calls for everyone’s attention and declares that the stage is returning: “[M]aybe it’s just a cyclic thing” (66). [The entire novel might be a “cyclic thing,” and it is definitely mirrored.] Reis, in a teal pin-stripe suit, tells them of the basic state of his play, and is very interested in retaining as many of the cast and crew from *The Red Spot* as he can. [Given how *The Red Spot* evokes the Storm King, this really does sound like a redemptive kind of moment: can the Storm King’s minions be used in another role?]
250
251Rosenquist singles out Cassie and presents her with a heavy box containing a “massive” gold bracelet, which he claims to have had designed months ago. When she expresses that she feels as if she does not deserve it, Reis says, “You deserve much more” (67). [Wallace as a first name can imply “peaceful ruler” and Rosenquist can mean “rose branch.” Given the use of rose imagery with lipstick and even with the gilt chair that Cassie sits in in Takanga, it is worth considering that the cultivation of the Rosenquist personality might be something of a natural response to Cassie, who will become associated with spring. Even Donnie Duke drinking something green might be a positive sign.]
252
253Reis as Rosenquist tells her that the bracelet is “Solid gold. … Eighteeen karat, which means it’s pretty soft. Be careful with the clasp.” [We should remember that Reis’s description includes his large size and a soft face. Later, he says that he will send a friend to Cassie who will repeat a word three times that will remind her of him. That word is gold, and the friend is Gideon.]
254
255Cassie hates the golden bracelet immediately, but India calls it lovely. Cassie hears a deep and hoarse whisper as Reis grabs the box: “*I need to speak to you privately. I’ll meet you at the front desk downstairs in twenty minutes*” (67). [Given that gold produced through alchemy is unstable and somewhat dangerous to human beings, the taking back of the protective box could be construed as a malevolent act, but it is more likely Reis changing his mind about letting Cassie be exposed to the bracelet for long. India’s instant love for the gold is the typical response one would expect from a “dragon,” as Reis defines them, and helps solidify her later symbolic resonance in scenes as the Storm King (as odd as that sounds).]
256
257When Vince asks about the play, India says that she wants “Wally” to see him without makeup. Since India will direct, Vince agrees to cancel his commitments for the new play, in which India envisions him as the Volcano God. [Here, he says he is 6’4” to Reis’s 6’2”. This might imply that the Volcano God is bigger than Reis in “real life,” even though Reis clearly envisions himself as that god.]
258
259Cassie gives Margaret the bracelet and asks her for a pen, scribbling down her cell phone number for Margaret’s use. As she leaves, Ebony says that Jimmy might have died of a “Heart attack or something” (68). [Rian Reis also had a heart problem, or something. Jimmy’s death remains one of the most difficult aspects of the text to allegorize.] Ebony insists that Cassie should have a drink with her – though Cassie says, “I’ve had two drinks, and the second one would peel paint. I think I drank about half, and my head’s swimming. So no” (68). [It seems that alliteration with Ps probably stands for a very particular thing in the symbolic logic of this text. The drink which would “peel paint” is the special drink that Donny Duke prepared, and we should always pay attention to “swimming” imagery given Pat Gomez’s infiltration into underwater R’lyeh and the end of the novel. Removal (or reversal) of a dark color will be important to our assessment of the good and bad figures in the novel.]
260
261Reis interrupts them and invites Cassie outside, where, “The night had turned cool. Rusterman’s white and gold canopy sheltered them from the light rain, but not from the wind” (69). [Here, the color imagery is important. Reis is associated with gold and white in this novel, while Gideon, through the name Gil Corby, is associated with gold and black. The wind penetrates here with Reis, but not the rain, which is definitely related to the Storm King and his wrath. This will also be important in the song which Margaret Briggs teaches Cassie later, “Walk in the Reign.” In mythology, winds can also bring seasonal changes, which would factor into any story which might be playing with allusions to Persephone.]
262
263Reis reveals that he just hopped from Berlin to meet her there “in a friend’s hopper” (69) [Later, when Chase takes Cassie to The Silent Woman, almost everything on the menu will be in German.] Reis also asks Cassie if she has been to space. Despite her protestations, he gets her a drink. Reis considers space travel as something introduced to humanity far too early. The optimistic spirit with which Reis approaches an impossible task is revealed in his dialogue here:
264
265>” It’s true. A hundred years ago men dreamed of [widespread space travel.] They thought there’d be a world government long before it came, that ignorance and poverty would’ve been eliminated. […] When I show you Earth form space, when you see how beautiful it is, you’ll realize how easily it might be put right. […] Poverty and ignorance … they’re relative terms. Let’s see that everybody has enough to eat and a place to sleep. That everyone can read well enough to enjoy reading. […] I want you for Mariah. You haven’t read the script, I realize. Mariah Bownlea’s our star, the woman who dates the Volcano God.” (70)
266
267[The utopian dreams that Reis has are noble, but, as Chase said, he seems entirely too willing to kill to make his dreams a reality. It is our argument that this nobility will inspire a conversion and a love for Earth in a creature not naturally prone to such affection. And right on cue …]
268
269It is then that Cassie’s cellphone begins playing “Pigs in Paradise,” with Gideon on the other end. She tells him she cannot use his name and that he is about six hours too late as the limousine takes off.
270
271The next chapter begins with Gideon and Cassie at breakfast. [Those interested in food might review the colors and ingredients; here, Cassie has the Fontina Toast aux des Raisins Secs – fontina would be whitish, while those raisins are dry and dark.] Cassie reveals that she was frightened of Reis, who was interested in the bracelet, which she could not turn down in front of everyone. Cassie only told Reis that she did not want him to think he owned her, not how much she hated the bracelet. Gideon asks if Margaret might be working for Reis. Reviewing the timeline of Sharon Bench’s press releases, Cassie wonders how Reis caught onto them so fast: he had already had lunch with India on the day after she met Gideon. Chase offers several possible explanations, one of which includes that Reis sees Cassie as a way to get to him. He speculates that he might already be watched by Reis. [Aaberg might be a convenient method, though Gideon believes that Aaberg wanted to arrest Reis.]
272
273Conversation turns to Chase’s car, which is invisible to radar, and back to the bracelet, which Cassie thinks is the type that might even be worn by a Volcano God. She claims, “He’s got volcano gods on the brain” (74). When she says that it is primitive, Gideon says, “A diamond bracelet? I doubt it” (74). When Cassie insists that it is entirely of gold, Gideon reacts, though it is not clear how. [This is another moment where past and present seem to bleed together. The second bracelet that Reis gives Cassie will be covered in diamonds. This one is merely gold, and it also has, as will eventually be revealed, a dangerous radioactive property which will poison those who have it for too long, a by-product of the alchemical process Reis learned on Woldercan. Why would Chase assume that her bracelet was made of diamond? We shall posit that his passage through time might not be conventional, but it is still difficult to proffer a solid reason for this mistake.]
274
275Gideon wants to examine the bracelet, and it is at this point that Cassie notices how useless his watch is; he always knows the time. Chase says that it once belonged to someone he admired and takes it off to show that it reads “*RC from his friend HPL*” (75). [In this universe, it seems that H. P. Lovecraft is real. Though we could assume that this was inscribed originally to Robert Chase, the old ambassador to Woldercan, Gideon does not say that the watch belonged to his father, and of course Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter is just as coded into this inscription. Indeed, we only know that once it was the watch of someone Chase looks up to. Reis also has a watch, which serves as a cellphone. The “Pigs in Paradise” theme might be applicable here.] Gideon also says that his darkness of skin and eye “is the way I was born” (75).
276
277Gideon asks if she has “dated” Wally, and she describes the evening, including the drink he gave her in the car, which “tasted like lighter fluid” (76). [We would argue that something was set alight in her conversation with Reis – probably his own more noble intentions. The kindling of a light becomes another consistently vital motif throughout the novel.]
278
279She asks Gideon how he entered her apartment, and his next words suggest what he hoped to show her in the earlier scene right before the cut to her dressing room:
280
281>”I meant to show you … and I’d rather show you than tell you, so I’ll try to make this brief. The apartment next to yours is the mirror image of yours. That arrangement simplifies plumbing and wiring, including the trivid connection; so it’s very common. Specifically, the living room mirrors yours. Thus there’s a couch with its back to your own, on the other side of the wall.” (76)
282
283[Cassiopeia’s mirror is another huge theme of the book, and some of that mirror imagery might even help rationalize why her apartment moves from West to East Arbor. Indeed, one of the most criticized scenes in all of Wolfe, the speech of Com Pu Ter in Gideon’s car, is actually another cryptically embedded playing out of this reversal; however, we will burn that bridge when we get to it.]
284
285Gideon cut a small hole behind her couch from the room next door, where the family was on vacation. Nevertheless, his timeline seems off as he describes it here: he claims to have put the couch back before she returned from the theater, and he also says, “I strongly suspected I was being watched and the matter was urgent. Our friend frightened you. If I’d simply arranged to meet you they might have gotten to you first” (76). [The tense here is confusing; it could be that Gideon got to Cassie first and then, after she met Reis, she found him frightening, justifying Gideon’s actions – i.e., Gideon knew how frightening Reis was before Cassie was even aware of him, so he broke into her apartment during one of her previous performances, before the start of Chapter Two. Otherwise, it seems to be a lie; he appears to be saying he broke in *because* of her fear of Reis. It could also suggest a timeline inconsistency as Chase had mentioned doing some damage earlier. Gideon continues to ask about what she and Reis did. If the timing is off, perhaps there are distortions in this timeline.] Cassie describes Reis as “a friendly tiger. “He wants you to hang out with him – until he gets hungry” (77). She asks Gideon for a large sum of money immediately for her cooperation, and he agrees to write her a check for twenty thousand dollars. She proposes going directly to the bank and opening an account there, and Gideon says, “You know, that’s clever. I hadn’t thought of it.” (78) [This will echo another idea that Cassie has later: going to Woldercan directly to discover Reis’s secrets, and this evokes much the same response from Gideon.] She asks if she can pawn the bracelet, and Chase quotes Spenser: “One may buy gold at a price too deare” (78).
286
287After Cassie asks if she can fix her wall and Gideon expresses how much he wants to examine the gold, her phone rings with “Pigs in Paradise” again. Margaret is calling to tell Cassie that “Mr. Rosenquist” has demanded the return of his bracelet. [While this may seem to be confusing at first, it is actually quite simple, especially given the ring tone, which signifies a redemption. Reis has changed his mind about putting Cassie in danger after speaking with her: their interaction has made him a better man. This thematic arc will be repeated with ex-ambassador Klauser in his meeting with Cassie and, we argue, in the case of an even bigger dragon lurking behind (or underneath) the text.]
288
289Margaret describes how Reis placed the bracelet in a long box before leaving. Gideon enquires about the box’s weight. He warns Cassie not to wear the bracelet more than she has to if Reis returns it to her. Cassie demands Gideon’s cell phone number, and she promises to be more circumspect in the future. Chase says that he has several questions, and that the most important one is why Reis would give her a bracelet and take it back, though he does not think she will be able to answer it. [Luckily, we can: Reis changed his mind about hurting her.]
290
291After concluding their business at Barclays Bank, Gideon drops her off on West Arbor, then walks back to keep an eye on her after parking. He considers “a sculptor of ancient Greece and the beautiful woman George Bernard Shaw had called Galatea.” He tells himself that he could reverse what he has done to Cassie, “’but time and chance will do that soon enough.’ As soon as he spoke, he knew that for him no reversal would have the least effect” (81). [Cassie will “fall” at the end of the novel, but this section implies that Gideon would love her regardless, as he later admits. Galatea of course refers to the story of Pygmalion, who fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. By the end of the novel, Cassie will live on East Arbor. The Earth spins towards the east – if Cassiopeia is a constellation, her position might be influenced by the seasons. However, we will approach this symbolically: black and white, up and down, right and left, and east and west will all switch at a certain point in the novel. Actually, symbolically, it will switch at *two* points in the novel, which signify the same ultimate event.]
292
293Returning to his own Pine Crest Towers, Gideon feels wary. On the second floor, he is attacked by a gunman. To escape, he breaks into another apartment, though he is shot in his right calf. “He had known there would be no way out of the kitchen save one window. There was no time to break that window or climb through it, but kitchen gadgets hung above the sink. He threw a cleaver and saw the gunman stagger backward, his bleeding face in both hands” (82). Gideon leaves three hundred dollars behind for the occupants of the house. [The presence of a window in this scene as the only exit might wind up being thematically important. By the end of the novel, it seems that the gunman might have been sent by Reis, by one of the government agencies such as the FBI or the ATF, by Klauser, or by the cultists of the Storm King. We shall return to this and to the death of Jimmy later.]
294
295The chapter cuts to Margaret arriving fifteen minutes late for a meeting with Cassie. She reveals that she did not share Cassie’s cell number with India, avoiding lying outright only by throwing it in the wastebasket while she was on the phone. [Much later, India will seem to fulfill an allegorical role similar to Porter Penniman in the party after *The Red Spot*. This refusal to give Cassie’s contact information to her might also resonate with something else in the text, but Margaret remains difficult to pin down: she is scrupulous in her honesty but still manages to deceive. My instinct is that this resonates most with Gideon Chase.] The only two crew members signed for *Dating the Volcano God* are India and Vincent Palma, though India has attained the Tiara for a read-through of the new play. Cassie and Margaret discuss the expectations India expressed, and Cassie claims that she can’t sing and has no desire to do any solos. Margaret says that she must be able to sing, given her voice, and Cassie asks, “Have you ever heard of a mountain that was alive, Margaret? Honestly, now. A mountain whose wife washed clothes?” (83)
296
297Margaret suggests that must be from a dream and shares a song from the choir in church. After she sings one, she asks Cassie to repeat it: “You can’t help but be better than I was” (84).
298
299Cassie sings “Walk in the Reign”:
300
301>“*As close as tomorrow the sun shall appear,
302
303>Freedom is coming, and healing is near. …
304
305
306>And I shall be with you in laughter and pain
307
308>To stand in the wind and walk in the reign,
309
310>To walk in the reign.
311
312
313>The sower is planting in acres unseen
314
315>The seeds of the future, the field of God’s dream.
316
317>Those meadows are humming, though none sees them rise.
318
319>The name of the sower is God of Surprise.
320
321>God of Surprise…* (84)
322
323[This is obviously a thematically important marriage of many of the symbols scattered throughout the text. The use of homophones in this song in reign and rain, should also be extended to sun/son: As close as tomorrow the son shall appear. Later, in the midst of the Storm King’s wrath over Reis dropping gold into R’lyeh, the wind will provoke a very particular thought from Cassie: “The wind screamed. She heard it faintly at first, but nearer and louder with each step they mounted, a wind that shrieked in agony like a witch in labor. *The devil’s son*, she thought, *will be born tonight*” (281). The songs of the wind might even resonate with Margaret teaching Cassie a song here. One of the great mysteries of the text involves whether Cassie is pregnant when she leaves Earth, and, for this essay, how Gideon might be Great Cthulhu, as so many motifs would seem to point towards, and still be born on Woldercan. Luckily, we know that congratulations for Gideon’s birth arrived before it actually happened, so time and linear causality should not necessarily be a concern. Yet who is the God of Surprise? Reis can be pronounced as Rise, but the G.S. initials might also put us in mind of the Squid God. This verse also notes humming meadows which none see rising. As far as meadows go, the name Brownlea might imply a brown clearing, while the name Schoonveld, the doctor on Takanga, can mean a clear field. While we are on the subject of name meanings, Margaret has a name which means “Pearl,” while Briggs denotes a bridge. The image of a pearl will become almost as important as that coconut in the conclusion of this writeup.]
324
325This song prompts Cassie’s upstairs neighbor Brian Pickens to call, to ask her to sing more; he claims there is no one else like Cassie. “For a moment it seemed to Cassie that Brian Pickens was being strangled” (85). [Incidentally, Diana Diamond mentions killing Brian Pickens before Cassie realizes that the devil’s son will be born – Diana promises that if Cassie ever returns to her apartment, “they” will be above her, waiting.]
326
327Cassie decides to give Margaret a raise when she gets off the phone. As she signs the check, Margaret takes a call from Sharon Bench, whom she calls “Shirley Ladydog.” Sharon wants to know Gideon’s location. [Margaret is reluctant to say the word bitch. Her grey clothes will also match some of the details Gideon later shares about werewolves and “telltale” signs that might help one identify them, but little seems to come of this association.]
328
329The news comes on, revealing that there are fewer states in this future, a great indifference towards the lives of children, and a problem with police violence. Indeed, the news of a school bus crash is pragmatically assessed: “Regardless of the presence or absence of children, traffic on Moore is backed up for miles. Use alternate routes” (86). The programming and its commercials materialize inside the room: “Silent bottles of ketchup invaded the living room. One opened its own top and emitted a crimson fountain” (86). [This might also be an image which could be easily drawn to the Volcano God – did he invade Cassie’s living room?] Also, the news suggests some nocturnal threat which people should watch out for, and I suspect that the individuals being interviewed have some symbolic significance (as almost every scene in this novel seems to). After a news discussion about decreasing police violence, one fit and muscular man in sports attire suggests that “from dawn to midnight no one’s got anything to worry about” (87). [Gideon’s scrawled note on his picture indicated that Reis jogged and wore sportswear, but this is never really shown in the text – the confidence of this man might represent Reis’s moral position: he is willing to walk in the dark until midnight. His sunglasses might also symbolize that he is willing to screen his eyes from the light if necessary.] One young man “with acne and a nascent beard” says that he goes out whenever he wants. “His shirt, open to the waist, revealed an obscene symbol worked in gold and suspended from his neck by a heavy gold chain” (87). [His acne resonates with the red spots on Donny Duke’s face, and the obscene symbol also reminds us (if we, too, could go backwards in time) of Diana Diamond, who calls her gun a “dildo” before the climactic storm. In addition, it is clear that, at least to Reis, “dragons” surround themselves with gold. Here, that gold suggests a lack of concern for the threat of darkness and corruption; perhaps it signifies protection from the dangers that walk the night – whether that threat is the police or not.]
330
331It is at this point that there is a knock at the door, and Ian Mersey (wearing coveralls) comes in to repair the hole in her wall. He asks if they have heard about the man shot in Pine Crest Towers. Cassie sees that the hole behind her couch is less than a foot square. The news switches to Sharon covering Gideon’s shooting. She implores the scholar to turn himself in for assistance. The official story is that he must have thwarted a robbery in progress when he was shot. Tellingly, at the end of the program, Sharon says, “a friend of mine’s dating him” as the scene shifts to Gideon and Cassie smiling and holding hands in Walker’s (88). Sharon claims that the FBI is looking into the case. Ian Mersey leaves, and Cassie asks Margaret to try and find out what happened to Jimmy. Afterwards, Cassie calls her agent, Zelda Youmans, who encourages her to sign for *Dating the Volcano God*, emphasizing that Wallace Rosenquist might be one of the wealthiest people in the world and is not someone to cross. They agree to meet at a Greek restaurant the next day. When she hangs up, Gideon Chase knocks at the door and immediately opens it, sliding the bolt behind him. [Gideon does not ever seem to wait for anyone to actually let him in, and the assassin Diana Diamond has a knack for materializing inside Cassie’s room as well at the end of the novel.]
332
333Cassie tells Gideon that the police and the news media, including Sharon, have been looking for him. Gideon says, “That’s good. That’s very good. I’m putting you in danger, Cassie, just by being here. Listen carefully, please. Are you a good liar?” (94) He tells her that what she says should be the truth but not the entire truth. [Much like our third-person viewpoint narrative for this book, I imagine.]
334
335Gideon reveals that Reis served was ambassador to Woldercan. He also says, “When I talked to the president, his advisor made two statements which, although they were true as he intended them, were more than a little misleading. He said that the Wolders were ahead of us in biology but behind us in physics. … Statements of that kind depend on what we consider important” (95). One of the things that the Wolders can do is transform atomic structure in a cost-effective manner. Unfortunately, gold produced in such a fashion is radioactive: “You can’t purify it enough to weed out everything” (96). He also suggests that the heavy box holding the bracelet might be a protective shield from those harmful properties, and that Ian Mersey could probably make such a container. [Mersey just covered the hole. It should be noted that in the Cthulhu mythos, the Great Old One is actually trapped inside R’lyeh, where he waits, dreaming.] Chase believes that the government’s interest in Reis stems from a desire to produce gold cheaply. Trying to change the subject to biology, Gideon asserts that Reis has decided to kill him; he came because he wanted to see Cassie and hear her voice one more time just in case.
336
337Cassie realizes that Gideon was hiding next door even as Mersey repaired the wall, listening. She offers him a Chablis. [Chablis is famous for its white wines. Later, Scott will be wearing a white and Chablis suit before he is taken by a werewolf.] It is during this scene that Gideon also first introduces the possibility of shape-changers:
338
339>Some human beings can transform themselves, Cassie. The cells of their bodies rearrange themselves. It’s actually a lot more complex than that, but that’s the basic idea. The weight has to stay the same, you understand. If a hundred-pound woman becomes a she-wolf, it’s a hundred-pound she-wolf. Wolves, dogs, and leopards are the most common forms. … [B]ut not the only forms. Keep that in mind please. It’s important.” (99)
340
341He claims that the creatures of Woldercan cannot shift in that manner, but they can accomplish something else by hybridizing with lower animals; the males have “the ability to alter the DNA in their semen enough to make it acceptable to the female’s reproductive system” (100). [Whether there is a pun in this book on sea-men and semen I will leave to the discretion of each reader. When we consider shape changers, we might have to think of Margaret Briggs and perhaps even Aaberg, given his perfect height match with Reis.]
342
343Cassie considers dumping him, and Gideon says that she won’t, “Because you know I love you. With all my faults … I have a great many, believe me” (99). [This will also echo a walk she has with Reis on a coral beech near a volcano, where Reis fears that she will dump him and confesses his own love to Cassie.]
344
345Gidon continues, “Hasn’t it ever seemed strange to you that though some humans can become animals, we never hear of animals becoming humans? … It almost never happens because it is much, much easier to go down than to go up” (100). [On the surface, we never learn of many of Gideon’s faults save perhaps a scheming nature, but if our identification of him as somehow a part of the Storm King is accurate, then those faults magnify exponentially. He might even be talking about himself here metaphorically, in raising himself up to human values, though he claims he does not have this ability. Of course, he didn’t do it on his own.]
346
347The scene cuts to Ian Mersey loading a heavy box into his “pickup” (100). [Here, the literal meaning of the words might be apt.] The box contains Gideon, who eventually peeps out, knowing that he has escaped Reis. A premonition hits him that “he would eventually triumph” (101). A sea chantey from long ago comes to his mind and he begins singing, “Blow the Man Down.” [Of course, an eldritch being of the sea might well have heard this song often.]
348
349The next chapter involves India’s attempts to strongarm Cassie into signing for the new play at the Tiara theater. They discuss who might play “the sailor” and discard several possibilities, including Bruce Sandoz. Cassie asks if the probably lesbian India would go to bed with Reis to save the show. As they discuss what India truly wants, Cassie is certain that someone is listening. India suggest they are “ghosts” (104). As their conversation ends, Cassie turns to the empty hall and bows. “Applause reached her out of the darkness, the sound of a single pair of hands clapping” (105). [The presence here is assumed to be Reis unseen.]
350
351In the next scene, Cassie gets measured for a skirt and expresses her absolute disappointment in the play. Her agent Zelda Youmans enters, excited about the prospects despite the fact that the star seems to hate it. Zelda notes that the play will feature “two dream sequences” with more revealing clothes than the green gingham dress of a preacher’s daughter (107). [It might be worth keeping “two dream sequences” in mind for the novel itself. Lovecraft’s Dreamland also features a southern region known as Oriab, an island with a towering extinct volcano known as Ngranek, which the flying Night-gaunts protect. The earth gods once dwelt there but have abandoned it for Kadath in the North. Some caves in Ngranek lead to the underworld.]
352
353Zelda insists that “New shows have to grow up. They do, and this one will” (107). [Moral maturation would seem to be important to the subtext of this novel.] Margaret promises that Cassie will receive, “Lovely spring-green outfits that show skin in the middle” (107).
354
355Zelda gets up and answers a knock. “From the chained door, Zelda said, ‘It’s a man from the building. He won’t talk to me. Only you’” (108). [The story of Cassiopeia should prompt our attention every time chains are mentioned. At the end of the chapter we will learn that Ian Mersey has stopped by to tell her Gideon’s status: “*Infected. He is getting treatment*” (113).] Margaret takes pictures of Cassie as Zelda takes “a gold pen and a little leather-bound notebook from her purse” (108). [That note about Gideon’s infection will be inscribed by Zelda’s gold pen. In our final argument, R’lyeh is infected by Reis’s double attack via Pat Gomez and the poisonous gold he rains down on the city.] Sharon Bench also comes by requesting to be let in as the phone rings. [Wallace Rosenquist leaves a message asking for Cassie’s company at dinner, promising that she will learn something “to her advantage” (113).] Eventually Sharon is allowed to enter, though Mersey has already left.
356
357Cassie says that Sharon should decide between Zelda’s position and her own reservations about signing for the play. Cassie emphasizes how bad it is in every way, and how it is not paying her what she is worth. Sharon gets distracted by the idea that Wallace Rosenquist is interested in Cassie and asks if she can get an interview. Zelda stresses that Cassie’s salary will grow and that she is down for two percent of the gross (as the phone starts ringing again, Cassie unplugs it.) 
358
359Zelda believes that the show cannot fail with such rich backing and its star: “The redhead in the big brown chair’s going to star in this one” (111). [Cassie spends much of the book seated, as is only appropriate given her mythological association.]
360
361To escape the chaos, Cassie goes out on the balcony, noting that autumn is approaching, “but today it dallied by the roadside” (111). She tries to call Gideon as she closes the French doors behind her, reaching his voice mail. 
362
363>Five floors below, pedestrians hurried past the narrow strip of lush green lawn in front of the building. … Across the street, a man in a dark doorway lit a cigarette, his face visible for a second in the flare of his lighter.
364
365>Above it all, an aching blue sky assured that it cradled Mariah’s island even as it stretched over her dirty northern city. “I hope you’re nicer there,” she told it. “I wish I could be there instead of just playing at it” (112).
366
367[Earlier, it was fairly clear that Cassie lived in a third-floor apartment, but this would seem to imply that she has come up in the world. One of the other theories behind the action of *An Evil Guest* involves the idea that her wishes and ambitions actually do have the ability to influence reality around her. She will later recognize that the man below watching her is the police officer Lars Aaberg, working for Reis and watching out for Gideon’s appearance. Hiding in the dark, he lights his cigarette. This imagery of a narrow strip of green will be repeated as Cassie plans her wedding to Reis on Kololahi, though that strip will lead to a beach and the blue Pacific instead of the blue sky.]
368
369When she comes inside, Cassie notes, “I’m getting my second wind or something. Have you ever wanted to help out somebody you loved and known that the only thing you could do for him was some tiny stupid thing that was a lot of trouble? And done it anyway? Any of you?” (112).
370
371In reply, Zelda tells a story of her child, Joe-boy.
372
373>”He was my son and he was in the hospital, getting ready to go. He wanted one particular toy. I ditched work and went looking for it. It took all day to find it, but I did and brought it to him. He couldn’t talk by then, but he smiled. It was the last time I ever saw him smile. He passed away that night. […] The boss called me in the next day and fired me. And – listen Cassie. Listen really, really carefully. […] That was when I opened my agency. Inside a year I was taking in more than I ever had in my life. Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me.” (113)
374
375[This is the moral heart of *An Evil Guest*: Joe-boy dies in much the same way that Reis will die at the end of the novel, and Cassie will cry, “Oh Bill, my poor Bill. Why did you have to die?” (301) While she does not receive an immediate answer, one consolation, and one proposed solution to the problem of evil, is that a greater good might be created from his sacrifice and the example of his life. Has his death and the dropping of gold into R’lyeh changed anything? Another possible mythological echo of this story is in the myth of Zagreus, the child of Persephone and Zeus, who was so cruelly roasted by the titans: they distracted him with toys and mirrors until they could work their evil upon him, and only his heart survived to be reborn inside another woman, Semele.]
376
377Cassie agrees to sign, and Zelda hands over the note from Mersey which tells of Gideon’s infection. [Pat Gomez might also be infecting the city of R’lyeh and Cthulhu. While antibiotics are normally considered something “good,” Gideon will have a strong reaction to them and lose his leg. This “reaction,” losing a small part of himself, might be a reflection of what once happened to Great Cthulhu, though in that case we propose that Gideon is the small part “treated” by something like an antibiotic. That medicine could include such ingredients as mercy and love, things strong enough even to contain the evil of Cthulhu. Cassiopeia holds up a mirror to herself, but perhaps that metaphorical mirror can help other things to see themselves in a different light as well.]
378
379After everyone leaves, Cassie listens to Reis’s message. In the next chapter, Cassie wonders if she even wants to make a “good impression” on him (115). She puts on a black dress. His chauffeur shows up in the white limousine fifteen minutes late. [Margaret was fifteen minutes late to a previous appointment with Cassie.] When the doorman Preston buzzes Cassie, she refuses to let Reis’s driver Carlos up. [It did not seem that there was a doorman in previous descriptions of her apartment building. In most novels, a small change in floor number is probably a mistake, but these kinds of things in a Wolfe novel often lead us to strange conclusions, erroneous or not, especially since it happens several times: Cassie goes from being next door to 3B to a fifth-floor room to room 301 and from West to East Arbor over the course of the book. R’lyeh also seems to have a doorman, reluctant at first to admit Pat Gomez.] Cassie watches the news until “Wallace Rosenquist” calls, and then agrees to meet him at Rusterman’s restaurant, turning on her alarm system as she leaves. When Carlos holds the door of the white limo for her, he seems, “taller and darker than the uniformed man she remembered seeing when she had looked down at the white limousine. A sheet of glass – thick glass that looked as if it might stop bullets – separated them” (116-7). [While the “shape-changing” Gideon mentioned might make us suspicious, I propose that Cassie has reached the point where she “elevates” everyone around her, even “dark” figures. The glass here will also remind us of the final window imagery Klauser presents of a robin struggling against itself in a window, which we shall apply to another, darker vehicle soon.]
380
381When Cassie arrives, “Rusterman’s seemed calmer and richer than it had on the night of the cast party” (117). [This would also indicate that Cassie’s ability to affect those around her is not limited to human beings.] When she says that she is meeting Rosenquist, it effects a change in the hostess: “Had some passing spirit kindled a candle within the hostess, she could have glowed no brighter; her smile looked a little forced, Cassie thought, but it was big and bright beyond all questioning” (117). Cassie’s cell phone plays “Pigs in Paradise” and on the other end Preston tells her that the alarm in her apartment has gone off. [Here, Rosenquist has entered her abode to check on her, according to the surface plot. Cassie will later retell this story in different terms, emphasizing that the intrusion taught Reis that she could be trusted.] She asks Preston to leave a message for Ian to call her in the morning. A waitress brings a blue bottle of spring water that seems to “cost more than most wines” (118). The waitress reminds Cassie of Alexis Cabana, but Cassie tells her, “[Y]ou’re better looking” (118). The waitress says that though she is not as beautiful as Cassie, people say she’s “not bad at all” (118). [Gideon will play the part of a waiter before he gets the role of the sailor in *Dating the Volcano God*; as Cassie says, this sailor will make speeches about love. Here, this scene might symbolically represent a chief rival in Alexis Cabana transformed into one who serves Cassie, made even “better” in her servitude, though it does not have the same glamor as her previous role. This could also describe what happens to Reis and perhaps even to the Storm King himself: a ferocious enemy turned into a willing servant.] The waitress also reveals that Mr. Rosenquist has to be treated as if he is the governor, because he is somehow related to Mr. Rusterman, “the president of our whole chain” (118). [Of course, Wade Rusterman is yet another or William Reis’s pseudonyms. Just as it sounds, Wade can imply someone who fords rivers.]
382
383When Reis finally arrives, Cassie asks him if he found anything in her apartment. “His expression changed, and he said nothing. … His eyes had been lying before, and lying skillfully; now they had stopped” (118). Cassie orders the half capon Souvaroff, and when she requests Ranch, Reis says, “I felt sure you’d order the green goddess” (119). He mentions this because he remembers that the first time he saw her, she was wearing a green dress. She says that she wore brown at the final showing of *The Red Spot*. [A capon is of course a castrated bird fattened for consumption, and the standard style of preparing Chicken Souvaroff would be to prepare a mixture of rice, champagne, and foie gras inside it, with salt and pepper. Later, Reis will identify humans as the Storm King’s chickens. The ambiguous gender of Diana Diamond and her disgust at the idea of breeding might also be considered as a kind of neutering or castration. Later, at the Silent Woman, Cassie will wonder how Gideon seems to know what she ate at this dinner. Given some of the motifs in the novel, this is one of the scenes which suggests that perhaps someone else occasionally masquerades as William Reis. Gideon has just warned her about shape-changers; however, he was definitely injured. Gideon noted earlier when he came into Cassie’s room that she reminded him of a living portrait: “*Lady in a Spring-Green Gown*” (98). However, that was not the first time he saw her. This entire scene represents something of an interpretive snaggle given my general approach to Wolfe, which suggests that almost everything should be considered as true, somehow. Here, either Reis is misremembering some important details, Cassie actually does have the ability to reforge reality unconsciously, or we are meant to draw a conclusion about either the identity of the man sitting at the table with Cassie or about the flicker of Reis in the audience at *The Red Spot* - one of them could be spurious. Of course, the difference between brown and green when we are dealing with someone who might be the cognate of a fertility goddess is obvious.]
384
385When Cassie asks what makes the dressing green, Reis responds, “Money. If I may go back to an easier question, yes. I found several things of interest in your apartment” (119). [It is, at least in part, parsley. The symbolic purpose of parsley is to cleanse bitter emotions, and Cassie happened to detect an undercurrent of darkness and bitterness on the mountaintop with Gideon at the start of the novel.] Reis denies using the ticket to the show that India gave him (even though the Wallace Rosenquist who gave Cassie the bracelet seemed to have seen the show).
386
387Reis asks about her brand-new checking account, opened with Gideon’s money, and she tells him she won the lottery. Reis thinks this is an indication that she lies, and she says, “Let’s turn off the lights on this one. You’ll lie to me anytime you think it’s to your advantage. Whether I’ll lie to you depends on the question you ask, how you ask it, and how I’m feeling just then” (120).
388
389Reis promises to tell her the truth, and he says that he will deserve to win her love even if he fails to. He says that often he must pretend to be someone else. Two years ago, Reis hired Gideon Chase as a consultant. He believes Gideon is trying to defraud him. Reis promises he can be trusted absolutely in business matters and also notes, “the criminal impulse – something your friend Chase has in abundance – is self-defeating in the long run” (121). [Of course, we argue that Chase really is trying to defeat himself and his own worse nature throughout this novel. Later, on the coral island of the Volcano God, Reis will not seem to remember this exchange concerning his own trustworthiness: “Did I [say that]? I probably did” (270). He did spend quite a bit of time trying to get Cassie to tell him something about Gideon, and perhaps this might even be a test of Cassie’s loyalty set up by Chase, though how he could appear as Reis remains unclear.]
390
391Reis’s explanation for taking back the bracelet from Margaret does not seem to be the complete story. He says that he feared her honesty, knowing that Cassie hated the bracelet the instant she saw it. [This *is* knowledge Gideon would have.] Reis also says that he paid a German craftsman extra to get it quickly after he gave him the gold, and that it was sent by International Express. [At the party, he said he had just hopped from Berlin in a friend’s hopper.] He knew that Margaret would eventually return the bracelet to Cassie, who would have felt compelled to wear it. The bracelet, he claims, has been destroyed, though another might be made, but not by him. He gives her a large green check for the value of the gold – two thousand dollars. [For such a rich guy, this doesn’t seem that incredibly generous. Of course, I can’t recall the last time someone wrote me a two-thousand-dollar check.]
392
393After insisting that Gideon has not bought her, she tries the dressing. She acknowledges that Chase wants her to “cultivate” Reis (124). As she talks, she intermittently belches. “The man should be older than the woman is what Mom used to say, and I always thought buckshot” (124). [Much like Margaret Briggs, occasionally Cassie employs euphemisms – this would be bullshit, of course. Hopefully this exchange has nothing to do with Bruce Sandoz, but if it does, we know our shooter …]
394
395She continues to lie to Reis about Gideon, saying that the note in her apartment was probably passed to Sharon by somebody. She describes the chaos at her place, and, when she talks about Reis’s phone call, she goes on what seems to be a tangent: “What do they feed these chickens that makes them so good?” (124) She also concludes that the second call, which prompted her to unplug the phone, might have been from Chase.
396
397After they leave arm in arm, Reis has another bit of vital dialogue which, in my mind, solidifies his identity as Reis as his white limousine cruises down Arbor Boulevard:
398
399>”I’m going to win you, Cassie. I doubt that you believe me, but you’ll see. When I first heard of you, I wanted to find and destroy you. It was to be an exhibition of my power, something to frighten Chase – to frighten him into my camp if possible. Almost at once I realized you were worth a hundred Chases. …
400
401>“I no longer want to destroy you. I want to win you – I, alone, out of all the world. I want to feel the envy of every man who sees us together, as I did tonight. I want to dress you in diamonds. When I was younger, I wanted to own an island. An island with beaches and palm trees where I would reign as king. …
402
403>“I have that island now, but I’ve seen a better one. A blue isle in a sea of black. I fight for it every day, and I’ll win. With a green goddess at my side.” (125)
404
405After they kiss goodbye at her door, Cassie swears that it is she who will win him. [This corroborates our understanding of the gold which was given and then taken back: Reis changed his mind about hurting Cassie. It seems that Cassie has converted him, and the love he feels for his blue island is of course affection for the Earth. In this regard, the president is certainly wrong about Reis’s motivations. Though Reis uses their methods, he is not working for the Wolders, but is loyal to Earth, his blue island.]
406
407The text cuts to three months later; a review of *Dating the Volcano God*, which starts during the fall season, begins by assuming that the play will be a disaster. Its plot involves a reverend, his “long suffering” sister, and the reverend’s daughter from Kansas moving to the South Pacific. However, when Cassie speaks, “the plywood tree outside the Brownlea’s window had become a real palm; an intangible breeze carried the scent of tropical blossoms. There is such a thing as magic, no matter what the materialists say. Most especially there can be magic in the theater” (127-8).
408
409[We should consider that the importance of Cassie for the events in the South Pacific involve the idea that she actually has been raised to a higher state, such that her “acting” influences reality. Thus, her role as Mildred Norcott might have helped Pat Gomez in her infiltration into the Storm King’s lair, and this play might also have some effect on Takanga in the South Pacific. Otherwise, the intertextuality between her plays and the later action is a bit bizarre. Norma Peiper, who plays the “long suffering” sister here, will die as she is standing right next to Cassie, almost as a kind of twinned figure. Later, Pat Gomez will identify Cassie as her sister, for experiencing what she did.]
410
411Cassie sings:
412
413>“*Life started fresh and new when the sun came up today.
414
415>Out on the beach Sun’s trumpets rang the anthem of god’s torch,
416
417>While at my feet the waves came up like chickens on our porch …*” (128)
418
419The grass house behind her seems real, as are the people in the audience, people “to be loved and cherished” (128). The song fills the hearts of the crowd, and their applause cuts off the dialogue in the play. Afterwards, when India knocks at Cassie’s room, she says, “You were simply wonder-fuel. You set the damned place on fire” as she sits down. (128). They discuss Dean’s shortcoming’s as the sailor: “His tenor isn’t what I was hoping for. His dancing isn’t what Pfeiffer was hoping for, either” (129). [Of course, the incendiary quality Cassie brings to everything needs no further comment, but I feel this scene also implies some of Reis’s shortcomings as the Sailor of Heaven and the pure hero of the novel.]
420
421Cassie receives a call from Agent Martin of the FBI, asking her to come in. She hangs up and calls the office of the FBI back to verify his identity. India wants to bring the cast up to Cassie’s level. Of Vince, she says, “Vince wants to ham it up. In his part that’s okay up to a point, but we’ve got to keep him on a short leash. … [H]e’ll be worse tomorrow night if we let him” (130-1). [Once again, these could easily be moral assessments.]
422
423As the show continues, Cassie dons a grass skirt that reveals her waist. “Onstage once more, she pulled Donny Duke out of the line of prancing sailors; they danced a wholly unrehearsed hornpipe to the deafening approval of the audience” (131). [Later, Diana Diamond will be freed from her chains by Patty Gomez. She says that while she never saw Cassie on stage, someone serving the Storm King watched her dance a horn-pipe. The imagery throughout this scene implies that Cassie can keep others in line or even pull them out of their normal patterns, consistent with the idea that she is making other people better. Pulling Donny Duke out of line might indicate a sudden change in character.]
424
425The book cuts to Cassie’s dressing room two days later, where a man taller than Gideon Chase wearing an “ash-striped gray suit coat” introduces himself as Agent Martin (132). [Later, we will learn that he is working for Reis’s friend at the state department, who should probably be identified as the ex-ambassador to Woldercan, Harold Klauser. Some of Wolfe’s original comments about the novel suggest that this is one of Reis’s employees, which we shall quote directly below.] However, here, “Agent Martin” seems to be searching for Reis. Martin threatens to put cuffs on Cassie if she won’t cooperate. He asks her where Gideon Chase is. Cassie expresses that she wishes she knew. The phone rings, and Gideon is on the other end, asking if she can talk. Cassie says, “Not now, Norma. I’m busy.” (133). Gideon tells her that their “friend” is back in the United States and hangs up. Martin asks, “What do you know about William Reis?” (133) The agent goes on to describe him as a master criminal, with many legitimate businesses to launder his money. “We want to get him, and now we think we’ve finally got enough evidence to put him away for life. … Do you know he’s trying to kill your friend Professor Chase?” (133)
426
427This Agent Martin (soon revealed to be a fake) goes on to say that if William Reis did not try to kill Chase himself, it was one of his top aides. He emphasizes how elusive Reis is, even when he is seen. Cassie suggests “You can’t find Gid either. … Maybe they’re together.”
428The fake agent, later revealed to be a lycanthrope, responds, “Chase and Reis? I doubt it. Reis is seen all over, as I said. Chase isn’t seen at all’” (134). [That seems like something of a reversal, given Reis’s powers. It should be noted that while we have called him Reis throughout this summary, he has mostly gone by the name of Rosenquist.] Martin gives Cassie his cell phone number.
429
430After this, Cassie goes to watch auditions for Dean’s “understudies” as the sailor. Here, India thinks about getting a drink but instead says that they should go for a coffee. [Alcoholic drinks have been associated with Reis, coffee with Chase; the restaurant that they go to is entirely white.] Cassie says that she is swearing off meaty food and ice-cream as they discuss who might work for the part of the sailor. They need someone who will make her look “as good as possible. That doesn’t mean somebody who’s as good as you are, which we couldn’t get anyway. It means somebody who’s pretty good, in a mix-and match way” (136).
431
432[Hopefully I don’t have to say anything about the fact that they are talking about goodness here. It is also possible that their dismissal of Dean and another blond dancer Cassie likes might map to Cassie’s previous “unsuitable” marriages. However, the casting of Gideon as Cassie’s “sailor” is set in motion in this white restaurant.] The counterman suggests that one of his waiters might be able to do it, and India agrees: “Send him over … It couldn’t hurt.” [This makes Ebony White laugh. If I were to make an analogy, I would suggest that, purely metaphorically, India is to Ebony as Cthulhu is to Chase in the logic of the text.]
433
434When Cassie returns to the hotel, the real agent Martin is waiting for her, and he is described as shorter and stockier than the other one. [Of course, soon events suggest that the first Agent Martin we met was actually a shape-changer. While many might read this as a sign that there is more than one William Reis running around and that a shape changer has taken his place, Reis’s willingness to discuss giving Cassie the golden bracelet makes it hard to deny that the man in the teal suit at Rusterman’s was actually him. However, I do believe that this “copying” says something about Gideon Chase and Great Cthulhu. Gideon said that *humans* with the ability to change shape were limited to the same size, but we will meet a non-human soon whose good behavior is accompanied by a marked reduction in size in the Shark God Hanga.]
435
436The next chapter, “Royalty in Reality,” begins with Cassie waiting by the phone an hour before the show starts. She tells Margaret that Gideon called and asks her not to repeat it. (As Margaret agrees, she is opening her sewing kit.) Cassie says that she is going to tell India about the two agent Martins, but not about Gideon. Outside, she hears Aunt Jane sing:
437
438>“*And how I love his boiling lava
439
440>Steaming like a cup of java.
441
442>His passionate voice, his skin like guava …*” (138)
443
444[We can finally guess at the identity of the Volcano God from these lyrics, since Cassie has been said to have dated *both* Reis and Gideon. Cassie has been having coffee with Gideon, and above, it was getting coffee with India and Ebony that reintroduced him to the play. In addition, he has olive skin, which might match up with the “skin like guava” – the outside of which is green. Otherwise, guava is a pink color. I obviously prefer the former reading, but pinkness has a place in the novel, especially in Pat Gomez’s pale pink and white hospital attire. Guavas can also be white inside.]
445
446As the play progresses, Cassie notes that India is missing:
447
448>Cassie, standing in the wings beside Vincent Palma, whispered, “Where the heck is India?”
449
450>Palma only shrugged.
451
452>A few minutes after that, when they were deep in the second dream scene, Cassie glimpsed India in the wings – and a familiar face next to hers. They were gone by the time the scene was over, and Margaret was there instead. (138)
453
454Cassie changes from her green skirt to a white cotton nightgown, asking Margaret why Zelda might be next to India. Both went into Cassie’s dressing room. When Cassie asks about her hair, Margaret says:
455
456>“Beautiful, Miss Casey. Only I really ought to braid it.”
457
458>“Over my dead body.”
459
460>At which point Cassie had to sneak onto the darkened stage and into bed.” (139)
461
462Later, Zelda says that she hopped in her pink hopper a hundred miles to be there, and that they have been negotiating a recording contract for Cassie. India says, “I represented Wally – he owns the songs. Zelda represented you.” (139) [In an allegorist’s hands, one must watch out for lines like this. However, I would prefer to think that in addition to representing Wally and Cassie, this entire scene represents something else. India seems to disappear, and suddenly reappears next to Cassie’s agent, someone who has traveled a long way, associated with pink. Cassie will be in bed when Pat Gomez and Diana Diamond appear next to her at the climax of the novel. We are also going to argue that Margaret’s name, “Pearl,” makes her sudden replacement of India and Zelda in this scene allegorically relevant.] After signing the song contract and getting out of her green gingham dress, Cassie goes to have tea with India. [This contract is for a song which will actually be performed with Gideon as Gil Corby. Margaret also taught Cassie a song.] As Cassie describes the fake Agent Martin, Margaret notes, “He had a gun, too” (140). Cassie denies “being sweet” on both Chase and Reis. India says, “One word, Cassie. Diamonds.” (140) [Obviously, from the story of Perseus to Cassie’s final vision of the Milky Way and even to the assassin sent to kill Cassie, diamonds are going to have a significant part to play in the rest of the story. I would also like to argue that the presence of India and Zelda in Cassie’s dressing room might resonate with Diana Diamond and Pat Gomez in Cassie’s room before the death of Reis. In that scene, something which might not be human is linked somehow to a private investigator from earth whose name means “noble man.” The last name Youmans can mean yeoman – a man holding an estate or a freeholder. The first name, Zelda, can either mean “happy,” or, if it is short for Griselda, “dark battle.”]
463
464As Cassie describes how she established the identity of the second and genuine Agent Martin, she is suddenly reminded of someone else: ”I just remembered something, that’s all. Back home, I saw a guy. It was only for a second, and I couldn’t think who he was. It just hit me. … He’s a friend of a friend, and he gave me a ride one time” (140). [She is thinking of Aaberg here. However, is she drawing a mental connection between Aaberg and the fake Agent Martin, whose name will later be revealed as Al? Both Al and Aaberg seem interesting in finding Gideon, according to what we learn later. Al will kill Cassie’s second husband Scott soon, while Aaberg looks like Scott.] Ebony appears with hot water, sandwiches, and teabags. India thinks about not letting Ebony stay, but Cassie insists on it. [This is also similar to the city of R’lyeh almost rejecting Pat Gomez. It’s okay to think I’m crazy, but all of these reflective and mirrored scenes will begin to add up. At the very least, the pages of this essay will continue to add up.] As they discuss the two agents, Cassie wonders why the first one “was so hot to find Gid” (141). She wonders why he went to such lengths, and Ebony compares it to a directly analogous situation: “Why’s India been looking so hard for somebody new to play the sailor?” (142). India needs someone better. Ebony assumes that Gideon has something the false Martin wants, or that he can do something for him. Both India and Agent Martin need Gideon Chase, of course.
465
466The second Martin expressed that the president was worried about Gideon, offering protection if necessary. India does not believe this story. They discuss the new one-legged dancer, Gil Corby, who is of course Gideon behind a glamour. They compare him to a pirate, and also note that his shortness will “make Vince and Tiny look bigger” (143).
467
468After the show, Reis’s white limousine is waiting for Cassie, and Carlos opens the door for her. She notes that he is wearing a gun. [This might link him to the fake Agent Martin, though that is not necessarily a sound conclusion from such scant evidence.] The spectral voice of Reis says that he got Carlos a license. Cassie asks to take a cab instead, but Reis says that he is not really there. “I’ll see and hear you, but I cannot touch you, however much I wish it” (143).
469
470Carlos refuses to let her leave, and Reis promises that though he may break the law from time to time and cheat those who would cheat him, his word is good: “Good always. Good to everyone, but particularly to you” (144). [Cassie’s nod here feels forced; later, King Kanoa will force her to nod as he orchestrates the sacrifice of Reis.]
471
472Reis wants to give her a gift, and he describes the entire show as a “vehicle” for her. An image of Reis’s head floats in the car, but he soon disappears to be replaced by Cassie singing on stage in a video of her dancing with her own soul: 
473
474>“*It’s only when I’m quite alone 
475
476>that I can see my soul […]
477
478>It’s then that I am Woman
479
480>the one thing God made whole.*” (145)
481
482Reis says that he has wanted Cassie to see herself as he and others see her, “Playing and replaying the Cassie Casey captured for me by a friend’s digital camcorder” (145). [This dancing with the “soul” will probably echo across a few scenes. We see her dancing with Gil Corby in the play and with the Volcano God after the storm, and this idea of a “whole” will be repeated by Diana Diamond and Pat Gomez in her room on Takanga: 
483
484>“We are the halves, Cassie dearest. Together we make a whole. I’m the hunted, she’s the hunter. I’m the vixen, she’s the bitch baying on my trail. Without a fox she’s just a pet, one who’d soon be replaced by a poodle like you. Without a hound, what glory would I have in the court of the Storm King.” (280)
485
486Immediately after this, Pat Gomez indicates that they are going to steal Reis’s hopper and return to California.]
487
488Here, Reis admits his mistake in trying to destroy Cassie, but in the moment that they shared in the car before, he decided he would win her.
489
490>“Would you like to be a queen? … I’m talking about real royalty. You’ll be a queen who rules as well as a queen who reigns. You’ll sit on a throne, a throne of black basalt carved immemorial ages ago, and wear your crown when you chose to. If you choose to elevate a man, he will kiss your feet in gratitude. If you choose to execute that man later, he will be made to lay his head on a stone … (145)
491
492[This be Reis’s fate, though her “choice” is forced on her by Kanoa.]
493
494Reis directs her to a gift wrapped in gold paper, lighter than the first. “The leather of the box it had wrapped was the color of old gold, and as soft as butter to her touch” (146). When she opens it, she feels “that she floated in space above some immense rectangular city. That she sailed through the night sky above a city whose countless lights were far too bright for stars. Too bright and too near.” (146). [This matches very well with Randolph Carter’s approach to Kadath in his dreams. Eventually, he learns that that bright goal is but an unreachable past, the world of his youth. It will also resonate with Cassie’s position at the very end of the novel when she has hopped beyond the solar system and beholds the milky way below her, and with … can you guess who I am going to bring up? … Pat Gomez’s infiltration into R’lyeh.]
495
496They return Cassie to her apartment, and Reis says that if she wants to hear news of Chase, she must put on the bracelet.
497
498>“Someone tried to kill Dr. Chase, but only succeeded in wounding him. You know that, and you probably think I was behind the shooting. Chase himself may well be of your opinion, but you’re both mistaken. … I’m trying to find out who the shooter was and who’s behind him. The identity of the man who pulled the trigger is not really important. What is, is the identity of the person who got him to do it. … In time I’ll learn it, I promise you. When I do, I’ll probably tell you.”
499
500Cassie responds, “I still think it was you” (147). Reis insists that he never wishes minor threats to him dead, and that he prefers to win over real threats. The chapter closes with, “Do you really think I want you, Cassie, for the same reason I want Chase?” (147)
501
502Cassie is awoken the next morning by a call from Sharon Bench, who seems to know about her meeting with Reis. Cassie responds, “I dreamed about him, and now it seems like you’re still in my dream” (150). Cassie is confused about how she returned to the hotel room, and she tells Sharon to wait until she turns on the air-conditioning – “The windows won’t open” (151).
503
504Sharon reveals that she has a contact at the show who called to let her know Reis’s car was there. Cassie suddenly remembers the driver and being escorted back to her room. [Putting on the diamond bracelet may have had something to do with the fuzziness of Cassie’s recollections.] Zelda calls afterwards asking to meet for breakfast. Cassie then calls Margaret, and notes, “Beyond the hotel window, the world had turned to gray while she slept. Once – no, twice – rain lashed the glass. Fall, and the show was nowhere near ready for New York” (152).
505
506Margaret promises that she did not call Sharon Bench to let her know about Reis’s limousine. She helps Cassie find the bracelet; Margaret also knows the default numbers on the room safe. Cassie declares, “She should be a detective” (152). [Vince Palma says that Cassie made his “poor detective” from *The Red Spot* poor indeed, and Pat Gomez is listed as a private investigator in the “Our Cast” section at the end of the book. Lars Aaberg is also listed as a detective lieutenant in the cast of characters.] At breakfast later, Zelda notes that she did not think that Rosenquist was around, as India would have said something about it. [This probably rules Zelda out as Sharon’s informant].
507
508There is another bit of dialogue that rings anachronistically when Margaret suggests, “You ought to get a thing at the bank, Miss Casey. A safety deposit.” When Cassie says that she will, back home, Zelda reacts oddly as she nods to herself: “That fits perfectly. …Thank you Margaret” (153). When Cassie asks what that fits, Zelda simply deflects it: “In a minute. Here’s the waitress, and you haven’t even looked” (153). [The safety deposit box will preserve the diamond bracelet, which Cassie does not take to Takanga. She pawns it to afford the hopper she takes to Woldercan at the end of the novel.]
509
510Zelda wants to see the bracelet, but Cassie puts her off. Oddly, Cassie has no memory of putting the bracelet in the safe. She is also concerned that Zelda’s hopper will not hold everyone. Zelda notes that Ebony is also bringing a tenor along, so that five people will have to fit in it. They decide that he can sit in the “cargo space in back” (154). When they pick up Ebony and Gideon, they are “at least as rain-soaked as Cassie felt” (154). Gideon is using the name Gil Corby. [This means the happy or gilded raven, a combination of gold and black.] Gideon stares at her bracelet while Cassie studies his “rain-washed” face.
511
512While they discuss how the hopper works, “Corby struggled to keep the green golf umbrella he had bought in the airport above Cassie’s head” (154). [This probably symbolizes what Gideon did for her, which might serve as a protection against the Storm King. Certainly, her beauty will not last through her exile on the coral island.] They begin to discuss gravity as a property of warping space, which some objects have. (If reality is being warped around Cassie, she must have a lot of it.) When Zelda eventually declares, “We’re high enough that the hop-bang won’t break any windows. Here it comes!” (155)
513
514After the jump, Margaret still has her eyes shut against the “glorious sun that darkened windows and windshield” (155). Soon, Cassie notes that Gil reminds her of someone. The disguised Gideon talks his way into a cab ride with Cassie over the protestations of others. Margaret starts feeling slightly ill and Cassie has no problem asking her to ride with Zelda and Ebony. “Below as Cassie could see more plainly than she liked, rolled a vast sea of pearlescent cloud. Above that sea, thousands of feet below, flew something that might have been a monstrous bat. As she watched, horrified, it dove into the cloud and vanished” (156). [While these things could be the hybridized descendants of Woldercan, they also resonate with some Lovecraftian monsters. Eventually, they will call Cassie their “cub” – they tap on windows, too. The winged monster diving beneath “that sea” also invokes the underwater Storm King, though the sea here is metaphorical and far above the ocean.]
515
516This meeting actually involves the contract for recording the song that India and Zelda negotiated; Gil is to be her partner in singing it. She offers to buy “Gil” a steak and he asks if her bracelet is real. He suggests that Rosenquist gave it to her and that the wealthy man must love Cassie. Here, we learn that the novelist Charles Finney is a character in this world: “An astro-explorer named Chuck Finney discovered that Woldercan was home to an intelligent race. I can say that quite easily. Finding another planet with an intelligent native race would be rather more difficult” (158). [While *The Circus of Dr. Lao* featured many strange animals, the most significant for this book are a rather elderly female werewolf and the ending scene, in which the past civilization of Woldercan is somehow brought to life to sacrifice a woman to their ancient god, Yottle.] We also discover in this discussion that Mars is being terraformed. When they talk about Gil’s past jobs, he says that he has had many, including working as a waiter, a city planner, a teacher, and a substitute teacher, which prompts an “Ah ha!” from Cassie (158). [This epiphany is probably just to indicate that now his esoteric knowledge about warp drives and the nature of reality makes more sense. There will be a strange relationship between the city under the sea and the Storm King mentioned later which is worth thinking about in terms of Gideon’s claim to have been a city planner. Of course, now he is a professor at Miskatonic University.] Suddenly, the cab brakes, and the Spanish speaking driver declares “*No es cierto!*” [This could mean “It’s not true,” or, more appropriately to the context of this event, “It can’t be.”] Four men have stopped Zelda’s car, and one of them wields a machine gun. Gideon demands that the cab stop. The men take Margaret at this point. [Cassie will run into Margaret on the street at the very end of the novel, and her one-time employee will not recognize her. Reis later suggests that his friend in the state department has Margaret. Given that these four shadowy figures take Margaret, and that later Cassie will speak to five of the winged creatures, one of whom might be female, there are several ways to read this abduction.]
517
518The text jumps to the authorities questioning Cassie. She is transferred to Aaberg, who has just supposedly released “Corby.” When he finally introduces himself by name, he says, “[Y]ou can call me Scott if you’re more comfortable that way” (162). Cassie asks him why he was watching her building. He says that Gideon once asked him to pick her up, and that he became worried about her, assigning men to watch her. He lights a cigarette despite Cassie’s sarcastic response to his request.
519
520Aaberg promises that they are quietly looking for Margaret. Cassie says that she can’t imagine why Margaret would have been abducted. Aaberg begins asking questions about her journey from Springfield in Zelda’s hopper. During this discussion, Aaberg asks, supposedly to prove a point, for Cassie to name one other actress in her show. She names Norma Peiper, and Aaberg asks, “Suppose you and Norma read the same line. Would you sound alike? … I want to hear you say the names, Miss Casey, not read them on my screen. I need to see your face as you hear my questions, and I need to watch you as you answer them” (164). [Norma does resemble Cassie somewhat, and she is killed quite abruptly. The relationship between Cassie and those she inspires might not be limited to those in her presence; perhaps her acting also helps other women, who correspond to the roles Cassie takes on, behave with courage, conviction, and love. Cassie describes where the passengers were sitting in the car, with Zelda driving, Cassie beside her, Ebony behind Zelda, Margaret behind Cassie, and Gideon as Corby in the luggage space in back. Before she mentions Gideon, she reaches into her purse for a handkerchief and Aaberg comments that he likes to watch her bracelet move. Aaberg suggests that the criminals who took Margaret would not have to land at an airport and could be anywhere. He continues to ask questions about Corby, including whether she likes him. Finally, he says, “Try to understand that I’ve got a good reason for asking [this question]. Have you ever gotten into bed with Rosenquist?” (166)
521
522She begins to describe how strong and successful Reis is, even though she thinks that she is through with big men like her ex-husband Scott. She says, “Wally says he loves me, and he means it. I can tell. It’s hard not to like somebody who loves you” (167). She does add that one of the assailants was wearing a birch suit with stripes.
523
524Zelda agreed to protective bodyguards and was released, but Ebony did not and is still in custody. Cassie concludes, “It looks like [Corby] knew what was coming. I don’t believe that, but that’s how it looks.” Aaberg agrees, thinking Corby was tipped. He also thinks that they were either after her bracelet or her. He breaks off his thought, “After the third look –“ (168).
525
526Their dialogue also becomes strange; Cassie begins calling him Scott: 
527
528>“You thought of something just now. What was it?”
529
530>“Am I that transparent, Scott?”
531
532>Aaberg grinned. “Not to most people, Bubbles.”
533
534>“He called me Cassie.” (168)
535
536Cassie hesitates when Aaberg’s line of questioning forces her to recognize that Margaret knew where she hid the bracelet: “Yes, she … Yes, she did” (169). Aaberg also presents the possibility that the kidnappers may have had their sights on Cassie and wanted to blackmail Reis to pay for Cassie’s return. Capturing Margaret was the next best thing.
537
538Aaberg says, “You and I are going to your bank. You’re going to rent a box in the vault and put that damned bracelet in if while I watch, understand? They’ll give you a retinal scan and two keys. After that, a police hopper will take you and Corby back to Springfield” (169). [“That fits perfectly!”]
539
540The scene cuts to Cassie and India, who says that Dean is history in the role of the sailor: “India looked as though she might kill Dean and eat him afterward” (169). [In this novel, you are what you eat. India is named after a foreign country to the United States, and in this case, she also resonates with what Porter Penniman said earlier about foreign assassins. Hanga has grown to love Takanga after he eats a king. The high king of Takanga will be sacrificed to the Storm King.] They plan on having Gil take the part immediately, and he reveals that his leg is prosthetic. The scene fades into the show naturally:
541
542>“There had been time for the most difficult passages and nothing more, yet her trepidation vanished as soon as Corby took her in his arms and they glided toward center stage.
543
544>“Ever waltzed with a cripple before, Mariah?”
545
546>“I’ve never waltzed with anyone,” she told him, “and I’m not waltzing now, Mr. Sharpy. I’m just walking in time to music.”
547
548>“What music?” 
549
550>“The wind and the waves. You know. These lovely trees, the birds in them, and the sand beneath my feet. The moon.”
551
552>Their spotlights took a bluish cast.
553
554>“I thought the moon was in charge of lighting.”
555
556>“She sings her way through the sky.” They whirled, and Mariah spun alone across the stage, followed by the blue spot.
557
558Sharpy pursued her in a series of leaps, at once incredible and clearly painful. When he held her again, she whispered, “Wally’s in the audience.” (169-170)
559
560[The later scene where she dances with the Volcano God on the coral island will also stress that the music is from the natural world. However, there is little sense that Wally is in the audience there. That blue light resembles a reflection off of the Earth rather than the moon.] Cassie accepts a bouquet of orchids and meets with India in her dressing room. India expresses, “I miss Ebony.” As Cassie begins to cry over Margaret’s disappearance, the orchids fall to the floor, “and India (bigger than most men but far less rough) was hugging her. ‘It’ll be okay. You’ll see. Don’t cry, baby!’” (170)
561
562After this comfort, Cassie sits down “in the black-wire chair in front of the mirror mopping tears” (170). [These events also reflect the moral movement embedded at the end of the novel: large India, after metaphorically eating the sailor, comforts Cassie, who assumes a black chair in the position of Cassiopeia, gazing into a mirror. A reformed large force will also serve to comfort Cassie even as the glamours of spring disappear. Those fallen flowers will soon be gathered up, with a message from Reis previously unseen in them revealed.] India answers the phone, and it is Gideon. He says that he knows who has Margaret, and that she is all right. “She’ll be released in a few days” (171). He says that the people who have Margaret are monitoring her phone. He thinks he knows who is watching him, and Cassie says she has also figured it out, “or I think I have” (171). [It is made clear later that she believes this is Aaberg.]
563
564Gideon warns her that there are things at night she should avoid, and that even seeing them might be bad. [He is certainly talking about the winged creatures, who later reveal themselves to be friendly.] He also tells her not to leave her windows open. At this point, Cassie notes that the orchids are being picked up by a stage hand and placed, “into a blue vase encircled by sinuous yellow dragons. An envelope lay among them” (171). [Later, as we have already discussed, Reis will define what a dragon is in the context of this novel: a being of greed who hoards gold. We will argue that both the Storm King and Harold Klauser, once described as a huge man, are dragons. The mirror like properties of the first and last chapter, in which the reformed and shrunken dragon Klauser treats Cassie with kindness, implies that Gideon might also be a reformed dragon, shrunken in size.] Gideon asks if she will go with their “friend” Reis when he asks, as it affords an opportunity to “wrap this up” (171). [Ultimately, this will culminate in Reis dropping his gold into R’lyeh on the Storm King and getting the armed forces to attack with depth charges. This shower of gold would seem to be the true culmination of Gideon’s plan, and, incidentally, the means through which Perseus is conceived in myth.]
565
566The next chapter, “Death and Death’s Visitors,” begins with India questioning Cassie about the call. She admits it was about Wally. India seems concerned at one thought: “What was this about somebody taking you, too?” (173) When Cassie mentions the bracelet, India says “I was there when he gave it to you” (174). [Here, she would seem to be thinking of the gold bracelet, yet given India’s metaphorical association with the R’lyeh bound Cthulhu in the symbolic logic of the text, there might be a double meaning here.] Cassie discusses the prospect of pursuing her relationship with Reis. India shares that they are taking the play home, to “work the kinks out of the new stuff at the Tiara” before opening a week or two before Christmas (174). [This would roughly correspond with the approach of the solstice, the metaphorical death of the sun before its renewal.]
567
568Another interesting verbal moment emerges here when Cassie hopes that Margaret has provided for someone to take care of a cat she might not even own: “to come in and feed the cat, clean the cat box, and water the plants. But sometimes people don’t [take those precautions.]”
569
570India responds, “Margaret isn’t people,” as she asks about the envelope (174). After India leaves, Cassie opens it.
571
572>*My Darling, do you know how much I love you? You will close in Springfield in two days. In three you will be the Queen of Paradise. I will send a friend to you. Three times he will use a word to remind you of me. Go with him. He will take you to me and I will bring you to Paradise, where you will see how much I love you.*
573
574[This pattern of three days is repeated on the coral island, where Cassie will ritually return to the places she shared with Reis. It might even be suggested in her call to Chase after returning home: “Then, when she had finished breakfast on the fourth day, she patted her lips, got out her new cell phone, and made the call she had planned for so many months” (293). This is where she learns Gideon has gone to Woldercan as ambassador.] The note is signed only W.R., and Cassie considers burning it. As she looks at the declaration of love, Norma raps at her door. Her fellow actress helps Cassie into her coat. The rain has stopped. Cassie comments that Reis scares her, and wonders if you can love someone who does so. As they discuss the possibility of going with Reis, Norma says that she “used to be married to the volcano god” (176). Although Cassie assumes she is talking about Vince, Norma never confirms that. She says that what he wanted was a servant with sexual benefits rather than a wife, and that they separated on rather amicable terms. Cassie describes her meeting with Reis at Rusterman’s, and how he broke into her apartment to determine if she could be trusted. The wine she drank with him was the best wine she had ever tasted, and, as they left arm in arm, she felt he was “A Man with a capital M. He told me after how proud he was because every man who saw us wanted to be him. I’ve never told him I felt prouder than he did” (177). [There is a moment on the coral island where Reis questions Cassie’s judgments concerning Chase. He makes a comment that he would not put her in an executive position. There might be some resonance between Norma and Cassie given this comment about how Norma’s old husband simply wanted a “servant who screwed” (176).]
575
576A security guard lets them out. Cassie feels that for all of that, Reis is vulnerable. As they walk into the street, Norma discusses the uncertainty of the future with the play and who might get cut: “It’s not just Gil for Dean Heeny. … You’re solid, naturally. My guess is that Vince and Gil are solid, too. Probably Tiny. The rest of us are on the bubble, and I was hoping –“ (178). [Norma is shot and killed at this point, when she considers that her part might be cut from the play. While this is an interesting intersection of the play and real life, its deeper implication is muddled, not the least of which involves determining a true motive for this killing. Earlier, Aaberg called Cassie bubbles, one of Norma’s last words. Robert Pirkola reminds me that if Aaberg matches up to a mountain at all, “bubbles” would be quite natural as a nickname for his wife, a laundress. However, I think that it is easier to map Aaberg, if we were so inclined, onto the fake agent Martin, whose name is Al.]
577
578Later, back in her room, Cassie thinks that Norma could not have heard the shot that killed her: “Norma had bent forward, her knees buckling, and the sound had come after that, as if the intention to kill had killed” (178). After a brief police interview, Cassie returns to her suitcase to get her pistol out. She tries to reach Zelda but fails. However, the phone rings to the tune of “Pigs in Paradise” again, this time with Sharon on the other end. Cassie agrees to talk if Sharon won’t ask questions. Cassie begins talking about the idea of God, and how her character Mariah believes in him, but they do not. Here she notes that if you add nothing to God, “you get good” (179). [This might actually be the reason that the “Pigs in Paradise” theme plays here. What might be added to the Squid God to make him good?]
579
580Cassie says that her mother is dead and that her father does not care. She failed to reach everyone in her time of need. Here, she describes Gil Corby in an interesting way: “I don’t know him, but I like him. Can you like somebody you don’t know?” (180) [Cassie also noted that she liked Porter Penniman in his post-play iteration, and her fear for the Volcano God idol turns to affection. This scene also reveals that Cassie’s bullets are silver-tipped. She tries to remember Norma’s life, mentioning that she did stand-up comedy before concluding: “Norma died for me. She died in my place. I know it, and it’s tearing me up inside. Someone paid that man with the rifle. We were walking side by side, two women about the same size, and he shot the r-r-wrong w-w-one” (181).
581
582The last line of this section is Sharon’s response, “Who’d want to kill you, Cassie?”
583
584Cassie thinks it over later, knowing that Reis is a murderer. 
585
586>Someone had tried to murder Gideon Chase, and she was working for him, supposedly. And for Wally, who was really Bill.
587
588>Did the police kill people? That lieutenant – she could not recall his name – had seemed capable of any number of murders.
589
590>Berg? It had been something like that….
591
592>She was sitting in a hard wooden chair with a writing arm. Before her, the teacher rapped her desk with a ruler. The teacher was frowning, her frown was deeply disturbing, and the tapping never ended.
593
594Gray light awakens her, but soon darkness overtakes her window: “night-black glass behind the scrim, night solidified” (182). When she pushes it aside, she sees tall vulture-like creatures with “towering pale helmets with elongated visors like caricatures of human faces” (182). Her door opens part of the way (inhibited by a chain no doubt) as she scrambles to open her suitcase. [Athena often wears a tall helmet. The yacht which rescues her from the island is named *Athena*. Athena is also the goddess who preserves the heart of Persephone’s child Zagreus.]
595
596Ebony knocking on the door the next morning awakens Cassie after an abrupt cut. Ebony says, “I was in the chow line, and a cop came in and pulled me out. He said I was going to be released.” (183-4). [This almost resembles the chorus line which Cassie pulled Donny Dukes out of for their “hornpipe.”] The telephone rings, and Scott, her ex-husband, is on the other end, even though she has blocked incoming calls. Cassie wants nothing to do with him and leaves with Ebony. They run into him in the elevator on the way down, in a “bone-white-and-Chablis seersucker suit” (185). Scott says that Norma’s shooting was a warning to her. [During their subsequent meal, Cassie refers to her experience with the creatures of the night before as a nightmare which woke up the entire hotel. Here it is worth noting that they might somehow resemble a type of Lovecraftian creature featured in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” - the winged night-gaunts. These night-gaunts have a vaguely human shape but feature wings and rubbery dark skin. Right before the tapping, Cassie thinks of the name Berg – which can mean “Mountain.” The night-gaunts guard the snow-capped mountain Ngranek in the Dreamlands. That mountain is an extinct volcano on the island of Oriab, in the Southern Sea. According to *The Lovecraft Lexicon*, Lovecraft once wrote to a friend explaining, "When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me 'night-gaunts'—I don't know where I got hold of the name) used to snatch me up [and] carry me off” (Pearsall 301). While the description is not precise, since the night-gaunts in Lovecraft do not feature faces or make noises, some of the other details certainly resonate with *An Evil Guest*. A discussion with Robert Pirkola has, alas, unearthed a cosmic fear I have that those helmets with visors featuring a caricature of human faces make these creatures … knight-gaunts. As if “The Friendship Light” and a migo weren’t enough … sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat at night knowing that Pirkola is right about this pun, and an unreasoning and overwhelming anxiety crushes all my hopes and dreams. If Ngranek is related to the volcano on Takanga and the mountain to which Gideon took Cassie, then this also explains the other things living on the mountain. The Earth Gods who once lived inside Ngranek move to Kadath in the north in Lovecraft’s mythos. The other important feature of Ngranek is that it is carved with likenesses of the gods that once dwelt there, and Cassie will meet a carved idol at the end of the novel.] As we have already mentioned, Scott treats the waitress terribly. He denies killing Norma. During the order, Cassie gets fruit and yogurt [in imitation of the missing Margaret Briggs.] Scott does not seem to know anything about Margaret and denies having her.
597
598During this scene, we learn that whatever protection Aaberg and the police have extended is gone, as they have released Ebony. Furthermore, Zelda no longer has a bodyguard to protect her. Cassie thinks that this means something to Scott. He reveals he has been living in South Florida and working in a profitable but questionable business, which “Arthur Thomas Franklin” turns a blind eye to if he helps them (187).
599
600At mention of the ATF, the empty chair next to Scott moves (which is clearly Reis sitting down, unseen). Scott says, “We’re after a man you’ve probably never heard of, and the key to our finding and killing that man is a man seen with you not long ago.” (188) [It would seem that they are seeking out Reis and see Gideon as a link to him.] Cassie asks if the giant bats or birds were placed on her window by Scott, and he denies any knowledge of it. “They were horrible, but I had this crazy notion that they wanted to be friends. If Scot had sent them, that couldn’t be true. … They had tall heads like pointed caps, and their faces looked almost human. They wanted me to let them in. Only the windows won’t open” (188). Scott shows her a picture and threatens her. When Ebony asks to see the picture, a “deep and harsh” voice chimes in as Reis materializes at the table (189).
601
602Scott sounds as if he is choking as he demands to know who Reis is. “I’m your replacement” (190). The picture shows Cassie dancing with Gideon Chase:
603
604>Through a sea of blue light. She wore Mariah Brownlea’s spring-green gown. Gideon was costumed as a sea-man, in white trousers, a black jacket, and a jaunty, nautical-looking cap; his right leg ended in a wooden peg. (190)
605
606Suddenly a gray-black beast enters the room dragging a man, walks right up to Scott, and stares into his eyes. Scott simply gets up and walks outside. [It is at this moment that Reis determines that his food needs Russian dressing.] Reis says that he has arrived from Melbourne by hopper, and he also says, “Nobody really owns a wolf. … And I certainly don’t own that one. He’s his own wolf. Scott’s going to die for the same reason your friend Norma died. His death will worry you, I know” (190). Here, he discusses the independence of many government agencies that tend to cooperate with one another only under duress. Reis reveals that the first Agent Martin that she met is actually working for the “man I know who used to work for the State Department” and has nothing to do with the ATF and Norma’s death (191). [Later it is heavily implied that the first Agent Martin just walked in as a wolf.]
607
608Reis says that the wants to make the bats his; he also denies kidnapping Margaret, though he has been told about it. He believes that if the police called off the Zelda’s protection and released Ebony, they must have found out Margaret was taken by another police agency. He assumes it was to find out information about Cassie. After discussing the stupid brutality of the ATF, Reis says, “Cassie, I said once that I’d send a friend who’d lead you to me. Remember that?” (193) He says that success requires putting the right people in the right places and personally stamping on fires which they can’t handle. “When some bastard shoots somebody who works for me, that’s a fire. I’ve come to stamp on it, and I will” (194). He kisses her and vanishes. [This entire scene resonates with a particular ritual pattern in which a king replaces his predecessor but sets himself upon a path which will end in the same manner.]
609
610In the next chapter, the curtain rises for the final time and Tabbi Merce plays Jane Brownlea. Gideon (as Gil) tells Cassie, “She’s great, isn’t she? Pure gold.” He mentions that the applause is box-office gold, and then, as they dance, says, “I think the spot’s the wrong color. They say that in the South Pacific, the moon is gold.” (195). [Gold is the word which reminds Cassie of Reis. However, given his sudden containment in boxes, Gideon Chase might also resonate with the gold bracelet (perhaps big enough to be considered a gold chain) that Reis gave her as well. Here, the parallel of Tabbi Merce with gold and the moon might also be symbolic, since Ian Mersey could make a box that contained the harmful properties of the gold.]
611
612Later, in her dressing room, “Gil Corby” reveals himself as Gideon Chase. He explains:
613
614>“What I did is called a glamour in English. Sir Walter Scott defined it as well as anyone ever has, calling it ‘the power of imposing on the eyesight of the spectators so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality.’ If you’re asking whether I can do it myself, I can’t. Not presently” (196).
615
616[This is somewhat confusing, as he just said that his appearance was changed thanks to a glamour. Who did it, then?]
617
618He goes on to explain that what Reis does is only akin to a glamour: the change is in perception, but there is no change in reality. Reis still casts a shadow. Cassie compares it to an illusionist who she let saw her in half “one night when his assistant didn’t show up” (197).
619
620Here, Chase says that there is a difference between stage magic and real magic, and they are usually not the same thing. [Cassie’s example of being sawed in half might be more apropos than we first realize; it is the illusion of making one thing seem to be two. We shall return to this once Gideon Chase disappears from the novel and Great Cthulhu’s influence grows.]
621
622Cassie asks, “Is he good? I mean Wally? Is he a good magician?” (197) [This is, I think, the central question of the text: which of the two interests are good? The answer might be both, but perhaps one of them, the one who will murder without compunction, is not quite as good as the other has become and is not good enough to be the true “Sailor of Heaven.”]
623
624Gideon asks to wash his face to take off the glamour: 
625
626>“You suspected me as soon as you saw rain on my face. Remember? Washing’s one of the best ways of breaking the spell. That may be the origin of baptism – another thing I don’t know, though I’d like to. Washing, striking the face with a hazel wand, striking with cold iron, and so on. Just crossing running water will do it sometimes. Wouldn’t you rather I were Gideon Chase?” (197)
627
628Now, he is working for Reis as a consultant. Afterwards, she asks if she can kiss him. Soon, they are traveling together in a caramel colored coupe. He discusses the bug he found in her room and how he disconnected the phone when he came in it, further refining his description of stage magic as “a thought-through attempt not to be obvious” (198). [There might be a fine line between this and intentional obscurity.] Gideon believes that Reis got all of his powers from Woldercan. However, he says that the art of vanishing has been known on earth for thousands of years: “A hundred and fifty-odd years ago there was a man called Cranston who was quite famous for it. But it’s also known on Woldercan, and I think it most likely that’s where Reis picked it up. If he were using their method of listening from far away, I’d have detected him” (198). [Here he brings up the Shadow, in our world obviously fictional, as a real person. Wolfe’s intertextuality in this novel is pretty serious.]
629
630Gideon admits that he is the person Wally sent to get her; she is headed for Kololahi on Great Takanga, a remote Pacific island chain. [There are those chains again – this island chain was featured in Wolfe’s “The Tree is My Hat.”]
631
632Gideon says that it produces some pearls and copra, but that it is otherwise unremarkable. [Copra are dried coconut kernels, and pearls, as we know, are forged in their luminescent sheen through some irritant or parasite infiltrating an oyster, which then coats it with nacre as a protective measurement to produce the organic gem. We argue, of course, that the Earth also had an intergalactic parasite which required a similar neutralization, though he probably stayed dark, on the outside, at least. The coconut is a more fitting image for his reformation.]
633
634They turn off at some abandoned buildings, with dark weeds poking through the pavement. Gideon identifies it as a decayed agricultural area. If one where to go back far enough, he claims, lions would have roamed here. “Panthera leo atrox has been extinct for no more than eight thousand years. He was still around within living memory, in other words. He may return – or something like him may” (200).
635
636Gideon makes a sudden u-turn and comes to an abandoned body shop, where his black sedan has been concealed. He tells her that they will be going to dinner at the Silent Woman. As they take off, soon she notes that there were only stars outside its windows. She tells him that she suspects Aaberg. [That’s a rather big change of allegiance, from Chase to Reis.]
637
638Gideon proclaims that he loves her too much not to trust her. Cassie says that she trusts him, but wonders if they are wrong to have this trust in each other. Gideon responds, “You’re not wrong about me, though. Am I wrong about you?” (201) Gideon says that she should remain quiet at the Silent Woman, as there are things there with sharp ears. He also reveals that he has been working with the FBI as well as Wally, “To a degree” (202). Both express that they might not want to turn Reis in. Cassie says, “You’re a good, good man. I always knew it” (202). Besides the fact that he is accepting money from Reis, the second reason he cannot betray him is that the government is setting restrictions on him and his future plans.
639
640The inn he takes them to is “older than Carnac, a structure of odd angles, many dormers, and inscrutable projections, small-windowed and secretive, its stone walls furred with black moss” (202). Gideon suggests that she might like a nice duck with truffles, and Cassie concludes, “You know what we ate. Wally and me” (203). [Every time someone sits down to eat in *An Evil Guest*, the reader should feel a disturbing tightness around the temples, like a vise grip. How did Gideon know this? Was he impersonating Reis in that pivotal meeting?] Chase says that he merely thinks she might like duck and describes his reaction to the antibiotic, which cost him his leg. He also talks about the assassin who tried to kill him and dismisses the FBI as a suspect, since they are generally good shots. He thinks that “the man who bought [Cassie] truffles” is a far more likely suspect (204). However, Gideon found out that Reis was looking for him to extend medical treatment and might have been interested in enlisting him. “A tall man in a gray suit visited me, one who had visited you earlier” (204). 
641
642Here she requests a drink, and Gideon orders champagne, telling her that she can sleep on the way home. Cassie notes that the waiter has pointy and hairy ears, and when she asks if he is a werewolf, Reis replies, “Certainly not. Werewolves are human” (205). [Gideon played a waiter; this might say something about his own humanity.] Gideon keeps coming back to asking Cassie about the wolf, and Cassie responds:
643
644“Do you ever feel like you’re in the wrong show? … It’s a nightmare I’ve had. Maybe a nightmare I’m having. I’m onstage, I’ve got no idea what the play’s about, the audience is always behind me. I’m in a restaurant that can’t possibly be in one of those guides you can read online, the waiter’s not – shouldn’t this place serve dragon’s eggs? Stuff like that?” (205)
645
646[This is another moment where Wolfe has supersaturated his *non sequiturs* with meaning. She is talking about how she has no understanding of what the drama around her means, though she is clearly performing in the play, and she changes directions before she says that the waiter is not *human*. Besides Gideon’s “posing” as a waiter, Cassie mentions dragon’s eggs here. Reis will soon give us a definition of dragons which involves identifying the Storm King as a dragon. Might that dragon have an egg? When she interrupts Klauser’s meal in the final chapter, his eggs have fallen on the floor.]
647
648Gideon assures her that those eggs are poisonous. Cassie describes the wolf and her meal with Scott. Gideon says that the werewolf, the fake Agent Martin, works for Reis. “He’s an ex-cop and a private investigator, and our friend Wally owns the agency that employs him. Not as our friend. Another name” (206). [Pat Gomez will be listed as a private investigator in the glossary at the end of the book, whatever that resonance is worth.]
649
650Gideon goes on to list the signs of lycanthropy:
651
652>”When an individual exhibits two or more, it’s safe to assume lycanthropy. Hair on the palms of the hands is the classic indication, mentioned as far back as the Middle Ages. One almost never sees that today, because they shave it off. … The ring finger is often the longest on the hand. They’re sensitive to odors and insensitive to colors. There’s often a swift loping walk, even in women. It’s hard to describe, but once you see it you’ll remember it. They tend to dress in wolf shades: gray, black, and white. There are others, but those are the most common.” (206)
653
654[I feel that while Margaret Briggs wears grey, there is mention of the Grey Neighbors, and while shape-changing is certainly in the novel as Gideon told us to be aware of from the start, these guidelines almost represent a bit of a distraction in this particular novel. There’s a far bigger metamorphosis brewing, and indeed, Cassie immediately focuses on change.]
655
656“I changed. … Or you changed me” (206). Gideon insists that he merely assisted her and that he was merely looking for a reason to help her, having already noticed her at the theater. Here, Gideon also talks about how “Al,” the werewolf, is a large man and must also be a large wolf. 
657
658As they leave the Silent Woman, Cassie asks about its headless sign. As they hop back, Gideon once again confesses his love. She begs him to let her drive the car, promising not to touch or do anything he does not want her to do once they return to the rental. He says, “Absolutely not. You don’t know what you’re asking” (210). [In the symbolic logic of the text, she certainly doesn’t. Gideon letting Cassie take the wheel is one of the most important scenes in the book, though it is almost inscrutable.]
659
660When he refuses again, she says that she was planning on letting him stay with her, as she had company that frightened her greatly, but that now she will call Ebony up instead. He says that they must look on her as a friend. She wants to drive so that she can feel like she belongs with Gideon and Wally. He decides to let her drive until they reach the rental car, and they kiss in the blue-white beams from the headlights as she takes the driver’s seat. 
661
662Gideon tells her not to start the computer and describes that there is a motor for each wheel. He also tells her how to control the car manually and verbally. As Gideon gets out of the car, Cassie takes off at ninety miles per hour. She tries to wake up the computer, and then a voice from the back seat, “a voice that might almost have been the soughing of a weary wind – whispered, ‘Say “Computer”’”(213). [Robert Pirkola assures me that soughing is pronounced much like “sowing” – which would put us in mind of “Pigs in Paradise,” but I would like to emphasize the presence of wind in several key scenes before, almost certainly linked to spring, especially under the canopy of Rusterman’s with Reis.]
663
664Cassie asks, “Who the heck are you?” but receives no answer. The computer starts up and speaks in “the simulated voice of a Japanese woman” (213). [Originally, I had planned on ignoring the speech of Com Pu Ter, but then I realized how central it was. When Cassie turns the computer on, it speaks in a voice which almost always switches its Rs and Ls. When Pat Gomez enters R’lyeh after getting past its reluctant door, a strange inversion takes place: “The world changed, silently, subtly, reversing as old-fashioned negatives are reversed. Light was darkness, and darkness light” (263). From Pat Gomez’s point of view, with night below in what is certainly “up,” she sees that the city under the sea seems to be on the sun, and she removes her mask and tank, no longer necessary. Beings rush to meet her, and she wonders if she might become as they are. When Cassie hijacks Gideon’s car, this is the moment that Cassiopeia holds up her mirror to reality. When Pat Gomez enters R’lyeh, which is somehow also Cthulhu, her inability to hate it changes its evil, and a mirror is held up to it, setting in motion events which will eventually turn its darkness to light. Cassie’s actions as the Green Goddess might not have directly caused this event, but they are innately tied together. At the start of the novel, Cassie lives on West Arbor. At the end, the assassin Diana Diamond, one of those who will become a part of Pat Gomez, too, says that she lives on East Arbor. These reversals are vital to the overarching plot of the novel, and Com Pu Ter represents that pivotal moment when Cassie finally has control and things change drastically.]
665
666Cassie asks if it can answer questions, and “A small voice near the dome light, secretive and somehow tinny, suggested, “Ask how to hop” (213).
667
668As the computer goes over the functions of the car and suggests that the “hopper” is separate, Cassie asks for a drink. “A deep voice behind her suggested, “Ask for whiskey,” but Cassie chooses tea over coffee (213). She does not want creamer in her tea. [Gideon liked creamer in his coffee.]
669
670Cassie says, “I want to ask about the windows. How do I put them down?”
671
672The tinny voice giggles: “Bad windows! You’re dirty! You’re scratched!” (214 [This was one of those moments in the text that I thought might be inexplicable, until I started seeing the mirroring between the first and last chapters of the text. In the final chapter, Harold Klauser tells Cassie that a robin fighting itself in a clean window believes that its reflection is real, and, here in Gideon’s car, I began to suspect that these voices were the ghosts of other forces in Cassie’s life. Tiny Porter Penniman vowed to change, and the hard, harsh voice of Reis was always suggesting some drink or another. Gideon said at the very start that he had consulted with ghosts in the past. Cassie is here asking how to get rid of that window – the one which also separates her from the creatures tapping outside, and which keeps the bird fighting itself. Gideon has disguised himself as a gilded raven, and the dark wings behind him should not be ignored. The computer does not acknowledge the three other voices Cassie has heard. At the end of the novel, Diana Diamond will begin tittering and giggling, just as that small voice near the dome does in this car. Reis’s proclivity for offering drinks might also insinuate that there is something of his spirit in the back seat (whiskey is a grain alcohol and Persephone is often seen carrying a sheath of grain), and perhaps the third voice could represent Pat Gomez, as Cassie only identifies one definitely masculine voice. Given four motors, these voices might also correspond to direction and mythological winds, but I think mapping them onto the text itself is more compelling.]
673
674She stops at a light when Gideon pulls up next to her in his caramel coupe, and through the lowered front window, “He gave her a look that should – were justice ever to prevail on planet Earth – have fried her. His right front window slid up” (214). [I think that in addition to showing Cassie asserting some independence, this also foreshadows her hops to Woldercan.]
675
676Cassie pretends that she turned on the computer accidentally in talking with the invisible presences in Gideon’s car. “They really opened up once you were gone. He – I think it was the man, but it may have been the bug up on the roof. He started talking about your computer” (215). When they are in the same vehicle, Gideon tells her to drop the tea cup on the floor, and she suggests putting it in the back, as the voices have become very quiet. “If they are wise, they’ll keep it like that,” Gideon threatens (215). She jokes that if Ebony couldn’t make it to her hotel room, she would invite Donny Duke. [This also resonates with the later appearance of Pat Gomez and Diana Diamond in her room, especially since Gideon is the prospective “visitor” who might stay the night. Like almost every scene, this one seems allegorical.] Cassie says that India and Ebony are sharing a room, Wally is unavailable, Vince creepy, and Tabbi Merce not even someone she wants to consider because of Norma’s death. Gideon is surprised that the voices in his car have not bothered her; Cassie found them nice. [Cassie’s touch has made them benevolent rather than malicious.] 
677
678Gideon and Cassie spend the night together, and she finds his note the next day, in which he claims he will never forget the night they shared and urges her to pack for Kololahi. He also tells her he will not be available to come back for any of her belongings. He ends by saying that he has loved her for years. Cassie giggles and puts on makeup in front of a mirror. When room service come, she sees another envelope under her door with a note from Ebony. The newspaper clipping inside details the death of her husband Scott Zeitz, partially devoured by dogs.
679
680The next chapter begins with Cassie asking Gideon if he would have stopped the wolf from killing Scott. He says that by the time he learned of Scott’s predicament, he was almost certainly dead. He says, “I would have done nothing unless you asked me to” (220). Cassie wants to know if he is really trying to get Wally captured, and Gideon answers, “That depends on what you mean by trying” (220). He says he has been trying to persuade Reis to give himself up and for the president to give him better terms. Gideon thinks the president wants the secret of Reis’s gold himself, not merely because it is unbalancing the world market. Cassie asks why they don’t just go to Woldercan to find out how Reis does it. Gideon looks at her, impressed, and says that he has been trying to be appointed as ambassador there, to learn just as Reis did. Here, Chase reveals the secret of his success: “Never set yourself up to fail. Never!” (223) [That is ambiguously ominous given what happens on Takanga.]
681
682Gideon drops her off to a royal welcome in Takanga and takes off immediately, even as a large native named Hiapo kisses the ground at her feet. [Hiapo means “first-born son.” Wolfe has a way of blending past and future in this novel that is disconcerting. When Cassie finally goes far away on her great adventure, metaphorically, after her ex-husband is killed by a shape-changing beast, a male “first-born son” kisses the ground at her feet. We shall return to this idea at the end of this far too long summary.] Hiapo takes her to Salamanca House and calls her high queen. He pushes her in a chair on his cart to a sprawling but decayed white house. [Here again she is in the position of Cassiopeia in a chair.] He takes her bags up a white staircase. She takes a gilded cage elevator to the royal suite, despite her own protestations. When Cassie goes shopping, whatever she likes is given to her without payment. As she looks at her gowns, she decides that the pale yellow one with foliage and red flowers is a particular favorite. “After showering and drenching herself with Lily Delight she put it on and posed before the pier glass in her new boudoir” (225). She puts on some face powder and “New Rose Number Ten” (225). [This matches her actions after she finished performing in *The Red Spot*.] As her maid helps prepare her hair, Cassie speculates that it is winter where she lives, while here it is still warm and vital. [Persephone’s descent into the underworld of course involves seasonal changes; if Cassie maps to this goddess at all, has her trip to the Southern hemisphere delayed that, or symbolically enacted it?]
683
684Eventually, she is able to learn some information about Takanga, much of it contradictory. Kololahi seems to be its only city, though there are “seven (or six or nine)” inhabited islands. (226). The most important contradiction in that information involves who rules: “The nation was ruled by its high king. All of the people had seen him. None of the tourists had seen him. All kings were sacred, the high king most sacred; he had been chosen by God. Or by the gods. Or by certain gods” (226). This high king ruled from mountainous Takanga Ha’i. Also, “The high king ruled from the Island of the dead, under the sea north of Takanga Ha’i” (226). This would probably be R’lyeh, indicating that the Storm King also rules Takanga, though it would be hard to credit that Reis and the Storm King are actually the same ruler. The description of the people is both pagan and Christian: “When people became Christians, God came but the old gods did not go away. … No one knew the names of the gods. They were called the Thunder God, the Blind God, the Shark God, the Volcano God, the Storm King, the Sun God, the Sea Goddess, and so forth” (226).
685
686Cassie goes to the beach with sunblock, and Hiapo tells her that there have been no shark attacks for two years. [This happens to resonate with the length of time that Gideon has been working for Chase, though that might be mere coincidence.] Cassie learns that there is a tower which can transmit her cell phone signal to space from a woman from Perth, who seems to enjoy free word association. “Calling the States might be a bit costly, though. … Dog charges, you know. Rover, or whatever they call him” (227). [The tower which transmits Cassie’s signal to space might also be important given the conception of Perseus in a tower and the Storm King’s tower.]
687
688She calls India, who tells her she is “on the john” (227). [The only prominent John in the text was the FBI head John Ferguson, but this seems more like a mirror of the Rusterman’s after-party in which Cassie went to the “jane.”] India says that she wants rocks in the second dream sequence: “I say dancers ought to be able to dance around a rock. I’d love to have you and Gil dance there for him.” (227). [This scene will probably come to life on the coral island with the depiction of the Volcano God, with whom Cassie will eventually dance.]
689
690When India asks where Gil is, Cassie says, “I’m waiting for him to ride up on a white horse” (227). [That seems like more Perseus imagery.] When Cassie describes her luxurious surroundings, India’s sarcasm comes out: “Holy snot, Wanton Woman, you must be suffering the tortures of the damned.” (228) [Given that half of Persephone’s time is spent in the underworld with Hades, we might consider that this is the dreaded use of … double irony. That’s like a double negative you can’t never prove.]
691
692Cassie does say that “Roast pork is the specialty here, and it’s to die for. The roast pork and the fruit. They bring me this whole big tray of fruit, all cut up and arranged to make it look like a sunrise, and the colors are so bright it looks like a tray of jewelry” (228). [That roast pork sounds like the opposite of “Pigs in Paradise.” At this point, there is only heavy breathing on the other line, and eventually India is not there at all, as Cassie continues to drone on. Hopefully we can see the metaphorical implication of a pig that is “to die for” and a fruit cut up to resemble a sunrise, given the light and dark images of the text. When Pat Gomez infiltrates R’lyeh, she will be, metaphorically or literally, torn apart and reassembled. The tray of jewelry must also resonate slightly with the impression Cassie has of the diamond bracelet, which is now stored at Barclay’s Bank – where Gideon also held his account.]
693
694Most tellingly, given my association earlier of India as a rather predatory and larger than life figure, here, we should pay attention to this transition: “A soft click from the other end of the connection told her no one was listening. She called Gideon Chase, and to her considerable surprise got him.” (228). [When the large figure stops listening, Cassie is finally able to get Chase, after her talk of fruit reassembled into a sunrise.]
695
696When Cassie says that India needs her, Chase says, “She should talk to Reis. Not to you and certainly not to me. … I’m in a ticklish situation. I know how it sounds, but everything could blow up in my face if I took a day – and it would require at least that – to access my car, drive it to a safe spot, hop, pick you up at your hotel, and all the rest of it. Third - … Third, you may be of great value to me where you are now. If you were in Kingsport, I’d have to rely on Aaberg to outmaneuver the people who killed Norma. He’s good, but I’m not sure he’s that good.” (228).
697
698They declare their mutual love for each other, and Cassie thanks him for letting her drive his car. [While it seems that we could never determine what Gideon is up to, his note that it is a “ticklish” situation tells us far more than we think. The Night-gaunts of Lovecraft are known for “tickling” their pray into submission, and they are about to become somewhat less sinister towards Cassie.]
699
700The scene cuts to Cassie on the beach next to a “six foot eight and remarkably good-looking, but strictly local talent” (228). This is soon revealed to be the manifestation of the Shark God Hanga, who appears in “The Tree is My Hat.” [This scene will actually illuminate more about Wolfe’s short story than vice-versa, though we should keep in mind the gods as extraterrestrial visitors and Hanga’s resemblance to Dagon, a deity also referenced by Lovecraft, as suggested by “The Tree is My Hat.”]
701
702Cassie has a dream which does not seem to be one at first: 
703
704>She swam in water that might almost have been blue air, the hunk beside her matching five of her strokes with one of his. A wall of coral rose to the right, coral of a hundred shades of rose and green; the fish that swam before it were yellow and electric blue, each hardly larger than a quarter but so bright they seemed to burn. (229) 
705
706Cassie sees a horrifying shark behind her, but she knows that it has come “to protect them from a horror that stirred in darker waters far below” (229). Cassie jerks awake, though the “hunk” is still beside her, smiling with his pointy teeth. He introduces himself as Hanga and asks her if the sea or the land is lovelier. She says that the sea is beautiful: “like the sky had a sister” (229). [The coral imagery is associated with the Volcano God, while green and rose are linked to Cassie.] She must love the land best because it is her home. She describes a puppy that had once chewed on her shoe because it had not known better. [This could be describing Cthulhu and its amorality as well as Hanga: from its vastly different perspective, it has not learned conventional morality. Perhaps something might teach it about chewing on shoes or people. Diana Diamond will display a willful disdain towards the idea of love and breeding later, when Cassie asks if she has ever experienced it.]
707
708Hanga asks if his presence on the beach troubles her, and here identifies *her* as a guest on the beach: “The village people may not use it. The people of Kololahi may not use it. Only guests of the hotel. Only them, Cassie Casey. Not even those who labor for the hotel may use it. … Would you wish the hotel guests gone, Cassie Casey? All save you?” (230) [During this scene, the woman from Perth obviously notes that Cassie is talking to herself on the beach, and Cassie seems to acknowledge it, in asking Hanga to speak.]
709
710The next chapter begins with Cassie describing all of this over the phone to Zelda. She says Hanga told her “a whole lot of spooky stuff about the Storm King and how this darned Squid God – that’s what he is – has it in for Wally and me. For the high king’s what he said” (232).
711She also describes ordering a coke for herself and for Hanga from her waiter, Hiapo, and that the people there do not care greatly for money. Hanga disappears: “He’d been sitting on the white sand right beside me, only there were no marks in it there” (232). Zelda suggests that she was asleep, and that it “was really the waiter who woke you up” (232). [Given that Gideon has appeared as a waiter in this story, this also might have a double resonance.] Cassie then describes how the woman from Perth, Florence McNair, goes into the water and does not emerge. The rescue efforts fail and the shark alarm sounds, and later, as Cassie finishes her conversation with Zelda, still on the beach, someone says, “He’s found her head!” (233) [There are several important things to consider. One of them is that Wolfe is absolutely insane in embedding details no one should possibly know. Florence means “flower,” and while McNair *usually* means “son of dun John,” there is a derivation from Perthshire which means “son of the heir.” This has to mean something for the larger plot of the book, given its “exceptional” definition from Perth. How will the “flowering son of the heir” be swallowed by the sea? Should this refer to Gideon, Reis, or some other character? Both the Volcano God and Pat Gomez ask Cassie to leave flowers for them.]
712
713That night, Cassie awakens from dreams of Florence McNair’s death and opens “the drapes as stagehands open a theater curtain, unlatched her French doors, and stepped out into her private garden, where tall figures with long, almost human faces waited among the palms and azaleas, wrapped in leathern wings” (234). [Here, Cassie finally opens up to the flying creatures, and it is as if she is in the theater. The azalea can be a symbol of fragile passion or of womanhood itself. Previously, in her own “fifth floor” apartment, she had opened up French doors to see a face far below that she later identified as Aaberg watching her.] She notes that there are five of them and asks if she is dreaming. The creature touches her with a four-fingered hand, and Cassie says that she has always felt they were friends she did not truly want. She tells a story of a dog that she was afraid of as a child who comforted her when she most needed it: “My mother married a new man, and he was – was just horrible. When she was away, he made me do things for him, and he said over and over he’d kill me if I told her” (234). She describes running away to hide in the neighbor’s yard, and their dog coming up to lick her face. The winged ones tell her that he whom she fears “was a god once,” and another says, “We might be gods, too. Such gods as he. We do not desire it” (234).
714
715Cassie says, “When – when I dreamed I went swimming with that Takangese – there was something horrible way deep in the water. When the lady from Perth was killed, I thought it had killed her. … But it was only a shaark. It’s real, isn’t it? The thing I dreamed of. The storm King” (234).
716
717Here, another of the winged ones says, “It is not a god” (235). [Does this mean that they were speaking of Cassie’s fear of Hanga earlier, calling him a god?] She invites them inside, but their response indicates it is not their element: “Would you like us to carry you through the air?” (235)
718
719They say that the Storm King was one who came to this world as they did and also suggest that while he wishes Cassie, he may not yet wish for her death. Cassie responds, “Monster lusts for beautiful Earth woman? I think I watched the movie” (235). They tell her to go home, and one dramatically mounts the back of her stone bench and says, “*We will save you*” as it spreads vast wings and floats upwards in the wind. The first one to have spoken says to “Trust those who love you” (235). [This is another moment that I feel should be taken at face value: both Chase and Reis have expressed their love for Cassie. Perhaps even the Storm King loves her.] One touches her hand and says, “You are our cub” (235). When she closes the doors and returns to her suite, the garden is empty. [Their identification of Cassie as their cub is difficult to understand literally. Pirkola suggests that the resonance between their helmets and depictions of helmeted Athena might have some mythological implications, as at times Athena’s mother Metis is depicted with wings. However, it is difficult to map Athena onto Cassie for any concrete reason, save perhaps in (possibly) saving Zagreus’s heart.]
720
721The next scene begins with Sharon over the phone asking Cassie, “[W]here the hell are you?”(236) She continues to ask where Cassie is as Cassie rambles. Sharon says that “Hell, yes” Cassie is in trouble (236). Cassie mentions the “Menbats” of the previous night from her dream, and conjectures that one of them was a woman. She is seated on a French-looking “ashes-of-rose” plush seat with the doors open, looking at the ocean (237). [Her lipstick, New Rose, was applied upon coming to Takanga and assuming her reign. By the time she leaves, Cassie will be burnt out, literally and figuratively. Her dancing with the Volcano God will even show his heat affecting her dress. It is in this condition that she will return to the stars. The Japanese Volcano God burns his mother Izanami to death when he is born; the Japanese nurse on Takanga is named Izanami.] Here, Sharon asks if Wallace Rosenquist is related to William Reis, and if Cassie knows where he is. Cassie hangs up when someone comes to the door, and, much like the earlier dressing room scene, another phone call on the hotel phone interrupts her. King Kanoa is going to take her to Takanga Ha’i. She meets him, and he is wearing a violet loincloth and a crown of crimson and gold. He bows to her and speaks in what the text calls “more than a trace of a British accent” (238). [Kanoa’s speech patterns would seem to represent someone who has been completely changed by the culture he assimilated into, even though he has returned to his native land. In the play, Porter Penniman stars as the King Kanoa cognate, but that is a complex web of associations. In *The Red Spot*, Penniman played a character more like the Storm King. The almost ridiculous assimilation of a foreign culture’s values that Kanoa represents can be mapped back through Porter Penniman to the Storm King, who might even be, eventually, compared to the puppy chewing on Cassie’s shoes. However, Kanoa will still prove to be dangerous, and his desire to have Cassie for his own leads her to shoot him. Kanoa’s fate is the most ambiguous feature of Cassie’s trip to Woldercan, assuming that much of the plot becomes reflectively allegorical.]
722
723Kanoa gets a parasol for her so that she walks in shade to the dock, where several catamarans wait. Cassie is seated on a high chair, while King Kanoa sits on a lower one. [This actually does map to the positioning of Gideon and Cassie on top of the mountain during her elevation. Kanoa’s name can mean “the free one” in Hawaiian. Here is the perfect time to plot this rather important bit of exposition from Wolfe into the narrative, from a 2007 interview with John Joseph Adams:
724
725>*An Evil Guest*, a novel‐in‐progress set in the same milieu as ‘Memorare,’ also deals with freedom, Wolfe said. ‘Cassie Casey becomes a queen and discovers that she can no longer buy anything,’ he said. ‘Each dress, each pair of shoes she wants, is given to her. William Reis can make gold and become invisible; one of his employees is a werewolf who will gladly kill (and eat) anyone Reis wants killed (and eaten). Gideon Chase is, well, Gideon Chase. A wizard, almost human, and so slick he can slide up a flagpole. Laws and societal restraints mean little to him. He loses a leg, but in a way he is freest of all.’ (Adams)
726
727There is no greater freedom in Wolfe’s work than in someone choosing to act regardless of their nature. While Cthulhu might also be free from societal constraints and physical laws, true freedom might represent changing. In hindsight, *Pirate Freedom* offers the opposite character progression, in which an innocent child becomes a priest who chooses to return to his soiled past. Perhaps Cthulhu could make a more noble choice.]
728
729Kanoa explains that he sounds so “English” because he was educated at Eaton and Cambridge, though he did not finish because his father died. He knows about Hanga but asks her not to say his name for now – nor the name of the “other gent,” clearly the Storm King (240). Kanoa describes Reis as a “Good man … . Kindly chap. Very decent, but – ah – tough. A good friend but a dangerous enemy” (240).
730
731He then tells a legend that directly relates to our argument for the entire novel:
732
733>”My gaffer was a great wizard. Friend of ghosts and spirits. All that. That friendly chap you met sent his soul off on some errand or other, and the gaffer caught it. Locked it in a bone ‘bout so long – I’ve seen it. Ran a bit of string through the eye to hold it. Your friend walked small after that, knowin’ the gaffer had his soul. If he bothered this one or that one, the gaffer’d lend the charm. Problem solved, so it would seem. …
734
735>”Silly blighter borrowed the charm and untied the cord. Your friend’s friend forever, eh? Fine for him, but the gaffer was eaten by a shark. Biggest anybody’d ever seen, they say. Bigger than this boat. …
736
737>”Your friend was the friend of our village afterward. Twig? …
738
739>”Gaffer held the spirit of our village. He’d loved it and done his best for it. Your friend ate all that when he ate him. His son – my pater that was – wanted peace and sent all sorts of gifts. Honored him every way he could think of and some that some others thought up for him. Welcomed him to our feasts, you know. Gave him anything he asked for. He’s a good chap at heart, twig? Bit puckish at times, but aren’t we all.” (240-1)
740
741[Cassie looks into the blue sea and the darkness below while Kanoa relates this story. In freeing Hanga, Baden from “The Tree is My Hat” became “your friend’s friend forever,” according to Kanoa. Porter Penniman and Cassie share exactly the same sentiment when they shake hands at the cast party: “Friends forever” (61). We are approaching our final argument here: William Reis wants to be the Volcano God, but in his willingness to kill he is sometimes less than good. His final resolve to battle the Storm King is inspired by his love for Cassie, but he fails, and in his sacrifice, and in the infiltration of his agent Pat Gomez into the city of R’lyeh, the Storm King, Great Cthulhu will be transformed by “eating” a king just as Hanga was, becoming a “good chap” in Gideon Chase, who will then seek to imitate Reis, having learned that the Earth is a blue island worth fighting for, especially with Cassie on it. Perseus is born in a shower of gold sent down into R’lyeh, when that which is good breaks off a part of the Storm King, who will “walk small” just as Hanga did when he was constrained. Unfortunately, we still need to determine what happens after Cassie reaches Woldercan.]
742
743Cassie is reluctant to accept the sedan chair Kanoa offers at the base of Takanga Ha’I, and she begins to obsess about her weight. As the chair is lashed together, Cassie expresses that she feels like the queen of paradise. Kanoa identifies himself as her most loyal servant (though he will betray Reis to death soon) and offers her a coconut. [At last, we have returned to the starting image of our essay: crack open a dark coconut and it is white and nourishing inside. The prison of the dark waters in R’lyeh is about to be pried open metaphorically and literally – Chase is coconut and Cthulhu, too, though this particular nut is decapitated more in the fashion of Reis’s sacrifice.]
744
745Cassie, after having consumed some of the coconut, considers that Reis would have had to kill people to become high king, and Kanoa agrees, though he calls them bad men and women, servants of the Storm King, who “gathers worshipers from every nation on Earth” (245). Kanoa also reveals that the Storm King fears that Reis will use depths charges to attack R’lyeh. At that point, a military vehicle flies overhead, searching for signs of Reis’s radioactive gold. In discussing Reis’s operation, Kanoa shows great knowledge of his high king’s capabilities and practices. He mentions the dark clouds in space that are impenetrable to human perception.
746
747Kanoa goes on to say, “Ink blots out the sun, eh? Darkness over land and sea, cools the air under, and the winds come. Draws ‘em, though I don’t know how. Winds bring rain, and the rain makes thunder and lightnin’” (247). It is at this point that Cassie comes to what Wolfe described as the climax of the novel, as she catches sight of the palace on the mountain:
748
749>Terrace after terrace rose up the topmost third of the mountain, garden terraces flaming with flowers and accented with palms, each with a white stone balustrade. There were white stone buildings scattered among them, buildings that did not quite look Greek or Roman, low and solid-looking buildings dotted with arches and striped with wide pillars. (247)
750
751Her reaction is much the same as to looking at her bracelet the first time: “Oh, my gosh. … Oh, golly!” (247). Cassie begins to cry, touched by the beauty, and “The wind, and the sound of the surf far below, mingled with Cassie’s sobs” (248). Kanoa tries to comfort her as Okalani, who carries the parasol, puts her arms around Cassie. Reis is called Williama ‘Aukailani there, “William, the Sailor of Heaven. As decent a chap as ever I’ve met” (248). [Okalani, whose name also means “heaven” has been carrying a green palm-frond parasol to protect Cassie from the sun, just as Gideon had a green garden umbrella to protect her from the rain before Margaret’s abduction. Our most difficult task given the confusion between the Sailor and the Volcano God involves determining whether it is Reis who makes the sacrifice on Takanga, or Gideon himself, taking the place of the Sailor.]
752
753Cassie accepts the sedan and realizes that Kanoa is Tiny Penniman and that she is Mariah; however, she says, “I only hope I never meet Vince” (249). Beyond the splendor of the palace, she sees “a mountain from which rose a plume of smoke, soon whipped away by the wind” (249).
754
755The scene transitions immediately to an extremely hostile situation – the dark voice of an assassin who later identifies “herself” as Diana Diamond tells Cassie not to sit up, though she will continue to talk until Cassie wakes and responds. She says she has glasses so that she can see in the dark, and that her silenced pistol will make a sound, “like the striking of a kitchen match, and a flash rather smaller than the flash of a cigarette lighter. A flash that will be gone at once.” (249) [In a text so invested in the interplay of light and darkness, the light here is destructive and ephemeral.] The assassin says that she is from America, and she also verifies that Cassie lives at “number one-eighty-one East Arbor Boulevard, apartment three-oh-one” (249).
756
757Diamond asks who Brian Pickens was, and Cassie wonders if the assassin is a man or a woman. Diana merely responds, “I never saw you onstage. I regret it. One of us did. You danced a horn-pipe in a grass skirt, with flowers on your tits. … As for me, I saw you in Kololahi. Your beachwear was amusing I concede. It ought to have had a little skirt to hide your thighs” (250). [When Cassie had turned off the lights with Gideon Chase back in the United States, he had remarked, “One day after you get to Kololahi, you’ll be wearing a bikini that covers three square inches. And every man who sees you will foam at the mouth” (217). In light of this scene, Gideon’s comment becomes somewhat threatening. It also immediately preceded Cassie learning that her ex-husband had died in the text.] Here, Cassie notes that she thought the assassin was a man until she laughed.
758
759Diana says that she could be a woman for her if a man would frighten her less, and that Brian Pickens died for her. “His apartment is ours now. Should you return to your old home, you’ll find us above you. It won’t be pleasant” (250). The assassin promises that if Cassie obeys, she will be spared. She might even rule, with as many men or women as she desired, though she would be subject “to divinity. As we all are. You’ll find him a kindly master, though one whose precepts must be obeyed to the letter” (251). After some abuse, the creature that will one day call itself Diana Diamond tells Cassie that when the high king returns, Cassie will ask him if she can swim in the sea, where she will receive further instructions. “When your instruction is complete, you’ll speak to your husband of the bestial lust you and he hold so dear. You wish to couple with him in the sea, to couple alone amid the waves. … He’ll come with you, and at the moment of climax he’ll be taken” (251). This would leave Cassie the black throne.
760
761Cassie asks if the assassin (always descried with a dark voice) has ever been with someone she loves. Here, the assassin laughs at the idea of breeding and threatens Cassie with her “steel dildo” (252). Cassie sees a gleam on the barrel and grabs for it, but the shot burns her left cheek. “The sound of the shot was lost amid the crash and rattle of broken glass” (252) [If Cassie is indeed under a glamour, then, according to Gideon’s talk of how these spells are broken, this injury to her face might represent the start of her fall.]
762
763The figure escapes through the open terrace door, as Cassie’s concerned maid charges in, light filling the chamber. When Cassie peers below, she sees Hiapo standing over the smaller figure, and Cassie descends to find that the assassin is bleeding. Cassie sends Hiapo for Dr. Schoonveld and Cassie takes the guns. [Later, Klauser will suggest that Cassie brings two guns to Woldercan.] The doctor arrives with his Japanese nurse, Izanami. Schoonveld is not interested in helping the assassin immediately, saying that she would only tell lies even if she survived to be interrogated. Cassie is overcome with sickness, and it is dawn by the time she returns to bed. Even though Cassie’s door is locked and guarded, someone with a rough voice and large arms enters, embracing her and making her feel safe. In the morning, she finds a note signed “*Wally (Bill)*” which expresses his love for her and emphasizes her bravery and goodness. He says that he will kneel at her feet soon (254). [Hiapo also knelt there.]
764
765The scene jumps to Reis promising King Kanoa that he will not attack the Storm King or his city. They discuss the impossibility of the assassin picking the lock on Cassie’s door. Hiapo believes that Cassie opened it. (Even at this point Cassie is unsure of the gender of the assassin.) Kanoa describes how another lock of that variety pushed an expert to drill through it with a diamond bit. Kanoa believes that the maid opened the windows and the terrace door earlier, allowing the assassin to enter easily and conceal herself. Cassie says that there is a bathroom and “A little private sitting room with big windows. A room for getting dressed and having my hair down with lots of closets, and a kitchenette,” in which the assassin might hide.  (256) [This, too, would seem to mirror the manner in which Gideon gained access to Cassie’s room.]
766
767Cassie interrogates Dr. Schoonveld; the most recent in a string of names the assassin has given him is Diana Diamond. The doctor thinks that she was once female and human. Here, Schoonveld reveals that another patient is asking for Cassie, one whom Reis sent to spy on the Storm King. Inside Diana’s room, Cassie finds a slender figure with colorless eyes chained to the white bed. Cassie suggests that Reis’s mercenaries have hunted down and killed most of the followers of the Storm King. Cassie offers Diana a deal, and the assassin asks her to bend down so she can speak clearly, spitting “faintly green” saliva into Cassie’s face (259). [Of course, this mirrors Donny Duke’s greenish drink at Rusterman’s. After drinking it, he arose to get Cassie a special drink which could “peel paint.”] Afterwards, Cassie inspects herself in her compact as Schoonveld assures her of her beauty; washing does not take away the feeling of dirtiness from the assassin’s spit. Schoonveld explains why people might be drawn to the Storm King. He provides a venue for the outcast and the strange to be accepted: “once these were called changelings. For witches they are burned sometimes” (260). These followers feel privy to secret knowledge, to make even the most exalted queen lowly. The third reason they worship the Storm King is so they might kill without consequences: “They are given a thousand comrades who will rescue them from any menace of law” (260). [Here, Schoonveld brings up another resonance between Diana Diamond and Gideon Chase: “I advised His Majesty to cut off her feet, and when he would not I offered to [chain her]” (260). 
768
769Schoonveld says that the Storm King Is an antediluvian “immigrant from the farthest stars” (260). Even though humanity has only found one intelligent race in the Wolders, many others have found humanity. However, the Storm King has decided to treat humanity as his cattle, and the other races are but “mice in his barn” (261). Their discussion turns to the woman from California Reis sent to infiltrate the Storm King’s circle. [It is when Pat Gomez comes that Cassie opens her lipstick.] In Gomez’s hospital room, Cassie finds orchids, hibiscus, bougainvillea, and also wonders if passion flowers are there. [Orchids were thought to ensure that a masculine child would be born; a hibiscus can symbolize perfection, and a passion flower is named after the passion of Jesus Christ. After Margaret’s abduction earlier, Cassie received orchids during the final performance of *Dating the Volcano God*. These fell and were picked up and placed in a blue vase encircled by yellow dragons. This imagery is very important.] 
770
771The tall woman turns and sits up, dressed in a hospital gown colored white, “with bloodless pink stripes” (263). Cassie takes her hands:
772
773>And woke.
774
775>It had been only a dream, all of it. Her girlhood in San Jose, College, her work in the agency, the midnight meetings in strange places, and the strange visitors who sometimes appeared at those meetings. There was only …
776
777>This.
778
779>This warm water, these bubbles spiraling slowly toward the surface with each breath she drew. (263)
780
781From the point of view of Pat Gomez, Cassie experiences an underwater world. [These bubbles will also link her to Norma Peiper – it was one of her final words.] We have already mentioned that black and white as well as up and down switch as Gomez approaches the Storm King’s city.. She is certain that “he” could transform her to be like the “angels too high and holy to serve any other god” who swarmed to meet her there: “He was the city, and the city he, his supple arms wrapping this world, warm and knowing, subtly favoring those who served him. As she had served him to betray him” (264). [Here, Pat seems to accept that there is a glamour to the Storm King, and that he can raise others up just as Cassie was raised by Gideon. India has wrapped Cassie in her arms, but so too has the strong arms of someone we believed to be Reis after she was attacked by Diana Diamond.] When Gomez considers all these creatures swarming around her and the city, she thinks of them like a host of predators feasting on a mightly carcass and “like lions circling an elephant whose blood soaks the soil on which he stands, an elephant whose strength is of the past, kept standing by pride, by the inborn knowing. It was – it is – the true king. It is royal and will remain royal even as carrion“ (264).
782
783The text quotes a biblical passage: “Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together” (264) [This passage is from the gospel of Luke but it is also mirrored in Matthew. In it, Jesus discusses the coming of the kingdom of God and the Son of Man. He says that on the day that the Son of Man comes like lightning, some will be taken and others remain. This also has the rather famous sentiment that those who would save their lives will lose it, and those who would lose it preserve it. When the disciples ask where this occurs, Jesus responds with this quote. When Cassie goes to Woldercan, her computer will be named Aquilia, the eagle. Here, they are speaking of the corpse of Cthulhu.]
784
785The city is reluctant to accept Gomez inside, noting that she is already dead. When she puts her hands before her eyes:
786
787>They were whiter than any chalk, hands molded of snow traced with blue – and that myriad who had swarmed her was no more. So soon as she no longer saw them, they were no more. … She willed not to see them, willed as the man with the living beard, the six-fingered man, had taught her, had taught them all. Willed away, they were gone. (264) 
788
789Gomez says that she has brought her bones as a tribute, and she identifies herself as “*Shalimar of the circle am I, Pat Gomez of Presidio Security, Patty Darling, Sweetheart, and Baby. All these*” (264).
790
791The gate keeper allows her entry, and “She entered into [the city] as a man enters into a woman, triumphant in defeat” (264).
792
793She sees the Storm King’s living dead on white slabs and is changed by each. “There remained in her, somewhere and somehow the seed of humanity. A spore unseen but real; a thing that valued life in all its wild fantasies, standing awed before the slime mold and butterfly. To root out that spore he broke her, scattering the bits from pole to pole. Reassembling them in strange ways, scraped, washed, and cleaned. Broke her again, sifted the rubbish that remained for burning” (265). Gomez refuses to allow herself to hate the Storm King and realizes that this is the first important thing she has ever done. [Those who have read my *Wizard Knight* essay will appreciate that Wolfe is capable of making scenes which resemble biological processes come to life. Here, the scattering of Gomez’s parts from pole to pole strongly resonate with the separation of genetic material to the telomeres during cell mitosis and meiosis. Diana Diamond will identify “herself” and Pat Gomez as “halves,” so meiosis is a more likely explanation: it results in four daughter cells with half the chromosomes of the parent cell, as in animal sex cells and plant spores. At the very end of the book, Klauser will tell Cassie that the worms on Wolderan are actually vegetables. Perhaps, once again, Wolfe has given this gigantic sea creature something the features of a plant spore. In that case, the imprecation to plant a flower that Pat Gomez soon makes becomes even more resonant with new life. The Storm King could not root out the “spore” of her humanity, nevertheless.]
794
795The text even goes further in its use of chains: “Once she had made chains of colored paper, snipping out each link with clumsy, careful scissors, welding each closed with fubsy fingers that knew but little of tape and nothing of chains” (265). [Perhaps a small part of this creature will be cut out and preserved, a little piece of the great thing that once was.] These changes might even proliferate throughout the entire creature, eventually.
796
797Gomez is rejected (or escaped) to the ocean and found by a man who thinks her dead. She considers that he might have her on the sand, “and prepared herself to be violated, promising him that she was no longer sea-chilled but warmed now by the sun, sun-warmed and dead and welcoming his love. Surely there were those who spent their seed in the dead, who caressed cadavers such as she and struck them afterward in the corruption of their love?” (265)
798
799At the infirmary she is taken to, Dr. Schoonveld tries to revive her, though she does not breathe. “He declared her dead and returned her to the cemetery, where she had vomited salt water, groaned, and wept for the grave this vomiting, these groans, denied her” (266).
800
801[This entire scene is probably the most important in the book for understanding exactly how the grace of one human being might influence a completely alien creature, operating beyond the limits of human morality. Clearly, Cassie played Pat Gomez’s part in *The Red Spot* and in turning on Com Pu Ter in Gideon Chase’s car (which then becomes something of a cognate for R’lyeh, with its living dead inside it, especially if those voices in it could represent Reis, Diana Diamond, and Pat Gomez, dead in Gideon’s future timeline but still alive in Cassie’s present.)]
802
803Cassie comes to herself, lonely for the arms of Reis or the winged creatures. She feels that the pulse must be a mistake and also that she is no queen. Outside, the nurse comes out to ask what is bothering her. “I’m just trying to get over finding Pat Gomez dead. … Yes I supposed I did know her. I played her for a while” (266). [The Japanese nurse’s name is Izanami. This is ultimately very important in helping to contextualize the Volcano God. In Japanese mythology, Izanami is a god of creation and death, much like Persephone can be considered. She gave birth to the god of fire, Kagu-tsuchi. His birth burned his mother to death, so his father cut his head off and sundered him into eight pieces, which became volcanos. The blood from the fire god’s beheading creates a number of deities, including a rain god and a sea god. In some other versions, as Izanami dies, she gives birth to the water god Mizuhame to pacify the fire god (Ashkenazi). It seems that a very destructive birth is about to occur.]
804
805The scene cuts to Cassie asking Reis for some time alone, and they decide on a beach outside the Takanga group where no one will be watching them. The island has they come to has a volcano on it. Cassie asks if Reis wrote the play, and he admits that he did, with a collaborator. They share some romantic moments, during which she calls him Bill and asks what he wants from life. He says that everyone dies and expresses that he wants to use his power for good, though many people think he is a bad man. Cassie notes, “Dr. Chase certainly seemed to think so” (269).
806
807Reis does not trust Gideon, who acts for good and otherwise out of greed. Reis takes small steps beside Cassie as he tells her he would not put her in an executive position. She asks about his disappearances. [This moment might actually be a very pivotal one in how Cassie feels about Reis. Gideon let her drive the car despite his resistance, and here Reis denies that he would put Cassie in charge of anything, even suggesting her trust in Chase was misplaced.] Reis disappears, and asks her to look behind them, to see their silhouettes hand in hand on the beach. Reis says, “I try to stay clear of sunshine when I do this. Of bright light from any single source” (270).
808
809After their kiss, she begins to call him Wally and asks him about his gold. She says: 
810
811>“You told me once that you could be trusted. You said your word was always good.”
812
813>“Did I? I probably did. Certainly it’s true.”
814
815>“Do you love me, Wally?”
816
817>“Yes. As I’ve never loved anyone else. … I only wish you loved me as much as I love you” (270).
818
819She says that she wants to be loved, and that is why she pursued acting and married two “pretty terrible men” (270). Here, he tells her of dragons and of his gold sales. “Sometimes my customer is a dragon who hoards it all. If he isn’t it will fall into the hands of a dragon sooner or later. Most of it, if not all of it. They keep it together and they keep it near them, because they’re afraid it may be stolen” (271). They walk along the beach of white coral sand. She feels certain that people once lived there. Cassie wants to see the large coral blocks in the jungle. Reis receives a call on his watch, and Cassie tells him that Pat Gomez is dead. She says, “I liked her, and she died while I was there with her in her room” (272). Reis details how he met her twice and how her job was to infiltrate the Storm King’s cult, but she dropped out of sight after six weeks. He notes, “I can’t say that I liked her.”
820
821They begin talking of the burial practices on Takanga, in which people are wrapped in plastic and deposited in a grave. “For a handful of seconds it seemed to Cassie that the palms, restless as they always were in the trade wind, were whispering to her: dark secrets she had no desire to hear. ‘You make sure they’re dead?’” (272)
822
823She says she was certain Reis would do something to retaliate against the Storm King. He says that he is. Reis believes that the Storm King views people much as a farmer might view chickens. Reis has begun dropping gold into R’lyeh, where the Storm King has hundreds or thousands of people, and he knows that they will collect them until the Navy notices, and that attention will bring a much more dangerous enemy than Reis. 
824
825When Cassie and Reis find the coral blocks, there is an image of a “squat, wide-mouthed king or deity remarkable only for its size and ruin wrought by weathering” (275). Cassie doesn’t like him. Reis says, “I don’t think you’re supposed to … You’re supposed to fear him and like me” (275). “They kissed; and soon after, on the beach and half in the surf, they did a great deal more.” [This is a pivotal moment in the text, obviously. Cassie never does actually declare her love for Reis here, though she did for Gideon earlier – though this meeting seems more romantic. The question remains: is the Volcano God a stand in for Reis or for someone else?]
826
827On the way back, Cassie asks if he will marry her, and he promises her love. He also says that he would die for her. She wants a pastel green bridal gown and a ceremony in the city of Kololahi, in “A place where there’s a wide green lawn, and a white building in the background” (276).
828
829She also says that she wants several of her friends flown in. India and Ebony for sure. Tiny, and Dr. Chase. Sharon Bench. Of course you can invite your own friends and family.” (276) [It seems as if the placement of India and Ebony with Tiny and Dr. Chase is a kind of allegorical alignment of big and small, though Sharon Bench is an odd name to end on.]
830
831Reis asks if his sixteen-year-old son from a previous marriage can come. That night Hiapo tells her that the body of Pat Gomez did not stay in its grave and has vanished, leaving only its wrapping behind. Two days later Reis lets her know that Rian is coming, and he tells the story of his health problems as a child and how Gideon fixed it. Now, the boy is a starting quarterback in his final year at prep school. Then, he tells her the bad news about Harold Klauser: “He was my predecessor as American ambassador to Woldercan, and he stayed on for a month after I got there to show me the ropes” (277). Klauser is too ill to make the trip. [The book reveals that he has lost a lot of weight from this illness. We do know that eventually those who keep too much gold near them will become very ill, and thus it seems fair to assume that Klauser’s illness stems from a kind of greed he once had, making him a reformed dragon.] The chapter ends with a carpet of green running down to a “rock-strewn beach and the clean, blue Pacific,” but the next begins with Cassie in her bed, and once again the light and airy imagery is immediately brought into the darkness (278).
832
833Cassie finds herself surrounded by two women. “To her right, the assassin’s large, pale eyes seemed luminous in the dim light; a faint smile played around her moth. On the other side, the dead woman stood erect and motionless, her face a mask, her eyes two darker stains upon that mask” (279). [This description of the dead Pat Gomez matches a moment in the first chapter so closely it has to be a deliberate echo: Gideon Chase’s face was a mask which his dark eyes peered through. The juxtaposition of light and dark in this scene continues the motif which saturates almost every chapter of the book.] The assassin says, “Mate in three moves. … I’ve come to tell you the game’s as good as over. That it *is* over in the intellectual sense. It’s over, dear, darling, sweet, plump Queen Cassie, and you’ll be a widow before you’re ever a bride.” (280) [Even the word “mate” has a double connotation.]
834
835Pat Gomez whispers that she freed the assassin from her chains. When Cassie asks why, she says, “A witness. I must write my report. … When I’ve written it, I will have peace” (280). The assassin laughs, and says, “We are the halves, Cassie dearest. Together we make a whole. I’m the hunted, she’s the hunter. … Without a hound, what glory would I have in the court of the Storm King?” (280) Pat says that they will steal Reis’s hopper and return to the Bay Area. To Cassie, she says, “You’re my sister. You’ve seen what I saw. You felt what I felt” (280). She asks that Cassie find her grave to lay flowers there.
836
837Cassie promises, and the assassin declares, “We’ve won!” as her small hand grasps Cassie’s shoulder. Cassie hears the wind: “‘Yes, the wind!’ There was no giggle or titter now, but the wild, unnatural laughter of a thoroughly bad child. ‘Come out on the terrace. Tell us what you see.’ (280) [This giggling and tittering “bad” child certainly resembles the tinny and giggling voice in Gideon’s car which proclaimed, “Bad windows!”] The dead woman and the assassin hold Cassie’s robe as she approaches the terrace door, which opens with a song of wind: “The wind itself ballooned her robe and knocked over something in another room. … The assassin and the dead woman who had been Pat Gomez had vanished into the howling night” (281). [While we might be tempted to map the triple goddess of maiden, mother, and crone onto this, especially given the name Diana and the association of those three phases with the moon, it is a bit difficult to see which is which. When Diana is part of the triple goddess, she is the virgin goddess of childbirth and women, Selene or Luna is the moon, and Hecate serves as the chthonic goddess of crossroads, necromancy, and ghosts – though they are all part of Diana in different aspects. Persephone can also form a part of the triple goddess, usually as the maiden, as her name Kore suggests. Even though Diana Diamond was angered by the thought of breeding, almost immediately that theme will be introduced to the novel.]
838
839Cassie’s watch shows her that it is day, but it is completely dark outside. The storm even blows a window in. Cassie’s maids grab her to take her to Takanga Ha’I so she can bring “the judgment of the Sky Gods” (281). She notes that the path coiling into the mountain seems a snake; even though Cassie cannot get to it, her gun is strapped to her thigh.
840
841The wind, “alive with cold anger,” increases as they go upwards, and she becomes certain that the devil’s son will be born that very night. At the top, an arch is “fitfully lit at times by vagrant beams that slipped away – swallowed by a night blacker far than any night should be” (281).
842
843Kanoa approaches and tells her she will not be harmed, seating her upon a stone “seat of justice” (282). Kanoa says the only god in the sky is the Storm King, and that the village where they landed has been annihilated in his typhon, with “two thousand or more of us drowned” (282). He tapes her mouth, and her arms are pinned by the two women at her side. Kanoa repeats a proclamation to the crowd in English for Cassie and Reis: the Storm King will cease his displeasure if the high king is sacrificed. He demands that the king be brought forth. [*Lawe mai Mo’i*!” means “Bring the King!”] Cassie notes how small Reis looks next to the natives of Takanga, and he refuses to address the crowd, instead telling Cassie that the storm is not even intended for them. He says, “I did what I could for humanity. I wanted to be of real help, and never gave a damn for what anybody thought of me. I succeeded. I love my son Rian. Tell him if you can. … I loved you in life, and I’ll love you in death” (283). As the sacrifice proceeds, Reis tries to disappear and flickers in and out of visibility, until his head is positioned “on a wide, dark stone near Cassie’s feet” (283). Kanoa forces Cassie to nod in acknowledgement of his death. “The club struck; the thud of the blow and the sound of breaking bone would stay with Cassie as long as she lived” (284). Kanoa and the women free Cassie, and he advises her to marry someone “familiar with the local situation.” She shoots Kanoa many times, and in the confusion, something jerks her upwards; they are born aloft on the wind, “scudding over a tumultuous sea, and there were wings before them, wings darker even than that dark day.” (284) [This is the same image which culminated in Cassie’s trip to the mountain with Gideon at the start of the book behind Gideon.]
844
845The creatures take her to the coral beach of the volcano idol, leaving her there. Cassie searches for food and water and eventually returns to the places she had walked with Reis. When she visits the place where the image of the Volcano God was carved, she finds “Vincent Palma seated on a weathered block of coral.” (285)
846
847His skin is black with tattoos and his headdress of leaping flame. The figure of Vince says that he has come to give her something. As she reaches out to touch him, the mountain behind him rumbles. He asks for a favor in return for presenting her with “a gift that will be precious to you” (285). He says, “We used to dance, you say. Dance with me now. … Listen. Only listen! How can you say there’s no music?” (286) [While fire might be the gift the Volcano God promises, it could also be a child.] “There were drums in the waves and a thousand strings in the palms. Sunbeams winded trumpets through the dark green leaves” (286). [Certainly, there are some resonances with the song “Walk in the Reign” in this scene, but this image is also one from Mariah’s arrival in *Dating the Volcano God*: “Life started fresh and new when the sun came up today, / Out on the beach Sun’s trumpets rang the anthem of god’s torch, / While at my feet the waves came up like chickens on our porch.” Now we can see that instead of humanity serving as Cthulhu’s chickens, the waves are presenting themselves.]
848
849They dance together, and he catches Cassie as she falls. “It freed something that had been bound before; after it she danced as he did while the burning mountain pounded a kettledrum and birds of a hundred brilliant hues joined the music with strange songs.” Eventually she collapses, and he kisses her “as she sprawled upon the black jungle loam.” She apologizes, and says, “You’re not really Vince, are you? You just look like him. … I like you better, whoever you are. I never liked Vince, or not much. But I like you a lot” (286). [This is the pattern repeated often in the text: an object of fear and distrust becomes one worth liking. She always liked Gideon and trusted him, knowing that he was good, and even came to like Reis despite the fact that his initial impulse was to destroy her.]
850
851The figure asks her to gather wood together, and she asks if she will ever see him again.
852
853“I think you may. Leave flowers” (286). [The question is how does leaving flowers with this idol or at Pat Gomez’s grave allow her to see the Volcano God again?]
854
855Cassie’s pile blazes when it is of sufficient size, and the fire burns throughout her long exile on the island. Eventually, a white ship comes, and a swift white boat sets out to meet her. Before she goes with them, Cassie leaves flowers at the foot of the coral image. The sailors welcome her, and the American captain ushers her inside to “coffee and a coffee cake well sprinkled with nuts” (287).
856
857The coffee makes her cry, and the man there says that the owner is still in bed. He advises her not to cry, and Cassie tells the story of the storm and Reis, whom she says was her common-law husband. The storm interrupted their real wedding plans. When she mentions the friends who left her there, the man says, “Did it ever occur to you that they might have gone down at sea after they let you out?” (289)
858
859The yacht is owned by the austere Madame Pavlatos, and it is covered in pictures of herself and mirrors. When Cassie catches her own reflection, she sees, “A wasted face, sunburned and deeply lined, surmounted by dirty, graying hair. A bent and barefoot old woman dressed in rags, with arms and legs like sticks” (289). Madame Pavlatos comforts her “like a mother” (289). [Cassie’s stick-like arms and legs, while certainly not a healthy look, would accurately describe a sketch of the Cassiopeia constellation. Some have suggested that Madame Pavlatos could be the very wealthy ex-wife of Reis. We should remember that Athena gave Perseus a mirrored shield to fight with, though in this case it might have been Cassiopeia or Pat Gomez who ultimately wielded that mirror. There are mirrors on the yacht, but they drive Cassie to a kind of despair.]
860
861In the final chapter, Cassie is left in a shelter for homeless woman until the US government “was persuaded to bring her home. Herbie, it transpired, had morphed into an undersecretary in the Department of Education. He had a friend in the Department of State and may have harbored a sneaking affection for the wife who had divorced him not quite ten years ago” (291). When Cassie returns to Kingsport (which, when we look at it, has a pretty suggestive name), she goes to Barclays Bank and gains access to her account. She will need a new key for her safety deposit box [One of Hecate’s symbols is a key.] Cassie laments that she has lost everything, including her friends, “because I don’t want them to see me like this” (292). She even sees Margaret Briggs going the other way down the street. Margaret fails to recognize her. When the bank employer offers to call her when the key is ready, Cassie says, “I don’t have a phone … .That’s the first thing I’m going to get” (293). [We have read the ring of Cassie’s cell phone as redemptive in nature.]
862
863Her new apartment is on the east side of Kingsport, and on the fourth day she calls the Miskatonic University to learn that Reis has been appointed ambassador to Woldercan. She sells the bracelet to become “the wealthiest woman in the state” (293). Then she tries to contact Harold Klauser, using the name Fiona Casey, and manages to secure an appointment with him despite resistance over the phone. She is warned not to tire him, since he “isn’t at all well” (294). Klauser lives in a white house on the corner of Bushong and Taylor. [The novel is dedicated to Joe and Rebecca Bushong-Taylor]. In a book rife with all kinds of insanely wrought color imagery and the overlaying of multiple references and significations in just about every scene, guess what? – Cassie rings the bell and a “short, stout woman with a hard, dark face” attempts to keep her out (294). Cassie forces her foot in the door, and, behind the door, Cassie catches a glimpse of a man in a wheelchair preparing to throw a fork. His reedy voice tells the woman, Maria, to let him in. [Once again, Pat Gomez’s infiltration into R’lyeh and her struggle at the gate is central to the story.] Klauser is sickly and has lost much weight from his once nearly three-hundred-pound mass. [This is slightly smaller than Porter Penniman’s size. Of course, Klauser is probably a reformed dragon: his old size, as archetypal as it seems, could be reflective of greed. This is the principle takeaway from the mirroring of the first and last chapters, and the key that opened up my understanding of Gideon, as the man in the White House at the start who would take Klauser’s position as ambassador. It lead me to believe that Gideon, too, was once much bigger, giving a narrative purpose to Klauser’s reduction in size.] They shake hands [just as Cassie did with Porter Penniman], and Cassie describes making an appointment with another woman, who left before Cassie arrived. He directs her to push him so that he can gaze at the maple; Cassie will sit with her back to the light. The chair they come to is from Russia, and Reis looks sad. “I’m afraid it’s a long story. You wouldn’t want to hear it, and I don’t want to tell it. Cassiopeia mourns for her children” (295). Cassie agrees with him. [This is a conflation of the biblical passages from Jeremiah and Matthew in which Rachel can be heard weeping for the children of the tribes of Benjamin who were killed. In Genesis, her husband Jacob was tricked into marrying her sister, who was substituted on their wedding night. For additional labor, he was permitted to marry Rachel as well. When she saw that her sister had birthed children, she demanded a child of her own or death. She gave her maid to her husband Jacob, but eventually she was able to bear two sons, Benjamin and Joseph. There are *all* kinds of ways that we could map this onto the closing of *An Evil Guest*, especially considering the fact that Cassie looks as if her child-bearing days might be compromised by her sojourn on the white coral island of the Volcano God.] Klauser asks if she is Bill Reis’s fiancée’s mother. He assumes that the woman Reis planned to marry might have been a clone of the woman in front of him. She reassures him that Bill is indeed dead: “I had to call his son and tell him. … Please don’t make me cry” (296).
864
865Cassie says that his fiancée is gone as well: “She’s passed away, but I’m hoping to bring her back.” Cassie just came from Oakland [where she fulfilled the last request of Pat Gomez, obviously]. She wants to know what she should take to Woldercan, and she informs him that Gideon Chase is now ambassador. Klauser responds, “I remember him. Just a little fellow, but those eyes …” (297). She says that Chase is an able man, and Klauser asks if he is as able as Bill, which upsets Cassie. He hands her tissues, and says, “Giving you those may be the last chivalrous act of my life, and I need one. I need a last chivalrous act far more than I need half a dozen paper handkerchiefs. … I want anchovy toast” (297). He offers her coffee, but she requests tea. Cassie tells him that her hopper is a Jimmy Galactic, the biggest produced. “Mine is Lincoln green, and really beautiful. It’s seventy feet long and twenty-five feet high. Twenty-five – no, thirty. It’s thirty feet wide. I’m not good at remembering numbers, but I do remember those. It can go to Woldercan. The onboard computer told me – her name’s Aquilia” (297). Klauser recognizes what the name means, “For one who soars like the eagle” (298). [Of course, this resembles the biblical passage during the infiltration of R’lyeh, concerning the corpse where eagle’s would gather.]
866
867Cassie says that she must send an ethermail to explain that she is going to see Dr. Chase, as she already received his welcoming reply. Here, Klauser tells her that our understanding of past, present, and future are illusions, and that to a robin fighting itself in the window, the other bird seems very real. Of course, we argue that the robin in this text is the gilded raven Gideon Chase, whose physical characteristics, somehow, mirror Pat Gomez’s so closely, fighting himself at every step.]
868
869Klauser explains that she should take something for her monthly needs, but Cassie answers, “I – well, I take a certain medicine. I don’t need tampons” (298). He indicates that most of her clothing can be light, though she should take a few warm dresses. She should learn to eat their food. When he asks what weapons Cassie plans on taking, she explains that she had to kill someone in self-defense. [When Gideon first hired her, he already seemed to know that if she had to kill someone, it would certainly be in self-defense. This makes the possibility that she is going to Woldercan to kill Gideon in revenge fairly slight.] He advises that she get two guns that use the same ammunition. Sometimes, the Wolders try to seduce human women. Klauser also comments on her thinness and says that unless one gets sick as he has, genes will control her weight. This makes him think of the gift he will give her. As he tells her what she should watch out for in Woldercan, he advises her to try the anchovy toast: “Half is for you” (300). He emphasizes again that the laws of physics are not the same there:
870
871>“It can throw you off if you go up or down stairs fast. … Don’t go into the forests. … There are some pretty awful things in those forests, and from time to time they come out. That’s why I advised you to bring two guns. … The Wolders sometimes hybridize with lower animals. The results can be, well, nightmarish. … If you go fishing don’t talk to any fish you catch. That’s very dangerous. Release them immediately or kill them immediately.” (301)
872
873[While many of these weird statements might seem to have little relevance to the overall plot, we should remember the myth of Perseus: he and his mother were fished out of the river by a friendly fisherman who then raised the boy as his own.] Cassie says that she liked the toast: “It makes me think of a time when I was the green goddess” (301). Opening the gift after she has left behind the Earth, Cassie sees a picture of the young William Reis next to a man of at least three hundred pounds. His image says, “I’m Bill Reis, the new ambassador to Woldercan, and I’d like to thank Ambassador Klauser for teaching me a great deal I needed to know, and for all the kindness and hospitality he and his family have shown my wife and me” (301).
874
875As the sun and the earth disappear in the vastness of space, Cassie wonders why Bill had to die. The book ends: “And when the Milky Way was a little band of bright stars, a thing like a diamond bracelet seen from a great distance, “Come back to me, Wally! Please, oh, please, Wally! Come back to me!” (301)
876
877## Is Subtext Text?
878
879Readers of Wolfe’s books in chronological order will definitely perceive that the late novels present a very particular problem: the subtextual in almost every scene threatens to overcome the surface narrative in importance. There were many, many times when reading *Home Fires*, *Land Across*, *Sorcerer’s House*, and *Evil Guest* that I was tempted to stop analyzing and accept that certain features of the books are simply incidental details. However, beating my head against them often provided some thematic closure in the same manner as his earlier works, though the risk of failure and incorrect conclusions had never been higher. Many may find some of these conclusions a step too far. While there is certainly room to disagree, I find the pivotal point in narrative variation to converge at this novel. The method through which I assert that *The Wizard Knight* concerns a troubled pregnancy occurs through literalizing the dreams and viewing the conflict metaphorically. Analysis in that case was simply turning the metaphorical literal, and vice versa. Wolfe has played with this literalizing of symbols even in his earliest fiction. However, his allusions become increasingly obscure after 2008 in his longer work. In order to collapse one character into another as I was forced to do in *Wizard Knight*, there had to be strong and clear textual hints.
880
881Much of the previous analysis of *An Evil Guest* highlights the risk of writing about Wolfe: should we treat non-textual and even non-thematic assumptions as features of the text? Some would (and do) accuse me of such habits, but I repeat that only after reading and re-reading the text did my ideas about the subtext form. While it is quite easy to summarize what happens in *An Evil Guest*, the nebulous motivations and actual symbolic import of the struggle between Chase and Reis remains frustratingly hard to put into words, requiring the interminable section above. What could I take out and still hope to convey given the thematic weight of each scene, even when it seemed so far beneath the surface? It is in the large patterns that Wolfe’s true structural strength as an author comes out, but until those patterns are consciously recognized, his later works are even more inexplicable than his previous ones. Even with all of the motifs mentioned above, there are still some questions about the actual origin of Gideon Chase and Rian Reis, as well as the ultimate fate of Cassie Casey – at the risk of oversimplifying a very complex story, will anyone win the day, “get the girl,” or wind up happily ever after?
882
883## Intertextuality
884
885While I always include a section on pertinent allusions, I am going to label *An Evil Guest* as a transition into his most mature but perhaps most inscrutable period. His reliance on intertextuality was at times bordering on the obscure (see “Through Looking Glass Castle” and its use of Maupassant). It is in *An Evil Guest* where intertextuality and the blurring of different entertainment media into one another and into myth and symbol become a primary thematic concern, with its reliance on pulp, noir, and horror tropes. Furthermore, the liminal mixing between the plays in which Cassie acts and her waking reality seem to suggest that much of the time she is performing for an invisible audience. We have discussed much of this in our summary above, so I will merely reiterate the overarching thematic implications of *The Circus of Dr. Lao* and the Lovecraft allusions. Woldercan in Charles Finney’s book seems to be a past city – a vision of the past and the sacrifice made there brought forward in time so that all might witness it; past merges into present. As it is introduced, “[B]efore your eyes the ceremony of the living sacrifice to Yottle would be enacted: a virgin would be sanctified and slain to propitiate this deity who had endured before Bel-Marduk even, and was the first and mightiest and least forgiving of all the gods” (Finney 11). *An Evil Guest*, too, seems to operate on either a cyclic or permeable model of time, and Harold Klauser makes this very clear in his closing statements. The great sacrifice of Reis at the end to appease a being who has inhabited the Earth for even longer than humanity certainly speaks to the text’s intersection with Finney’s work.
886
887The first time I read the novel, I was expecting far more “use” to be made out of Lovecraft and Cthulhu, but if the conjecture above concerning the actual nature of Gideon is at all accurate, the Storm King might play a far greater role than was originally obvious, being, in some way, the protagonist of the story. The amorality of Lovecraft is well known, and it seems to be recapitulated in Gideon’s opening moral philosophy, but Wolfe is not Lovecraft, and perhaps even a being of eldritch power might be made “ordinary” through the transformative power of love and mercy, just as Hanga came to love the islands of Takanga, and, as Kanoa described him, became a “good chap,” through consuming a king. There are several times when Cassie’s phone plays out “Pigs in Paradise,” and one of the most memorable scenes involving swine in the Bible is the casting of demons out from a woman and into a nearby herd, who then charge into the sea in their madness. Perhaps here, the demons have left the sea at last, and have experienced something that forever changed them. However, how could Gideon be Robert Chase’s son *and* Great Cthulhu?
888
889## Poseidon as Perseus
890
891Just as Zeus conceived Perseus in a shower of gold, the infiltration of R’lyeh by Pat Gomez and the gold Reis showers down upon the city enact a change in the Elder God. The sea monster becomes hero – it was in the reflective powers of his shield that Perseus was able to resist the powers of the Gorgon. Reis, too, may have been an enemy turned to fight a greater evil just as the head of Medusa, in some versions of the myth, helped Perseus. However, the sublime conflation of the sea god with the mighty hero cast into the sea at his birth still won’t explain exactly what is going to happen at the end of the novel. We know through that key scene between Porter Penniman and Cassie as well as through the dark and light imagery of the novel that something has changed on a massive scale: Cassiopeia or one of her sisters has held up a mirror to the all-devouring beast and placated it, freeing it from its prison to make a choice. Gideon would seem to be the devil’s son mentioned at the climactic storm, a part of the larger being preserved in Pat Gomez, whose face is described almost exactly as Gideon’s is, as a mask through which the darkness peers. Yet is it Pat Gomez and her corpse that serves as Gideon’s mother, or Cassie herself who carries him, given that time has little meaning on Woldercan? I will now present several brief sketches that may or may not be suggested by the text, though there are just enough hints to assume that Cassie is not on that ship entirely alone.
892
893I would like to take a moment to look at Orphic Hymn 71, a celebration of Melinoe, a goddess of ghosts and the underworld who eventually became another of Persephone’s titles, though in this manifestation she is Persephone’s daughter with Zeus:
894
895>To Melinoe
896>*Incense – aromatic herbs*
897>I call upon Melinoe,
898>saffron-cloaked nymph of the earth,
899>whom revered Persephone bore
900>by the mouth of the Kokytos river
901>upon the sacred bed
902>of Kronian Zeus
903>In the guise of Plouton Zeus tricked
904>Persephone and through wily plots bedded her;
905>a two-bodied specter sprang forth
906>from Persephone’s fury.
907>This specter drives mortals to madness
908>with her airy apparitions
909>as she appears in weird shapes
910>and strange forms
911>now plain to the eye, now shadowy,
912>now shining in the darkness – 
913>all this is unnerving attacks
914>in the gloom of night.
915>O goddess, O queen
916>Of those below, I beseech you
917>to banish the soul’s frenzy
918>to the ends of the earth,
919>show to the initiates
920>a kindly and holy face. (Athanassakis)
921Hecate, too, is often called saffron-cloaked, but here we have many of the images at work in Wolfe’s novel: darkness and light, a many-bodied specter, and an imprecation to kindness and holiness from a chthonic deity. Myth and pulp inform this story even as we struggle to separate Gideon from Reis and understand the overall structure of Cassie’s needs. She says that she loves Gideon at one point, but seems broken by the death of Reis. Some suppose that Cassie is headed backwards in time when she leaves for Woldercan, pregnant with the child who will become Rian Reis and set to become Reis’s wife again, though Reis will be younger and she older. On the altar at the start, Gideon offered burnt honey. In the Orphic Hymn above to the goddess whose name means “honey,” Zeus walks in the form of Hades the unseen to fool Persephone. There is just enough uncertainty in that final sacrifice to question whether Cassie has been with Reis or Gideon, who, for whatever reason, simply does not show up while they are on the island. [Aquilia Severa was the name of the second and fourth wife of the Emperor Elagabulus, and Cassie’s computer, after all, is named Aquilia – this would be the best hint that Cassie is headed back to Reis in fact as well as in her dreams.] The story of Zagreus maps to this very well – he was born of Persephone, conceived by Zeus rather than Hades, but only his heart survived to be given another form, reborn in another mother. Rian Reis’s heart was somehow fixed by Gideon. If Cassie is headed back the past on Woldercan, she very well might meet Reis. However, it is quite clear that if this is the case, Cassie never regains her glory, as the Reis she knew says that he has never felt about anyone the way he feels for Cassie. 
922
923Another theory could be that, with the imagery of her tryst with Reis on the island, half in the sea and half on the beach, it is Gideon whom she shall bear, who will somehow wind up being adopted in the past by Robert Chase. That, too, has its attraction, save that we are reluctant to ascribe that meeting between Gideon and Cassie as incestuous. Of course, that never stopped Severian. These are but nebulous speculations. Cassie has been given some gift and she has left a flower on the grave of Pat Gomez, a certain sign of renewal given her identification with the Green Goddess and her sharing of the anchovy toast at the very end with Klauser.
924
925I propose that the flower Cassie left on the grave of Pat Gomez is left on an empty tomb, and a spore or the corpse of the woman who entered R’lyeh somehow accompanies Cassie on her huge ship, where the seed of Cthulhu will one day be fished out of a proverbial river and adopted by a kind man from Earth in Robert Chase, for time does not work as we expect in Woldercan. Gideon may have even absorbed the best parts of Reis during his sacrifice to the Storm King, somehow. This freeing of Great Cthulhu need not be sorrowful and tragic. Chase and Reis’s heir might both be born on Woldercan.
926
927The deaths of Norma and Jimmy continue to be problematic. Once again, I suggest that they are symbolic: Jimmy was sent to deliver something precious, but he was sent away by India. Alas, he died, but eventually the gift was delivered regardless. Norma, too, would seem to be something of a sacrifice like Reis, who played a long-suffering character who, despite, the script, could not stop smiling.
928
929So, in a nutshell, here is one possibility which I do not think accurately reflects the denouement of the novel: Gideon takes the place of Reis and impregnates Cassie, impersonating the Sailor of Heaven and dying in his stead, sacrificed on the altar to himself. However, this would assume that Reis is capable of imitating Gideon and being sent to Woldercan in his stead. Nowhere in the text do both seem capable of appearing as the other – even though some shape changers certainly could imitate them. Another possibility is that Gideon orchestrated the entire attack so that Cthulhu could be freed, he could gain the knowledge of Woldercan and exploit it, and Reis would be killed. While Gideon does appear to end up in an advantageous position at the end of the novel, the feeling Cassie has of trusting Porter Penniman, of liking the Volcano God, and of loving Gideon are all quite clear. She tells Porter Penniman that they will be friends forever. Thus our images of the coconut and the pearl: an irritant inside the shell can become a valuable gem, and barren, hard darkness might be broken to reveal something completely different on the inside.
930
931Here at the end, with Cassie poised above the Milky Way, there is every sense that she has become a star in fact. We must draw some conclusions based on very scant information. As the Goddess of Spring, Persephone is a cyclic figure. Cassie’s beauty and youth might come again on Woldercan. Given that Chase can communicate with ghosts, and that Gramarye is also associated with necromancy, there is even a chance that Cassie’s king might himself be something of a once and future king. However, the connotation of the first two-thirds of the novel, given Gideon’s direct correlation with Perseus, is that he might be the one who eventually wins her love. Gold might be an evil guest in the hand, but there, in the sky, surrounded by hopes and dreams, the golden sun and healing winds eventually end every storm. When the dark confines of his undersea prison break open, even a being such as Cthulhu might feel the power of love, turning bitter night into day and obdurate darkness into loving light.
932
933## References
934
935- Adams, John Joseph. “Wolfe’s ‘Memorare’ in *F &SF*.” *Scifi.com*. 14 Feb 2007. Web. 16 Jan 2019. <https://web.archive.org/web/20080407201330/http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=40135>
936
937- Ashkenazy, Michael. *Handbook of Japanese Mythology*. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2003. Print.
938
939- Athanassakis, Apostolos N. and Benjamin M. Wolkow. *The Orphic Hymns*. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
940
941- Lovecraft, H.P. and E. Hoffman Price. “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” *The H.P. Lovecraft Archive*. 20 Aug 2009. Web. 5 Jan 2019. <http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tgsk.aspx>
942
943- Lovecraft, H. P. *At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, 7th edition*. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1985. Print. 
944
945- Ovid, *Metamorphoses*, trans. A.S. Kline. 2000. Web. 10 Jan 2019. <http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm#askline>
946
947- Pearsall, Anthony B. *The Lovecraft Lexicon*. Tempe: New Falcon Publications, 2005. Print.
948
949- Pirkola, Robert. *An Evil Jest*. Currently Unpublished, Personal Correspondence. 2 Jan 2016.
950
951- Rhode, Erwin. *Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greek*. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publications, 2006. Print. 
952
953- Wolfe, Gene. *An Evil Guest.* New York City: Tor Books, 2008. Print.