Something must have been in the water in 1990 - at the same time as David Lynch unleashed Twin Peaks, his soap opera about murder and danger in a tranquil American small town influenced by otherworldly forces, on a TV-viewing public, Gene Wolfe published Castleview, a meditation on a very similar topic. The town of Castleview in Illinois is named for the ethereal castle which can sometimes be seen at dusk in the distance. Of course, it turns out that this is no optical illusion, but a symptom of the recurring presence and intervention of a strange otherworld in the daily life of Castleview - an otherworld which explodes into frenzied activity with the murder of factory foreman Tom Howard and the arrival of the Shields family.

This is one of four novels set in the modern day that Wolfe wrote between 1984 and 1990 - the others are Free Live Free, There Are Doors, and Pandora, by Holly Hollander. Raging Wolfe fanboy as I am, I've been slowly reading and reviewing each of them - partially because they're frequently overlooked pieces of the Wolfe canon. In the case of Free Live Free and Pandora this is probably justified - Free Live Free fizzles out, and Pandora seems to have been a misguided attempt to try and write for the young adult market.

Not so for Castleview. Whereas Free Live Free and Pandora represent Wolfe at his most straightforward, Castleview harks back to the engaging obliqueness of his early novels The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace. The first three quarters of this book are by far the best, and depict a series of apparently-unconnected accidents and events that happen over the course of a single day - the links between which swiftly become apparent. The fairy intruders into the small town thrive on coincidences, misunderstandings, and near-misses, and work their evil deeds in the spaces between accidents; Wolfe does an excellent job of keeping his protagonists confused but keeping us relatively up to speed (although he does pose a number of problems for readers to work out in their own time), and most of the time the tower of accidents seems entirely believable. Wolfe also allows his knowledge of folklore and mythology run riot in a way which he didn't in, say, Free Live Free, and he seems to be enjoying himself a lot more than when he was writing that one; he would serve up another the blend of fairy lore, Norse myth and Arthurian legend (with tenuous connections with the modern world) in The Wizard Knight.

However, Wolfe enjoys himself that he builds the house of cards a little too high - Katy Howard, the suicidal sister of Tom's wife, seems entirely surplus to requirements - and the last quarter of the novel the pacing goes a little askew. Since the majority of the novel takes place in a single crazy night, it wouldn't have taken that much work to complete the story in that one night. Instead, Wolfe slackens off the pace abruptly before the excellent final confrontation. That said, Castleview does offer an original take on the fairy myth, especially in the way that the "fairies" seem to have no form beyond those they borrow than us. Just as they spend a lot of time mimicing real people and animals, living and dead, there's nothing to say that they're not also mimicing our mythology when they take on the form of fairies and gods and figures from the Arthurian stories. The concept of a race of beings who have no shape except those that we give them comes up again and again in Wolfe's writing - from The Fifth Head of Cerberus to The Book of the Short Sun to The Wizard Knight - so any Wolfe scholar will want to read Castleview to trace the evolution of this theme. (It also depicts Wolfe's unabashed love of small-town America, in contrast to - say - David Lynch's brutal dissection of it in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.) Casual readers will also enjoy it, but - like the other books in Wolfe's mid-to-late 1980s quarter - it's currently out of print. Pick it up if you can find it second hand.

(In more Wolfe news, they're apparently publishing a one-volume compilation of The Book of the New Sun - under the title of Severian of the Guild - very soon. Anyone who's not already on the New Sun bandwagon, now's your chance...)