Fourth Mansions

Much like John Crowley, Lafferty was another author that was oft-brought up in conversations I've had regarding writing styles and eccentricities that were similar to Gene Wolfe's, or at least authors whose work bred likeminded fanatics. Wolfe being a friend of Lafferty's and his praising of him as one of the genre's most original voices sold me on the idea of seeking out his stories. I actually have a couple of short stories of his collected in some anthologies I own, but have yet to read, so I decided to give Lafferty a try by diving headfirst into one of his full-length novels instead.

Fourth Mansions is hard to parse. Very hard. It feels like a mixture of slipstream fiction and science fiction with a strange theological bent to it, focusing a lot on Eschatology (another similarity to Wolfe's work). The best I can sum up the plot is that the world is found by a reporter to be run by secret societies, all with their own talent for reality-distortion, and plans for guiding humanity toward the end-times (or preventing it). Running concurrently are motifs that make allusions to Teresa of Ávila's The Interior Castle (or, The Mansions), a work of Christian mysticism wherein the soul is akin to a mansion full of rooms that represent its different states. The book contains mind-manipulators, strange ghostly entities called Plappergeists that appear out of the corners of one's eyes, and a general state of confusion regarding physical space, time and goings-on. It's densely worded and tricky, befuddling, ominous, funny, and above all, intimidatingly obtuse... but despite a kind of 'kitchen-sink' approach to what's included in the novel, it somehow works, thanks to Lafferty's masterful and entertaining use of language and experimental structure. It's incredibly bizarre, but I loved it, and it's easy to see why Lafferty has a cult-like status. Hope to read more of his work as soon as I can.