Door Number Three
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
John Donelly's life is changed forever the day Laura, a young therapy patient, tells him that she has been left for a year on Earth by the Holock, an alien race. If she can convince one person - and she has chosen him - that she is telling the truth, she can stay when they come back for her. And she exposes her breasts as evidence, revealing square nipples. His least profound response is to drop his cigarette into the crease in his chair.
So begins the wildest SF novel since the passing of Philip K. Dick. Patrick O'Leary's Door Number Three is a constant wellspring of surprise and wonder, a novel about a young man of today and a woman from somewhere else who is out to love or kill him - or both. The whole, apparently real, world and everything in it can never be the same again.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Leary has filled his intriguing debut with tantalizing inside jokes and asides that are well nigh impossible to understand the first time through; one must really read this novel twice. This isn't a mis-step, however, since the device reflects perfectly the condition of the narrator, therapist John Donelly. Upon meeting Laura, a young woman who claims to be an alien abducted to Earth by other aliens (and who shows him her square nipples to prove it), Donelly begins to blip back and forth in time, rather than pass sequentially through it as the rest of us do. Donelly, who narrates, warns us that his story involves a year in which he ``fell in love with an alien, discovered the secret of forgotten dreams, saved the earth... and killed myself.'' Lighthearted, funny dialogue and apt characterizations spin the story along as Donelly links up with ``the most bizarre detour in this convoluted tale,'' a diminutive renegade theologian, formerly an entrepreneur, who guides the befuddled therapist as he probes not only the mystery of Laura but also the riddles of paranoia, evolution, dreaming and consciousness. A highly appealing mix of skilled writing and zany imaginings, this novel bears positive comparison not only to the work of the late Philip K. Dick but also to the earlier SF of Kurt Vonnegut.
