comfort

I just opened a book I've never read, and as I took in the words, I started to get happy. I heard the voice of an old friend telling me a story about Bax, his letters, the house he came to own, and the wonderful things which happened to him there.

Gene Wolfe is the only auther I remember ever doing this for me. There is something about his skill, his mastery of the art and language of storytelling, which makes me feel like comfortable. He's my comfort food of fiction. This isn't to say that his stories are shallow; they're anything but. On the surface, most of them come across so simply, so easily, but there are treasures hidden underneath.

This would probably be enough, but he also has such a great grasp of dialogue. All of his characters are real, and talk like real people. They don't orate, they act as conversational puppets to each other's points, and they don't all come across as one gender under the guise of both. The have real conversations in which they get sidetracked and interrupt each other. They answer what they're thinking rather than what the other person was acting. They have faulty reasoning and real dialects. And all of it is taken into account; it all adds to the story.

Well, you can certainly see that I love Gene Wolfe. He's one of the best.