Door Number Three

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.

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a brilliant debut, newcomer O'Leary gives a fringe-media fascination, alien abduction, a thoughtful, sardonic second look. John Donnelly is a conventionally skeptical psychotherapist whose most intriguing patient, an otherwise rational woman named Laura, claims a common heritage to both humans and aliens and has the square-shaped nipples to prove it. While Donnelly vainly tries to uncover a hidden trauma in Laura's elaborate fantasies, her former physician is murdered, and it soon becomes obvious that the culprits are indeed aliens, as Laura insists. From then on, Donnelly's own notions of reality begin to unravel as he undergoes bizarre lucid dreams, encounters a strange alien investigator named Saul, and ultimately builds a time machine. O'Leary perfectly captures the mind-set of dogmatic psychotherapy, and thus of humanity's own rigid concepts of reality, in prose that easily matches that of the best in contemporary mainstream literature. Striking and insightful, this is one of the year's finest sf novels, deserving of widespread recognition beyond the genre. Carl Hays

Psychologist John Donnell's life takes a turn for the bizarre when a young woman claiming to be an alien seeks his counsel and more. While presenting a fascinating analysis of his characters' longings and emotions, first novelist O'Leary homes in on "big" issues: the relationship of cause and effect, the phenomenon of time, the importance of dreams. Reminiscent of the speculative fiction of the late Philip K. Dick and full of offbeat humor and a rueful acceptance of humanity's shortcomings, this debut is a good choice for most sf collections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.