Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the story:


The Tree Is My Hat by Gene Wolfe

This story is part of the The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction group collection discussion.

★★★★

Synopsis
The narrator Baden, an American government employee, slowly recovering from a malaria-like illness, makes friends with native Polynesians on some Southsea island. The natives worship a shark god who turns up as a kind of therianthropy in the form of a human dwarf “Hanga”. Soon, the narrator also befriends the shark god, even as a bloodfriend. But gods expect prices paid for their friendship.

Review
The title could be one of Harlan Ellison’s famous story titles. Once again, we meet a unreliable narrator: Baden’s illness causes him to hallucinate during fever attacks. We also don’t know what exactly is true, what is left out from the series of first person journal entries, and where Baden simply is wrong or lies. I personally tend to believe that Baden himself thinks that what he writes down is the truth. The story is dark with some Lovecraftian undertones and bizarre. I really liked it.