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.
"Just when you thought nothing new could be done with time travel, lucid dreaming, alien abduction, shapeshifting, and World War III, along comes Patrick O'Leary, fusing them in a grand, sardonic comedy of consensual reality gone awry. Read Door Number Three while you still have the mind it is guaranteed to blow."
James Morrow
"A highly appealing mix of skilled writing and zany imaginings, this novels bears positive comparison no only to the work of Philip K. Dick but also to the earlier SF of Kurt Vonnegut."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Door Number Three is Mr. O'Leary's first novel. His voice is fresh and funny, and he is bold enough to offer this assessment of the human condition as seen from a therapist's perspective"'The only terror that heals: the terror of being ourselves. How we suffer to avoid it."
