The premise of this strange and beautiful love story is that an utterly ordinary guy--who remains, if I'm not mistaken, basically unnamed throughout the book--falls abjectly in love with a beautiful woman from a parallel universe existing alongside ours, where the male humans die rapidly--their immune systems collapse--after having sexual intercourse with a female. When she disappears on him after their first encounter of a few days, he goes looking for her, with only her puzzling goodbye note to go on--including information about the "doors" of the novel's title. These doors, exposited as the plot unfolds, are like the intersections of television channels broadcasting at frequencies very close to each other, with the signal from one channel bleeding through into another now and then. Or anyway something like that.

Whatever the case, this is definitely a science fiction novel; the parallel universe of the woman Lara really does exist and is not a hallucination of the protagonist's, even if he is a vaguely dissociated personality, possibly psychologically damaged at the outset though not at all violent or aggressive, and even though he twice--first in the parallel universe and then in this one--winds up in some sort of mental hospital--the second time receiving shock-treatments that deprive him of his memories. And the woman Lara really is some sort of goddess, apparently. (Which I suppose makes it a fantasy novel, and not science fiction . . . .)

The ending of this moving tale about erotic and romantic relationships between men and women, about loneliness and longing and dreams, however uncertain and ambiguous it may be, is really a beginning. Along the way to finding, losing, finding again (and then losing again) his true love, and to making his ultimate momentous decision, our hero encounters a variety of dangerous adventures and strange characters, including a giant prize-fighter named Joe and his charming but semi-deluded manager, a psychopathic "revolutionary" named North, a young and horny female cop from the universe of biological femme fatales, and what has to be one of the oddest characters Wolfe has ever come up with (and Wolfe has come up with some damned odd ones): a talking, semi-sentient Barbie-like (though that may be an insult . . .) doll named Tina, who beautifully and poignantly comes to our hero's rescue at a crucial moment of pain and loneliness.