Author: K.W. Jeter
Cover Artist: David O’Connor
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date:1987
Infernal Devices is the story of George Dower, a stolid fellow who has inherited his father’s clock-repair shop, but not his genius for clockwork. The novel is written as a personal account, an apologia for the life of Dower, and an attempt to set straight the sordid and scandalous rumours attached to his name.
These rumours are brought up in an introduction that tantalisingly hints at the adventures to come: plans to shatter the earth, the unnatural pleasures of the ‘green girls’, a secret career as a violin virtuoso and debaucher of women, the desecration of a church, and his involvement with:
… reports from the Scottish Highlands of the Book of Revelation’s Seven-Headed Beast flapping about and dropping flaming sheep carcasses upon the heads of Sir Charles Wroth’s grouse-beaters while the Whore of Babylon laughed and shouted disrespectful comments from her perch aboard the creature…
And those are only a few of the delights contained in this wonderful steampunk book by K. W. Jeter – a friend of James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers (to whom the book is dedicated).
Dower is struggling to make ends meet with minor repairs and upkeep on clocks, but is slipping into poverty. One day a man who appears to be an African, with leathery brown skin, commissions him to attempt repairs on an inscrutable mechanism of his father’s.
Soon afterwards he is visited by the anachronistic impresario Graeme Scape, and his accomplice, Miss McThane, who attempt to steal the ‘Brown Leather Man’s’ device.
Dower is drawn into a mystery when he examines the coin the Brown Leather Man paid him with: silver, and engraved with the curiously exophthalmic face of a Saint Monkfish.
His efforts to identify the Saint and his client lead him into a bizarre subculture of Victorian London: the secret borough of Wetwick. And from there, through deeper and deeper layers of intrigue to discover the truth about the machinations of the Royal Anti-Society, his father, and himself.
I particularly liked the idea of the Royal Anti-Society, a crackpot secret society devoted to the pursuit of dark knowledge, locked in an underground struggle with the similarly secret Godly Army. Another favourite was the idea of trying to destroy the earth using sympathetic vibrations, or ‘Cataclysm Harmonics’.
Jeter has created a greatly entertaining steampunk novel, full of intriguing ideas and colourful characters. It’s written in the style of a book of the Victorian era, but doesn’t come across as affected, and is certainly fast-paced.
Infernal Devices is definitely a must-read for steampunk fans, and I recommend it for anyone who enjoys a humorous, madcap adventure – the book is aptly subtitled ‘a mad Victorian fantasy’.
