Infernal Devices : A Madly Victorian Fantasy. This item is unavailable.Infernal Devices : A Madly Victorian Fantasy

It all began when the Brown Leather Man, a mysterious being with a secret older than humankind, asked proper Victorian London gentleman George Dower to repair a weird device. How could George have known that this was but one of the many infernal devices his genius father had built, and that he himself would soon be pursued by former clients of his father? For George had always been the unsuspecting key to his father's incredible plans, a key that others would like to possess - from the automaton who wore George's own face to the mad Lord Bendray, bent on using George to destroy the entire Earth.

A romp through Victorian England by an author said to have "the brain-burned intensity of his mentor, Philip K. Dick."

"This is the real thing - a mad inventor, curious coins, murky London alleys and windblown Scottish Isles ...a wild and extravagant plot that turns up new mysteries with each succeeding page." - James P Blaylock

The devices of the titlea TV set that tunes in the future, a machine that can split the earth in twoare the inventions of a Victorian genius who dies without divulging their secrets. His respectable, unimaginative son George thinks he's inheriting a simple watchmaking shop, but soon the real nature of his father's work becomes clear. Because none of his father's clientele believes George's protestations of innocence and ignorance, he's caught between the free-thinking tinkerers of the Royal Anti-Society and the repressive zealots of the Godly Army; he's hung in effigy by the Ladies Union for the Suppression of Carnal Vice and pummeled in person by "brothel bullies"; he even meets a clockwork man with his face. Jeter works strenuously to live up to his subtitle but his book is neither mad nor fantastic enough to be anything but a pale followup to the work in this vein by Tim Powers and James Blaylock.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.