Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell

“Tastefully insane and morbidly fun . . . delightfully realistic . . . Dante’s Inferno as envisioned by Monty Python. A sidesplitting pleasure.” —Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

The empire on which the sun never sets has turned its ambitions toward a land where it’s never even risen: Victorian Britain is colonizing Hell itself.

The demons who once ran amok down there, torturing lost souls, were easy enough to subdue. The damned, left without tormentors, have been put to work on cotton and tobacco plantations. As for the colonists, it takes all sorts to stake a claim on the infernal frontier: there’s MacTavish, the dissipated District Commissioner; the savvy spiritualist Penelope Hodgson-Huntley; the preacher’s-son-turned-engineer Elijah Biddle; a cartful of orphaned girls sent down as part of an immigration scheme; and a zealous missionary offering salvation to the living and the dead alike.

Backed by the power of Britain at its globe-spanning peak, however, the great and good of the colony will not be content until they have plundered even the unconquered interior: Hell Undiminished. All that’s needed is a pretext for taking up arms—and when a series of lurid murders sends the lonely farms and towns of British Hell into a panic, war seems inevitable. Will Her Majesty’s colonial forces prove victorious, or will they be made, at last, to give the devil his due?

Set when the Old Empire of sails, slavery, and spices was transforming into the New Imperialism of steam and scientific racism, Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell is one-of-a-kind feat of the imagination. It is at once a raucous, biting satire of the ignorance and hubris that built our world; an epic quest into the darkest heart of darkness imaginable; and an epic as gripping as anything by Conrad, Forster, or Tolkien.

Robert G. Penner lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of the novels Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020, and The Dark King Swallows the World. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms.