Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy by K.W. Jeter (1987)

If you're paying attention, which you're probably not, you'll notice today's selection is not a horror novel and it's the first time we've reviewed anything here other than horror. We've decided to expand the scope of our discussions to include other types of fantastic fiction not normally given the attention of more traditionally 'literary' works. While many of the books and films we review will be well-known classics within their genres, we also hope to uncover lesser-known works deserving of the attention of the general reader.

Infernal Devices is the first novel I've read in the now well-defined steampunk genre. Steampunk, as I understand it, is set exclusively in a Victorian setting, but contains many of the tropes of standard science fiction, including advanced technologies (though most rely on steam for energy, as opposed to electricity), time travel, alien beings, mysterious plot twists, and juvenile sexuality. While it has its roots in classic proto-sci-fi writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, it was refined in the 1980s by William Gibson, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter. Here's a decent overview of the most important works in the genre. Jeter coined the term steampunk as a lighthearted response to the growing popularity of certain works outside of the more prevalent cyberpunk movement.

Infernal Devices deals with the bumbling adventures of George Dower, the son of a brilliant watchmaker and developer of advanced automatons. Dower has no specific will in the story, and the outrageous characters he meets and the outlandish events unfolding around him throughout the novel seem more of a brief and frightening interlude to an otherwise purposeless existence. Dower is visited in his father's shop by the mysterious Brown Leather Man who drops off a mechanical device and a strange coin that send Dower down a path leading him to strange piscine boroughs of London and the alien landscape of the Scottish Hebrides. He meets a coin forger, a pair of hustlers with strange futuristic accents, fishmen, elderly mad villains, temperance leaguers, whores, the Godly Army, and real-life selkies. There are several sudden reveals throughout the novel which change our perspective of all the prior events. None of these reveals seems earned by Dower, but only forced on him by a manipulative secondary character. Dower might be the key to destroying the earth, or he might be the key to saving it. The reader is not sure until the last ten pages.

Jeter's greatest strength is his deftness with the Victorian setting. He uses a breezy writing style which is eminently readable, but manages to imbue each scene with the grit and smoke of Dickens or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When Dower walks through Wetwick, we see the shadowy alleys and the lurching denizens. We smell the rot swept into the gutters. Also, concerning the mechanical automatons, Jeter writes with verve. The Paganinicon, which resembles Dower in all ways except for his skill with a violin and another important tool (where lies Jeter's juvenile treatment of sexuality), enforces the fantastic and comedic tone of the novel.

While Infernal Devices is a greatly entertaining read, I feel it's maybe not the best introduction to the steampunk genres. Jeter hits all of the superficial cues. There's magical mechanical technology, flying machines, weird underclasses, secret societies, myths come to life. But one of the most important aspects of the genre, as I understand it, is the punk spirit underneath its most important works. We see no liberating of non-western individuals from the obscurity the Victorians doomed them to. Jeter only briefly addresses the perils of the technologies of the future. I'm not suggesting every novel should involve these themes, but Jeter's novel seems to be on the lighter end of the spectrum of this genre. It's still a pleasant read. I'd just call it more steamgentry than steampunk.

Second Chance by Chet Williamson (1995)

A time traveling future murderer ditches his friends on the way from the 60s to the 90s, in order to adopt an anonymous persona and carry out plots of mass destruction. That's the basic plot of Chet Williamson's Second Chance, and if that sounds weird enough, it gets even weirder when you expand the plot summary.

The hero of the story, a decently likable new age musician named Woody, decides he'd like to relive his past, specifically his college days from over two decades past, and he gets his old friends together, and since he's rich, he's able to rent out the exact same apartment they partied in back in the 60s, and fill it with items and artifacts from that era, recreating, as best he can, a typical partying night from the best time of his life. Back then, his girlfriend and his best friend attempted to blow up a campus ROTC building, only they end up blowing themselves up.

Now, in the present, he and his friends get together at this old apartment, they even dress as they would have in the 60s, and smoke some expensive weed, while sitting in a circle. And they end up traveling back through time, and suddenly their long-dead friends show up. Before long, they reason that they've gotta get back to the present, and they figure, why not take their dead friends with them? It works, too--they get in a circle, smoke the great weed again, and they all come back to the present, where they lead somewhat different, better lives, with their dead friends returned--except, oh, actually, the one guy, he slipped their grasp in the time traveling, and now leads a secret life as a mysterious killer named Pan, who carries out assassinations and mass killings, in the name of saving the planet.

Completely ridiculous plot--but somehow it works as a mostly serious, non-jokey, science-fiction thriller. I've never read anything else by Chet Williamson, but I wonder if his other stories are as completely crazy as this one. It's quite something that he's able to write this in a manner that can be taken seriously. He somehow pulls it off. The method of time travel, in particular, could potentially come off as very silly--something out of a low-budget stoner comedy--but damn if it doesn't work. I found myself enjoying the story so much, I didn't require any more evidence that smoking a joint with friends in a circle can send you back, or forward, through time.

The novel was originally published in 1995 and was re-released in 2002 by Leisure Books, home of a wide range of genre writers. "Second Chance" is a strange blend of horror, science-fiction, and pot, and I highly recommend it.

Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1910)

One of the things that separates this book very much from its film and stage adaptations is the amount of detail Leroux provides about the Opera's cellars. Some of the details almost seem like fantasy, or at least science fiction, even for current readers. A lake under a functional building? Five cellars in a 19th century urban building? A torture chamber? A 'siren' in the lake protect a fancy house stockpiled with gun powder? Trap doors and fake walls and revolving mirrors? It all seems almost impossible, but Leroux writes it like it's a matter of fact. I haven't watched any of the film or theater adaptations in quite a while, but I remember Erik's layer being more of just a creepy basement. Here it's turned into a magnificent symbol of Erik's almost superhuman abilities and knowledge of physics and illusions. Great stuff.

Erik himself is also made much more of a super-villain here than a tragic monster. Of course, we still get the tragedy in his relationship with Christine, but he's also a mastermind of deception and a bit of sadist. When the Persian relates the story of how Erik grew up in the East, we get a great glimpse of how Erik learned this amazing things. Leroux, of course, makes Erik more than a comic book character by telling us exactly why Erik might be so sadistic and angry at the human race. His mother rejected him, refused to give him any affection unless he wore a mask. No wonder he's such a bastard.

I've noticed with a lot of late-19th century and early-20th century fantastic fiction, authors often used this method, shifting points of view to establish a believable narrative. Dracula is a perfect example. Instead of presenting the story of a vampire as a legend, Stoker manages to create a believable account of what it might be like for a group of people to really encounter a vampire. Here Leroux gives us newspaper accounts and different perspectives from people in the opera and makes his narrator almost a secondary source, a reporter convincing us of the existence of the 'ghost'.

I haven't read much steampunk, but I did pick up a copy of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen about a year ago. Steampunk seems to be a cross between fantastic Victorian literature and science fiction, where 19th century settings are exaggerated in their technology (steam engines and dirigibles are very prominent) and the exoticism of people from the east is very exaggerated. The Phantom of the Opera, in a way, is a proto-steampunk book, in that Erik employs amazing technologies that almost seem magical, and the treatment and inclusion of the Persian is somewhat exceptional for literature of the time.

I certainly like the fact that we don't get too much information about Erik early in the novel. I've been thinking about this, watching some of the old Friday the 13th movies. What made those movies so frightening to me is that you rarely actually see the monster except for a few brief moments and then finally at the end, with the climactic battle. I feel like most horror movies these days show their villains in full light, from the beginning of the picture. While this might be more fun for filmmakers, I think it detracts strongly from the horror value of most new horror films.

That being said, at the end of the first Friday the 13th I think you get a similar reveal, where his mother explains everything that happened to him and why she's killing everyone.

You can check out a nice fan page detailing the film adaptations of the novel here.