A divine farce, Infernal Devices is counted by many to be in the vanguard of Steampunk novels, written in the late 1980s by the man who is accused of coining the accursed term. The hero of our story, George, is the ne’er-do-well son of a genius watchmaker. George lives in Victorian England and has very little imagination and even less talent for repairing or even maintaining the works of his late father, who also built clockwork automata.
One day a mysterious man with leathery skin appears at his shop, terrorizes his manservant, and asks George to repair a mysterious device (a regulator) that George’s father created. This sets off a chain of events in which George finds himself completely out of his very limited depth. Two or three (or four?) different organizations have designs for George, the regulator, and an automaton which George’s father created that looks exactly like George.
George, finding himself in the midst of what he considers a mystery, spends the rest of the book blindly floundering. Along the way he encounters, and is often mishandled by, a race of half-breed fish people, a pair of con-artists (one of whom is a sexually voracious lady), the leather-skinned man, a wealthy man who wants to end the world so he can speak to aliens, the (often violent) head of a morality organization, and various assorted seedy lowlifes. Did I mention that some time travel is involved?
The very fate of the Earth hangs in the balance, and the plot is built of wheels within wheels. The comedy is thick, and this reader was delighted as George’s fate and wits turned from bad to worse, to worse still, and then even worse. It’s a long way to the bottom, and all George really manages to do properly is throw a fit like he’s Niccolo Paganini. OK. OK. He manages to do more. Like avoid being murdered by a lynch mob.
Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 5 out of 5
Final result: I said it was a farce, and I stand by that. Definitely not horror, but certainly nice and dark. Cthulhu is mentioned. Do I really need to gush more? I hope not. You should read this book.
Infernal Devices – K.W. Jeter – 1987 – St. Martin’s Press
Republished by Angry Robot – 2011
Buy Infernal Devices (Angry Robot)
(tragedy set in mythical surroundings), Tim Powers 
(historical hilarity and accretion of painful injuries), and James Branch Cabell’s 
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