Dante would roll over

kw: book reviews, fantasy, monsters

It is the Hell of your childhood imagination, the Hell you grew up with. The Hell of demons that look like gargoyles (and worse), of sulfury smells and tentacles and pitchforks and bogeymen and things under your bed that'll get you if you set foot on the floor. It is, like Milton's Hell, a place where Satan rules, but this Hell is locked behind Gates, which keep the human world safe…at least for the time being. It is the Hell of The Gates by John Connolly, and the issue here is not whether you might go there, but whether Hell will come here.

The full title on the cover of the book is The Gates of Hell are About to Open: Want to Peek?. It is a genre new to me, that I call Supernatural Faux-Horror Comedy. There are two story lines here. One is the aforementioned part-Medieval part-childhood fantasy Hell and the desire of its denizens to come here and, well, ruin things. The other is the still-pending restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and its possible power to create a small black hole or wormhole or … something…

The author begins with the beginning of the Universe, so he can explain the Singularity from which everything is supposed to have emerged. Actually (and as he explains), the Singularity becomes everything, not expanding into anything but being the everything that is expanding. Yes, that is a bit confusing to me also, and I've been a Physics major (not a very good one, perhaps). It also sets the tone for the book, a tone of classic British understated humor.

Thus the CERN/LHC thread begins with bored technicians playing Battleship while the collider gets cranking up, when something gets loose and goes zinging away. Then, as they watch, the computer system seems to rewrite its memory to cover evidence thereof. At the same time, just a time zone away in Biddlecombe, four half-serious students of the occult are met in a basement about a pentagram, attempting to contact the "other side". They do so, in spades, and the game is afoot.

Peeking through the window is young (age 11) Samuel Johnson and his dog Boswell. Samuel (and, we suppose, Boswell), sees the Portal open, and the Gates beyond, and the things that shortly transpire as the four are replaced by shape-shifting demons.

If this and the rest of the book were narrated in any straightforward manner, the result would be unendingly horrible. It is not; instead we are treated to a hilarious Keystone Kops-ish attempt by the demons to prepare for a takeover by "The Great Malevolence" (TGM), Satan himself, just as soon as enough power can be stolen from the LHC to melt away the Gates and open the Portal quite a bit wider. Samuel can't get anyone to believe his stories, and he has just four days (until November 1, which we know as All Saints' Day) to thwart TGM's plans.

I don't know if real demons, whatever they may be, are capable of being clobbered by rakes or cricket bats. But this is childhood fantasy writ large. The demons don't fare too well, except for a couple of unusually friendly ones. One of these, named Nurd (unless you pronounce it "Noord" it'll come out "nerd") actually befriends Samuel instead of eating him as instructed (or as it would have been instructed had TGM or his lieutenant though to inform it). This gives Samuel and a couple of his young friends a way to close the Portal, if they are in time (you know the answer to that "if" there, so why am I being coy?).

If only our real demons (existential or not) were so easy to overcome…