City Infernal

By Edward Lee
Cemetery Dance $40.00 / Leisure Books $5.99

Occasionally even a health nut craves a sweet and non-nutritional confection. Not that I'm a health nut - I seek out as many sweet confections as I do the healthier stuff in my reading. Nothing like a balanced literary diet! With CITY INFERNAL, Edward Lee heads toward the mainstream with this lighter-than-average outing, but keeps plenty of gross-outs handy to mark his way back to the much more extreme subgenre he helped identify - a subgenre characterized by works such as THE BIGHEAD, THE CHOSEN, and DAHMER'S NOT DEAD (with Elizabeth Steffen). While not exactly mainstream, it's a whole lot closer than anything else in this author's canon, and a welcome change.

Twin sisters Cassie and Lissa, rich underage daughters of a high-priced attorney, share the Goth club scene of Washington DC, but Lissa's the one with the reputation - for instance, her way of buying their entrance to the club is to perform sex acts on the bouncer. When Lissa's main squeeze, a sleazy bartender makes a move for straight-arrow Cassie, she finds herself giving in - leading jealous/drugged out/crazy Lissa to kill the jerk and blow her own brains out in front of a horrified Cassie. 

Flashforward a couple bad years, to when Cassie has gotten off the resultant booze and beaten depression (if not the guilt) and her father has opted out of the rat-race and bought an old mansion with a sordid past in the country and they've moved their weird city lifestyles to hicksville. There's something strange with the house, as a friendly-creepy disabled vet warns Cassie.  And when Cassie meets Via, Xeke and Hush, there's no turning back, for they've been living in her new house ... well, not exactly. Before long, they've shown Cassie a whole new world: Hell. They are Ex-residents of Hell's Mephistopolis, a city beyond imagining in size which exists on a separate plane as our world. Lee has some fun holding it up as a dark and twisted mirror on our reality. Grimly humorous or humorously grim, there's plenty of Lee's sense of humor in evidence: witness the catalogue of city buildings and landmarks named after notorious folks and the fact that certain historical personages have made the transfer to Hell without missing a beat - can anyone doubt Heinrich Himmler as Commissioner of Torture? There are more like that - I won't spoil'em for you.

Cassie's time in Hell is tempered by helpful spells and the growing awareness of some powers only she is likely to possess, and a special destiny to fulfill that will affect all of Hell - a place where Satan's grip is challenged daily by an active underground rebellion. Cassie learns about her special status bit by bit in entertaining encounters that all lead up to the climax, an assault on Satan's lair. 

There's a lot of invention here. The grimly fascinating idea that the Mephistopolis - the city of Hell - would have an economy and, natch, that this economy would run literally on suffering as ours runs on money. The value of bones. The twisted everyday punishments meted out to humans an demons alike, often with the express purpose of fueling the power grid. One thing about punishments in hell is that, since human spirits can't die, the punishment goes on for eternity. That's what we learned in catechism anyway, isn't it? Imagine being tortured just so your pain and suffering could produce magical-electrical power. Lee makes CITY INFERNAL an allegory for our own world, in which all is fueled by the pursuit of money.

Occasionally the novel seems almost stylized, its pace almost too rapid ... there's no flagging of the action, but there's also room for depth left unexplored. For instance, Cassie receives most of her information and Hell-lore straight from her Dantean guides, but once in a while it wouldn't hurt to let her learn things on her own. Lee utilizes these opportunities to overindulge in over-the-top cataloguing of grotesqueries which, while fun, sometimes seem placed merely for rote gross-outs. Of course, there's no real argument against that practice if it's intended, and it works - to an extent - because the bouncy pace is matched by the rising and lowering levels of the reader's gorge rising and falling. Though it should be noted that enough brain-sucking and flesh-peeling and skin-sizzling surely leads to desensitization that may affect one's enjoyment of the novel. But these minor gripes aside, CITY INFERNAL is the kind of fun page-turning read that begs for a sequel - and it's set up perfectly for just that.