![]() ![]() Thomas Fool - who, like all damned humans, doesn't remember his life on Earth - is sent to do the paperwork. And now one of these new humans has been found murdered, tortured, its damned soul torn free. The book begins, as so many noirs do, with a body: As it turns out, the souls of the damned are reborn in new bodies when they get to Hell, all to make their torment that much more visceral. But Unsworth pushes the boundaries of this well-worn fantasy formula - not always in a satisfying way - by stuffing in another genre entirely: noir. It's also structured as a very real bureaucracy, complete with coffee-sipping pencil-pushers, petty officials and an arbitrary tangle of rules and regulations that offset all the demons and despair. ![]() As with so many stories of its kind, The Devil's Detective paints Hell as a very real place. In his novel The Devil's Detective, debut author Simon Kurt Unsworth isn't trying to reinvent the inverted pentagram. In fact, the whole hell-as-bureaucracy theme has become hackneyed over the years - as much of a cliché as, well, bureaucracies being hellish. For many fantasy writers, though, it's a bureaucracy. Sartre famously wrote that hell is other people. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Devil's Detective Author Simon Kurt Unsworth ![]()
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