Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell

a new novel by Robert G. Penner

Available September 2026 from McNally Editions
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The empire on which the sun never sets has turned its ambitions toward a land where it’s never even risen: Victorian Britain is colonizing Hell itself.

The demons who once ran amok down there, torturing lost souls, were easy enough to subdue. The damned, left without tormentors, have been put to work on cotton and tobacco plantations. As for the colonists, it takes all sorts to stake a claim on the infernal frontier: there’s MacTavish, the dissipated but devoted District Commissioner; the ambitious, savvy spiritualist Penelope Hodgson-Huntley; the young engineer Elijah Biddle, tasked with laying a railway across this unforgiving landscape; a cartful of orphaned girls sent down as part of an immigration scheme; and a missionary offering salvation to the living and the dead alike.

Backed by the power of Britain at its globe-spanning peak, however, the great and good of the colony will not be content until they have plundered even the unconquered interior: Hell Undiminished. All that’s needed is a pretext for taking up arms—and when a series of lurid murders puts the lonely farms and towns of British Hell into a panic, war seems inevitable. Yet there may be forces Down Below beyond even the sway of Queen and Country . . .

Set when the Old Empire of sails, slavery, and spices was transforming into the New Imperialism of steam and scientific racism, Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell is one-of-a-kind feat of the imagination. It is at once a raucous, biting satire of the ignorance and hubris that built our world; an epic quest into the darkest heart of darkness imaginable; and an epic as gripping as anything by Conrad, Forster, or Tolkien.