The empire on which the sun never sets has turned its ambitions upon a land where it’s never even risen: Deep below the earth, 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 their tormentors, have been put to work on cotton and tobacco plantations. As for the colonists, it takes all sorts to give up the comforts of home and make new lives on the infernal frontier: there’s MacTavish, the dissipated district commissioner who only wants to keep the peace; the ambitious spiritualist Penelope Hodgson-Huntley, keen to ply her trade in a place where the supernatural cannot be so easily denied; Elijah Biddle, the engineer from Nova Scotia helping to lay 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 that is 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 begins to feel inevitable. But might there be forces Down Below even more powerful than 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 own world; an epic quest into the very darkest heart of darkness imaginable; and an epic as gripping and persuasive as anything by Conrad, Forster, or Tolkien.