The Damned Busters

Matthew Hughes The Damned Busters (2011)
I've been reasonably knocked out by Hughes' pseudo-Rennaissance Raffalon stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and enough so as to find his name imprinted on my admittedly short mental list of authors whose work I look out for when in Half Price - Murray Leinster, Katherine MacLean, Moorcock, Robert Moore Williams, and those six A. E. van Vogt novels that I still haven't read; and so it was that I came to The Damned Busters, which is actually the first part of a trilogy in an approximately contemporary setting; so it wasn't quite the Hughes I was looking for, or at least which I expected to find, but it seemed worth a go.

The Damned Busters is, of all things, a superhero novel, sort of, although you could probably call it urban fantasy if you felt so inclined. Our guy acquires his powers when accidentally summoning a demon and inadvertently driving all the minions of hell to industrial action, resulting in a period of nothing bad happening anywhere on Earth, which turns out to be disastrous; and the aforementioned powers come as part of the settlement deal. Thus does he embark upon a career fighting crime, inspired by a favourite comic book - naturally - and thus does his life become greatly more complicated than he could have anticipated.

It's an odd book in that it reads nothing like you would expect from the description, or how you might imagine superhero prose fiction would read for that matter. Our man is a high-functioning autistic and might therefore be described as tightly wound - which hopefully isn't too insulting to anyone - and although the story isn't directly told from his perspective, his somewhat analytical tone informs the narrative, lending everything an unusually even pace. This apparently put some readers off, but I personally found it quite refreshing to read this kind of story without having to wade through the sort of overwritten gothic melodrama which may as well have been Bauhaus lyrics. It also helps that Hughes is witty without feeling the need to crack jokes all the time, so The Damned Busters feels like a distant relative of Pratchett, albeit with aesthetic parallels to certain Vertigo comics from the nineties. Most surprising of all are interludes of philosophical debate on the nature of morality - amongst other ideas pertaining to the field of sin and punishment - with some depth, or what felt like some depth to me - certainly very satisfying and without assuming the reader needs everything spelled out in primary colours. I'm looking at you, John Bunyan.

If I have a complaint, it's probably that the book could have been a little shorter; but The Damned Busters was otherwise highly satisfying, quietly impressive, and I'm now particularly looking forward to the Raffalon book which Mrs. Pamphlets gave me for Christmas.