One of the most sinister villains I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in fiction returns in Oliver Darkshire’s novel, The Devil and Mrs. Gooch. When we first met Gwendolyn Gooch, in Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, she was selling deadly goblin fruit the nearly destroyed a village. As usually happens when her plans go bust, Gwendolyn fled in the night to her next scheme. We catch up with her in perpetually rainy Virdigris, already working on her plan to unleash outrageously priced, microscopically small, amenity-less rental apartments on the unsuspecting populace.
There is no one hero in The Devil and Mrs. Gooch. In fact, the characters who end up unravelling Mrs. Gooch’s villainy barely even know each other. Rather, the characters who accomplish this feat work independently of each other, which creates a curious diffuseness to the plot. It takes a bit of getting used to. There is a bonus to to this kind of structure: there are a lot of opportunities to learn more about the improbable world Darkshire created, where an erratic beetle pushes the sun across the sky and the books in the Household Grammarye find people to clean up magical messes whether they like it or not.
Our protagonists are a Green Man who just wants to retire from his university, his exasperated famulus (the Grammarye‘s guide spirit), a surprisingly heroic hobgoblin, and the Devil himself. The Green Man seems to be the only wizard at the Tabernacle who actually does any work. He does his best to avoid his students and barricade himself with research, but he’s the chancellor’s go-to person for dealing with all requests for magical assistance from Virdigris. That he’s been adopted by a copy of the Household Grammarye and its famulus, Mrs. Bobkins, makes it even harder for him to ignore that there is something very wrong going on in the city. Not only have the hobs, the reclusive creatures who take care of houses and their inhabitants, gone missing, but the houses they care for are rotting away in the constant rain. The suddenly homeless have no where to go except Gooch Towers, where a closet or small room can be had for the low, low price of everything they own.
The most interesting character in this book is the Devil. He’s spent millennia making bargains and mischief when he spots Gwendolyn on the streets of Virdigris in the middle of kidnapping a hob. (We readers have a lot more information about what’s going on than the disunited protagonists.) Her aura of malevolence instantly attracts him. Her variety of conscienceless economic evil is so different from what the Devil has been up to on his own that he has to learn her ways. Except, once Gwendolyn gets her hooks into the Devil, he starts to wonder if there are things that are too evil to inflict on innocents who never had a choice in the first place. If nothing else, the Devil is scrupulous about only meting out bad luck to people who are willing to play his game.
I know readers who enjoyed Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil will be delighted to see another off-kilter tale from Darkshire. This book rewards patient readers with its meandering asides, scattered protagonists, and meditations on the nature of avarice, evil, and hubris.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.