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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 District Commissioner; the savvy spiritualist Penelope Hodgson-Huntley; the preacher’s-son-turned-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 zealous 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 sends the lonely farms and towns of British Hell into a panic, war seems inevitable. Will Her Majesty’s colonial forces prove victorious, or will they be made, at last, to give the devil his due?
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.
Praise for Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell:
“Tastefully insane and morbidly fun, this witty novel is a delightfully realistic imagining of the attempt to colonize the damned. For fans of long-dead English humorists, sideways séances, misapplied logic, and terribly bright young women subject to clueless chaperones, Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell is Dante’s Inferno as envisioned by Monty Python. A sidesplitting pleasure.”
—Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
Praise for The Dark King Swallows the World:
“A smart, engrossing tale steeped in both a profound sense of place, and an intoxicating mystical realism that beckons you to follow it to ever-frightening depths. An unlikely stylistic marriage between the writings of Aleister Crowley and Burnett’s The Secret Garden. A read that will have you spellbound from word one.”
—Andrew Kelley Stewart, author of We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep
“In this beautifully crafted fantasy thriller, twelve-year-old Nora returns from America to join the household where her mother has taken refuge from the Blitz in London . . . What begins as a deft portrait of Bohemian refugees fleeing the terrible reality of WWII London becomes increasingly fantastic. Penner’s dark realm is populated by wondrously imagined creatures that could have risen straight from the Celtic imagination . . . Penner succeeds in maintaining a balance between historical realism and mythopoeic excess, and his elegant writing serves the real world and the fantastic one equally well. A fine atmospheric historical fantasy.”
—Erica Obey, Historical Novel Society
“This was such a refreshing, thought-provoking read. I lost myself in a Cornwall steeped in the occult, against a very real backdrop of war and loss. Compellingly imagined and brilliantly written, with moments of clear horror shining through the mud, The Dark King Swallows The World is a devastatingly beautiful book.”
—Natalia Theodirodou, winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction
“The Dark King Swallows the World twists various genres into one and creates a fantastical world that is part Dante, part C. S. Lewis, and in the end, absolutely original. Nora, the main character, is complex and brilliant, curious and imaginative, as is the language Robert Penner uses in this story that rises toward the light.”
—David Bergen, award-winning author of The Time in Between
Praise for Strange Labour:
One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books 2020
“With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction . . . Penner’s exquisite prose illumines a wild landscape, blurring the boundaries of the natural and industrial and finding beauty in the ruins of the world. With its focus on a neurodiverse and disabled cast, probing exploration of caregiving and its tensions, and depiction of the determination to find joy and meaningful work in the aftermath of disaster, Penner’s hopeful postapocalyptic vision pushes the subgenre forward.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“This novel’s strength and readability lie in the way Penner shows humanity searching for explanations . . . [He] suggests that the deep and lasting anxiety at the heart of the ‘post-apocalypse’ is that we might not even comprehend the Apocalypse when it comes along.”
—Andy Sawyer, Strange Horizons
“A marvelous accomplishment.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson
“Strange Labour is a road novel of crystalline exuberance . . . a book to savor and to love.”
—Rudy Rucker
“Strange Labour shimmers with a meaning just beyond reach.”
—Sofia Samatar
“What a vision this novel has. An amazingly spot-on evocation of our times . . . Brilliant.”
—David Bergen
“A bleak, beautiful, even—why not?—inspiring vision of humanity’s future.”
—Natalia Theodoridou
Robert G. Penner lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of the novels Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020, and The Dark King Swallows the World. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms.
Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell • ISBN: 9781968671129
McNally Jackson Books / McNALLY EDITIONS no. 56 • Pub: Sep 8, 2026
$30.00 • Hardcover • 6.5" x 9.25” • 304 pages
Fiction—Speculative / Alternate History / Satire / Post-Colonial / Canadian
Rights: World, Audio
eBook ISBN: 9781968671136
UK Pub: Oct 22, 2026 • UK Price: £22.00
