Hell to Pay by Matthew Hughes (Angry Robot) | review by Stephen Theaker

Chesney Armstruther should be having the time of his life. The events of the two previous novels in the To Hell and Back trilogy (The Damned Busters and Costume Not Included, reviewed in TQF37 and TQF48 respectively) left him with superpowers, a nice girlfriend in Melda McCann, lots of money, and a cigar-smoking, weasel-faced, wish-granting demon at his beck and call. Plus, thanks to meeting a version of Jesus from an earlier draft of the universe, he’s now free of the autism that had previously bedevilled his interactions with other humans. But he isn’t really any happier. He might understand people’s emotions better now, but that doesn’t mean he knows what to do about them. Previously, he was at least happy within his areas of certainty, his pools of white light, but now it’s all grey areas.

Short of work for his superheroic alter-ego, The Actionary, he instead sets himself the mission of helping Poppy Paxton, the survivor of a previous incident, traumatised by her time spent in hell. This means finding another Biblical type, Simon Magus, from yet another draft of the universe, bringing him to the present day, and persuading him to work his healing magic on Poppy. Meanwhile, a senior demon in hell, Adramalek, Satan’s first assistant, a giant crocodile-toothed mouse, has noticed the boss is missing, and decides it’s time to step up to the big chair. This leads to trouble for Chesney, since his friendly demon Xaphan is the only one who knows where Satan is: off in the Garden of Eden, writing a new Bible with the historical Jesus.

From that starting point the book, like its predecessors, heads off in some highly unexpected directions. In these books, angels and demons aren’t really characters, they are, as this novel puts it, more like forces of nature or the laws of physics. Demons don’t learn things, they simply know whatever they need to know whenever they are required to know it. But Chesney’s questions provoke Xaphan into knowing about something nobody has ever known about before, the mysterious Chikkichakk, and that will have serious consequences. Meanwhile, the angels have a sense that God may be planning to make some drastic changes, due to an overall lack of productivity in the universe. He’s done it before.

Book three for me was very much of a piece with books one and two, so I don’t have much new to say about it. It has another marvellous cover from Tom Gauld, for one thing! The dialogue is smashing, as always in a Matthew Hughes book, and the book’s ideas are as sharp as Xaphan’s spats and French cuffs. I liked the way Chesney and Xaphan had to think their way around their limitations (e.g. Hell doesn’t fight Hell), and find new ways of approaching their problems. But the whole angels and demons and Jesus and God aspect of the storyline didn’t appeal to me as much as when Hughes is writing about spaceships or dragons, or indeed spaceships that turn into dragons when the fundamental nature of the universe changes. I liked the To Hell and Back series rather than loved it, but there was still plenty to enjoy. Stephen Theaker ***