The Pale House Devil by Richard Kadrey

(Titan Books, 2023)

Reviewed by Kate Onyett

This novella may be shorter in length, but it is long on heart and has some fantastically revolting moments that drop you right into a very special type of “ick”. Fans of darkly humorous, supernatural, violent urban fantasy will love this story. Hey, that’s not so niche if each type of fan got together and agreed to a movie night, because if this was on screen, they would all have a baller of a time.

This is what I hope is the first in a new series for Kadrey, who earned his dark fantasy/horror chops with the highly enjoyable Sandman Slim series. Likewise, this book is set in a world where magic and monsters are real, and properly applied violence can be a force for good. Well, a force for better. C’mon, you’re reading fantasy horror, morals take a seat at the door (it’s more fun that way).

Be introduced to Neuland and Ford, a pair of hitmen with an angle: one is undead and the other is alive. This means they can potentially take out both sides of a problem. We first meet them on a stake out for a hit. They rapidly rose on my solid-o-meter when they decided to dump the contract in a (terminal) confrontation with the crime lord who hired them. Be advised: these may be hitmen, but they do not dabble in dishonourable domestic scandal. Ironically, this is exactly what they are going to end up in.

Hitmen who default on a contract must leave town for a while and lie low. And here is where it just gets adorable. Tilda is the put-upon relative and servant of miserly old Shepherd Mansfield, who wants Neuland and Ford to get rid of ‘something’ at an old family property, no questions asked. We’ve already seen these two have sympathies and a code of ethics and on a short road trip to Mansfield’s grim abode, Tilda ends up bonding with them, starting to bloom under the protection of two highly unlikely paternal figures.

Mansfield is almost cartoonishly villainous: selfish, cruel, rich and basically a bastard through and through. He’s desecrated the family chapel to try to conjure up a few more years of life and dangled human fruit from the trees lining his drive. Kinda makes you wonder how he got demon infestation problems in the first place… Plot! Just maybe the monster is a sort of victim, too, and the old swine is the real evil here!

It takes our heroes a few goes, with BIG BADDA BOOMs and impressive artillery (supernatural and normal), but of course they finish. Tilda really comes into her own, fast-tracking through some pretty extreme therapeutic activity to assuage many years of oppression and loneliness. Naturally, by the end she wants to team up with her two favourite exterminators, and thus the stage is obviously being set for an adventure serial.

Given he is basically testing the waters of a new project, Kadrey is dropping tasty hints left and right. There’s the religious nutter on an anti-undead mission who tries to destroy Neuland. They settle his hash, but you can bet he’d make a great returning nemesis. Then there are Neuland’s flashbacks to the weird and wild years spent in servitude in the bayou swamps after he is reanimated…

There’s nothing too narratively difficult or astonishingly new, so why so keen? Because this gallops across known clichés in a big pair of hobnailed boots, shrieking with deranged laughter, waving a big gun and stopping to rehome a bag of abandoned kittens. It’s deranged and cute as all hells, and that’s not common or, indeed, garden, stuff.

Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.